Okay, we're back for a while. How do you like my hat, Ray? It looks wonderful. Yeah, that's Ray Tsuchiyama. He's an informed citizen. And we're here in life after Statehood, examining the sea changes around us here in Hawaii. And we're trying to make connection with them, not only inside but outside. And Ray and I get into these fabulous, really fabulous conversations about it. So today we're showing it on the wall about food. And what we're calling is the assimilation of ethnic foods in Hawaii. And just in the run-up here over the past five minutes, I have learned so much from Ray about this. So let me tell you my opening story. So I get here on October 1st, 1965. And I'm fascinated with this Japanese girl who runs the speed teller office in the bank of Hawaii on Kapiolani Boulevard. She's very friendly. And I said, oh, wow, maybe she'll go out with me. So with my deposit slip, I put a little note on it. And I said, would you have dinner with me? And she passed the note back. She said, I'm sorry. I don't have dinner with Holly boys. But then she smiled. And she said, but I'll have lunch with you. And I'm ready. She's very ethnically Japanese. I figure I'm going to have a Japanese lunch. No, not a chance. It was Korean lunch. And from that date of this, I've always noticed that my wife really likes Korean food, even though she was raised in a house that was all Japanese food. So they had a lot of contact with plantation and they came from Kauai, the plantation's there. And I never could figure that out. But it's a phenomenon to observe that she likes Korean food a lot. Even though her house or home was all around Japanese food. Would you explain that to me, Ray? It's probably because she found it very exotic. And you say that she grew up on Kauai. I bet there were no Korean restaurants on Kauai when she was on the plantation camp there. And in the mid-60s, there were probably only a few. And when we mentioned Kapilani, that was the ground zero for Korean restaurants. That's right. There weren't restaurants. There weren't popcorn in Waianae or in Kahuku or whatever, or in Kauai. They started out where Korean immigrants kind of clustered about. And it's like clustering where you can buy your materials. So there would be stores selling Korean items that you could source them into restaurants. And so there was this synergy. And they could also attract Korean customers. But also outsiders. And unless you attract outsiders, outside of your small category, you do not succeed in Hawaii. Right. You have to do that. You have to do the assimilation. You have to be magnetic in some way. And yet, you know, back then, Okaziya was very popular. The plurality of people that I knew anyway were Japanese. If you go to the military base, I was a military at the time, you wouldn't find Okaziya at all. You'd find steak and potatoes, and that was like separate. And it didn't come together. They had the Smogolian Barbecue Affair, though. I don't know if you've ever been involved in this, where they'd throw you all the food and then they'd cook it up for you. And I thought that was, God, I don't know where they got that from, but that was pretty interesting. So we had a coming together. And then all of a sudden, one day, in Aina Hine, it was, McDonald's pops up. I guess that was in the late 60s, early 70s. And now we had our first McDonald's. It was spectacular, you know, successful. Everybody came from miles around. Because Hawaii is all about early adopters, right? Everybody wanted to adopt McDonald's. That, to me, was a bad day. Sorry, Ray. I didn't like that at all. I wanted to retain the Okaziya here. So that was sort of the beginning of the end, if you will. But you may say that we became part of the real America. People want that. But you have to remember that McDonald's is in Paris. It's in Tokyo. It's in Iceland, probably. So it's not like it's quintessentially American. It's not a global brand. It's like Coca-Cola. Like many other Kentucky fried chickens and so forth. I ate Kentucky fried chicken in Beijing, for example. And they loved it. You know, Chinese loved it also, in Taiwan and so forth. But when it came, I think it accelerated the decline of local kinds of restaurants. I don't see any more. There's one or two on Nuwano Street. And the rest are gone. They used to be part of every neighborhood in urban Honolulu. You're absolutely right. And the old-time equivalents, local equivalents, like the Kennes, that just closed this door after decades there in Kalihi. And others are, like you said, Jolly Rogers and so forth. But they were like kings. And there's on Dillingham and there were others near the airport. And it was like, you know, when it came back to Hawaii, that was the only place they could go home to because they weren't in the mainland. As opposed to El-Nail, that's not only here in Hawaii, but you can get a piece of home in Seattle or Vegas or Oakland. Well, let's focus on El-Nail for a minute. You know, they have been remarkably successful, at least as successful there as here on the mainland. But what is, is that an assimilated menu? Or is that a Filipino menu? Or is it Japanese? What is it? Is it everything? I think it's quite a fusion menu. It kind of is the next level from the Jolly Rogers menu, if you can say, you know, if it's generation one. And then the second one is El-Nail. I mean, I don't know what's going to come in the third generation, but it kind of bases a lot of the hamburgers with a twist, like teriyaki, you know, beef or teriyaki chicken, for example. Or it provides, you know, kind of a French fries, a certain sauce and so forth. So you can see that it's an exotic experience for people on the mainland also, not only, you know, just local people who happen to be living there. Another food we have developed over the