This book documents the creation of the Bichitra Online Tagore Variorum a publicly accessible
database of Rabindranath Tagore's complete works in Bengali and English totaling some 140 000
pages of primary material. Chapters cover innovative aspects of the site all replicable in
other projects: a hyperbibliography a search engine and hyperconcordance working across the
database and a unique collation program comparing variant texts at three levels. There are
also chapters on the special problems of processing manuscripts and on planning the website.
Early chapters take readers through the history of the project an overview of Tagore's works
and the Bengali writing system with the challenges of adapting it to electronic form.The name
Bichitra meaning various in Bengali alludes both to the great variety of Tagore's works and
to their various stages of composition. Beyond their literary excellence they are notable for
their sheer quantity the number of variant forms of a great many items and their afterlife in
translation often the poet's own. Seldom if ever has the same writer revised his material and
recast it across genres on such a scale. Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913. By its value-added
presentation of this range of material Bichitra can be a model for future databases covering
an author's complete works or other major corpus of texts. It offers vastly expanded access to
Tagore's writings and enables new kinds of research including computational text analysis. The
book of the website shows in technical and human terms how researchers with interests in art
literature and technology can collaborate on cultural informatics projects.
