DIGITIZE!: Met John today. His library is willing to be a repository of the electronic library of manuscripts. I hope that I will be able to also find a university that will be the locus of scholarship for a new area of Asian studies. Or these manuscrpts will just lie there all nicely digitized.

I had a great talk with Evelyn a week ago and took up where we left off last November, threads of our discussion on transnational mountain cultures. She will present this digitization idea to their humanities digitization personnel today. They are working with Cotton collection of burned Beowulf manuscripts so some fitting but unfortunate analogy. Evelyn liked the idea of a Hillbilly International!

John confirms that US universities that have an interest on Tibeto-Burman languages focuses more or less on Tibetan only. Being an atheist is even lonelier than I thought.

Our collection of manuscripts could very well be the cornerstone of an academic process of enlarging the scope of Tibeto-Burman studies once we start the process of digitization. My desire is to see Manipur at the cultural and intellectual center of this new area of studies. John was amused I gave a linguistics professor fifteen guesses which Tibeto-Burman langauge I spoke and he never got to the most advanced and contemporaneous of them all!

John also thinks we might work with the Library of Congress' Overseas Operation. That they can disseminate folios to member libraries all across the United States is an idea that overwhelms me with its boldness and generosity of thinking.

I have had a copy of my proposal couriered to the Oja , so let's see what he says first. That, and of course, getting some more tech information. And man I gotta do an exhibiton of these manuscripts at the library down the line. Must keep at it with John.