years, let's dwell on that for a minute, has been for the benefit of the tourist market. It has not been, you know, necessarily an assimilation of local foods. It has been the conversion of local foods, for example, Roy's. Roy's, you know, popular, and it's got great taste and all this. And Wong, Alan Wong, those are, you know, defined for the benefit of the, and of course local people go to that because they think it's way high, but the reality is it's not really localist fusion. Right, right, right. So there's like high level influences of Japanese, Korean and Chinese cooking, along with basic, you know, the roasts and chickens and so forth of American or Western cooking. You're correct. But that really took off in the late 90s into the 2000s. That was a revolutionary kind of genre, as we can say. It went into, you know, like the Vegas's and, you know, high dining kind of urban setting. So they exported a kind of culinary cooking style. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it really suggests that we need to look at Hawaii in a global context when it comes to food because, as you said before the show, people do not come to Hawaii necessarily for food. And if they do, they're coming for some national or rather international brand. For example, recently on Oahi Street in that New Howard Hughes project, they opened Nobu's. Nobu's was invented in New York City, right here. That's right. And it's very good. You know, it's really excellent. It's a global taste. It's one of my favorite restaurants in the world ever. But the reality is it doesn't come from here and if people come here to find great food, they're looking for great food that came from somewhere else. I mean, that's a copy of fusion food from somewhere else. And also, the class or type or category of tourism has changed. Remember, up to the 60s or early 70s, there were still people who dressed up for dinner in Waikiki. It went to Kamlas, right? Yes. Kamlas was the highest expression of fine dining. And then, when people who lived in New Water and Malno wanted to go to find that in place, they went to Kamlas. And remember, it's exotic experiences. The waitresses wore kimono. It was, you know, grilling lobster and steak and ribs and so forth. But still, the pretension was that you were an exotic Asian locale or Kamlas. But speeding up to today, those types of visitors are gone. You have mass tourism. They want to get in and then have enjoy themselves and eat cheaply. They want to go to Denny's factory. They make more money per square foot than Louis Vuitton. So they go to the fast foods. They change the chilies, you know, the chain Mexican or whatever. And of course, for people who live in Malno or Nuanu or Hawaii, getting into Waikiki is a pain. It's no longer an exotic experience. It is experience not worth taking, you know, because of the parking and so forth. So look at the change within dining just in 20, 30 years. Yeah, and it's too bad because, you know, I mean, I harken back to the good old days when we had all these food influences from all these places, coming off the plantations, coming out of Asia, coming out of the mainland. And we could have had real fusion food. We could have had food that was a conglomeration and we just didn't do that. For example, if you went out for Korean food, it would be Korean food. It would be not Korean Japanese food. Korean food. If you went out for Japanese food, you get Japanese food. And that's still the case today in local restaurants. It's one or the other, but it's not necessarily a combination. And some of them succeeded really well. I don't think Filipino food has extended beyond the Filipino community. There's others. Thai came here. It has been fantastically successful, even though the ties are not part of the same plantation history of Hawaii. Well, you go back to, say, New York City. What took over New York City was the day. And then they came from, you know, Russian, Eastern, European, you know, culinary tradition there. And remember, they had these series of commercials. You don't have to be Jewish to eat and live. I remember. I remember. Then he goes and whatever. And so they enlarged their, you know, their category, their customer base exponentially when they did that. So Chinese, Irish, Japanese, African-American all ate at the deli. And that became a national phenomenon. You know, delis are everywhere in the world now. But not here. There's one deli that I can tell you about. That's true. And a friend of mine went to Nathan's. Oh, yeah. And he said, I want to open a Nathan's Deli with the Frankfurters and all that on Waikiki Beach across from Cahuillo Beach. I want to make the biggest deli you ever saw in Hawaii right here. And they said, we're not going to talk to you about a million dollars, but a million dollars on the table. That was the end of that.  But it's not much. It hasn't really... There was a guy, there was a stockbroker, Ted Jung was his name, and he owned, it was a Chinese stockbroker. He owned Nathan's at the corner of a hotel and a fish shop, which I remember. It failed. It was... Nobody was interested in deli. So although deli is great food, it doesn't fit the local palate, and nobody's going to come here for it. And so we have certain foods that have been excluded, you know, from the channel of food in Hawaii. I find that interesting. There are rules, you know. We can have this, but not that. And Thai, plus the Vietnamese restaurants have flourished, because, you know, when you put together, it's very healthy, plus it's very cheap when you look at it. And it's like a lot of red vegetables. So it fit the times. It fit the times. It's no longer meat and potatoes, fried chicken kind of population anymore. The young people go for pho, you know, for pho. Yeah. I think that would be popular going forward. But then take a look at the steakhouses. We've had an enormous number of steakhouses, and I think they feed the tourist economy. People want to have a fancy meal, they want to spend a lot of money, they're on vacation and all that. So you get mortons. Oh, there they are. Highs, you know, like a key. And you get, what's the other one in Kaka Ako there? Ruth Chris. Ruth Chris. They're still going strong. They're going strong. In a culture that we think will eat less meat, but yet they're going strong. You're exactly right. