Paul G. Hackett

ph2046 AT columbia DOT edu


Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher von Braun


Education

Ph.D. Religion, Columbia University
M.Phil. Religion, Columbia University
M.L.S. College of Information Studies, University of Maryland - College Park
M.A. History of Religions, University of Virginia
B.S. Physics and Astronomy, University of Arizona
Doctoral Dissertation Barbarian Lands: Theos Bernard, Tibet, and the American Religious Life.
Thesis advisor: Robert Thurman.

The dissertation presented the first comprehensive narrative of the life of Theos Bernard (1908-1947). In the context of this narrative, the dissertation examined such issues as Bernard’s place in the early history of the American subculture and counter-culture informed by Indian concepts of religiosity and the narrative of the genesis and spread of Indian and Buddhist religious traditions in America over the last 150 years. In addition, Bernard’s life and writings are examined as a paradigm of an ethnically American counter-culture religious experience and his academic activities are discussed in terms of their broader implications for the study of religion.

Masters Thesis Approaches to Tibetan Information Retrieval: Segmentation vs. n-grams.
Thesis advisor: Douglas Oard.

This thesis reported the results of research evaluating automatic word-segmented indexing for Tibetan documents against a system using n-gram indexing in a search and retrieval system. For the thesis an algorithm for automatic sentence- and word-segmentation for Tibetan was designed and implemented in conjunction with a shallow parser performing automatic Part-of-Speech tagging.

Grants and Fellowships

2004-2005 Krikor and Clara Zohrab Fellowship, Columbia University
2003-2004 Weatherhead Fellowship, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
2002-2003 Faculty Fellowship, Columbia University


Resource Pages


IATS-X Tibetan Information Technology Panel

Links to the papers and presentations given in the “Tibetan Information Technology (IT) Panel” at the Tenth International Association of Tibetan Studies Conference, Oxford, 6-12 September, 2003.

Tibetan and Computing

Links to a number of resources for Tibetan encoding and data manipulation on the Macintosh, and Windows/Intel PC platforms.

The Tibet Mirror Newspaper: 1925-1963

A complete archive of all extant issues of the first Tibetan language newspaper. (Soon to be available through the Columbia University Digital Library Collection)


Papers

Information Retrieval

Comparison of Word-Based and Syllable-Based Retrieval for Tibetan
Presented as a poster at the Information Retrieval for Asian Languages Workshop in Hong Kong in September, 2000. Available as a postscript version.

A Comparative Study of Knowledge-Based Approaches for Cross-Language Information Retrieval
A technical report describing the use of bilingual dictionaries and translation lexicons for information retrieval. CS-TR-3897 Available as a postscript version from the UMIACS Tech. Report Library

Document Translation for Cross-Language Text Retrieval at the University of Maryland
Paper presented at the Sixth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-6), Gaithersburg MD, November 1997. Available as a postscript version.

Tibetan Studies

Looking For a Lost Gita: Gedun Chopel's Tibetan Translation of the Bhakti Chapter
Namarupa, vol. 7 (2007), pp.41-45.

Theos Bernard and the Twentieth Century Mythology of Tibet
Paper presented at the Fourteenth International Association of Buddhist Studies Conference (IABS-XIV), London, Aug. 29 - Sept. 4, 2005.

An Entropy-based Assessment of the Tibetan Unicode Encoding
Paper presented at the Tenth International Association of Tibetan Studies (IATS-X) Conference, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 2003.

Drawing the Steel Bow
in Changing Minds: Essays in Honor of Paul Jeffrey Hopkins. (ed. Guy Newland). Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications (2001), pp.291-326.

Automatic Segmentation and Part-Of-Speech Tagging For Tibetan
Paper presented at the Ninth International Association of Tibetan Studies Conference (IATS-9), Leiden, The Netherlands, June 2000.

Book Review: Jeffrey Hopkins. Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism:
Dynamic Responses to Dzong-ka-ba's The Essence of Eloquence: I.
Journal of Buddhist Ethics 6 (1999): 232-235. Available in PDF. [cached]

Book Review: Georges Dreyfus. Recognizing Reality. Center for South Asian Studies Newsletter, Fall 1996.
Available in HTML.


Books

A Tibetan Verb Lexicon: Verbs, Classes, and Syntactic Frames. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications (2003).
A lexicon of Tibetan verbs and paradigms of their usage drawn from the classical literature.

Classical Tibetan Reader. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, forthcoming.
A progressive reader in the traditional language and topics of the Tibetan Buddhist educational system.


Current Research

Vasubandhu's Treasury of Manifest Knowledge (abhidharmakosa)
A new translation of Vasubandhu's verse and commentary presentation of the tenets of the Kasmiri Sarvastivadin School.

The Jñanapada Commentarial Lineage of Guhyasamaja
Translations and analyses of works by the Indian siddha Buddhasrijñanapada (sangs rgyas ye shes zhabs) and his commentarial descendants on the theories and practices associated with the Mañjuvajra form of Guhyasamaja.

Sanskrit Computing

Information on on-going work in Devanagari OCR.

Previous Research

The Life and Works of Theos Bernard (1908-1947)
The biography of an early pioneer of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University.

Fieldwork and professional development

May 2006 - September 2006: Dissertation Research in Tibet and Northern India (Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, and Spiti).

February 2001 - March 2001: Text Acquisitions in North China and Eastern Tibet.

November 1999 - December 1999: Text Acquisitions in North India.

March 1996 - April 1996: Text Acquisitions in North, Central and South India.

1991 - 2001: Private study with the venerable Geshe Jampel Thardo of Drepung Loseling Monastic University