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Christian Wittern

Christian Wittern is a scholar of Chinese Chan Buddhism. After a three-year stint at the Chung-Hwa Institute as the primary technical supervisor for the CBETA Taisho input project, he moved, in 2001, to Kyoto to assume a faculty position at the Humanities Research Institute at Kyoto University. He has published Das Yulu des Chan Buddhismus. Die Entwicklung vom 8.-11. Jahrhundert am Beispiel des 28. Kapitels des Jingde chuandenglu (1004), (Peter Lang). Christian is well-known for his work in the area of the digitization of East Asian literary resources, having been a major force in the projects at both the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism and the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA).

Christian was one of the first Buddhist scholars to discover the DDB, soon after it was placed on the Web in its earliest and most primitive format in late 1995. He applied the first basic SGML structure that is the ancestor of the XML framework in use today. He also added the first set of Pinyin readings to the DDB, which at that time had approximately 3200 entries. In June of 2000, Christian implemented the first attempt at a search engine on the DDB, using the open source platform Zope. Since the outset, Christian has continued to offer important technical advice to the project. [10/10/2005] [Web Site]