ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the tools that Bichitra: The Online Tagore Variorum (https://www.bichitra.jdvu.ac.in" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">bichitra.jdvu.ac.in), an online integrated knowledge site of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, provides for the researchers and the intricate process of its development. The textual corpus of Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate (1913), includes poems, songs, short stories, novels, essays, travelogues, plays, and more, both in Bengali and in English. Being obsessively critical of his own work, he revised and edited them multiple times over the years. Reading closely through the versions, one can trace not only his complex creative process but also a glimpse of the changing socio-political landscape of a country through the 19th and early 20th centuries and the author’s intellectual response to it. Bichitra provides 140,000 pages of primary material both as images and as transcriptions, a hyperbibliography, a search engine and hyperconcordance tool, and a three-level collation result of the various versions of the titles using a unique collation software developed for the project. The chapter discusses the usability and effectiveness of these tools for the specific purpose of the site and in the domain of computational text analysis in general, and explains the backend structures and efforts that were involved in creating them.