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's no real rhyme or reason about it, right? That makes it so interesting. I was telling you the story of sadhas on Makalore Street. So Wali Fugiyama, you know, great lawyer for a long time in this city. U.H. region for many years. U.H. region, yeah. And he was the king of torts, and a great law firm for a long time. And he had Japanese clients who came from Japan, and he took them to sadhas, and sadhas featured modern Japanese sushi that was still alive. It was still alive.  I don't think that's popular anymore. Oh, no, it's still in Japan. I like it. So where do you think it's going to go? I'm going to make that a cliffhanger. We'll take a short break. When we come back, we're going to examine where all these sadhas are going and what we can expect in the future. Okay. Wali Fugiyama, informed citizen about food too. You'll see. Hi. I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, the host of Working Together on Think Tecawaii. Join us every other Tuesday from 4 p.m. to 4 30 when we discuss the impact of change on employees, employers, and the economy. Hello. I'm Dean Nelson, host of Planet of the Courageous. From a Tibetan point of view, we chose to be on this planet because we enrolled in a sort of graduate school for courage. Just that we may have chosen this adventure is a leap of logic. The question is, how do we spend and make sense of this precious human life? We are, as a species, extraordinarily successful, dominating the planet and now with planetary size problems that our existence itself has created. It takes courage to face not only the uncertainty of life, but also the challenge of sustaining this gift of life for future generations. Join us every Monday at 3 p.m. on Think Tecawaii. Aloha. Okay, thank you for that picture of food. So the question is, is live sushi really okay? Because if it's live, it's got to be fresh, and if it's fresh, it's going to be healthy, it's not going to make you sick, except for that special puffer fish. And people still pass away, one or two per year, so you have to be careful. Well, why do you do that? Can you get that here? Can you get Fugu here? I don't think so. You have to be specially trained in Japan to be certified, because if you have one drop of the toxin that gets in the flesh, and then you intake it, you do pass away. Let's talk about exotic food. That is really exotic. Oh, what a way to go. There was a big Kabuki player, I think, who really passed away, but he loved Fugu, so that was the way to go. So is it locked for the future, or are we going to be in a cheesecake factory instead? What's going to happen here? I mean, we've got to satisfy the tourist taste, we have to satisfy the local taste, but the local taste is changing, I think, into the tourist taste, and the old Okazuya, the old exotic is, I guess, less popular, less interesting, and as the generations pass, we're not going to see such exotic food anymore, yeah? Let's take it this way. What's the, how do people cook, or how do people look at dining, I guess? You got to look at that. People don't go out for fine dining French food anymore. It's very rare. They're rare times, right? Yeah, remember? There were so many restaurants. Michel, I remember, Michel. Yeah. There were so many French restaurants, in fact, one is still going to Storwin, Waikiki, and then you have things made at your table, all the salads, and all kinds of things. So it's a show. Much like Benihana is a show, in a Japanese sense, but you know, the French restaurant is there also, and the Flambé, and the fire, and so forth, cheese jubilee, and so forth, of course, or baked Alaska, those are shows, but that's not a big thing anymore. People are still interested in health, you know, really eating more and more, young people. It's not so heavy anymore. I think it's going to smaller portions, more portions, more, you know, kind of like sharing kind of dishes that continues. I think one trend that I've seen the last decade, the Izakaya, and Izakaya is a Japanese restaurant with small dishes, you know, yakitori, the chicken, stir-fries, little tofu, lala salsimi. Like the Indonesian restaurants. Yeah. That's really good dishes, yeah. And that's very much a Japanese tradition, very recently to Hawaii, but there's a lot of young people who like that, with a lot of people together. Korean food used to be a very basic, you know, yakini-ku style, but they're introduced to a lot more vegetable and seafood, so that's a change, even within Korean cooking. And then you have, well, you know, restaurants, I think, will be, like Pigeon Lady, for example, in Chinatown, was a very revolutionary kind of thing, because they introduced some traditional Vietnamese cuisine with French, and the Andamerican, they kind of mashed it together, and made it kind of a new cooking experience, so a dining experience. So you have, you know, French puff pastry, and so forth, with pho, there's noodles, and you have all kinds of pork dishes, and pâtés, and so forth, that's very French. But when I was in Vietnam, I used to eat pho with a baguette and French wine, bourgeoisie. So that is, you know, something that I think Hawaii people would enjoy, also. So, and I think there's going to be more upscale Chinese restaurants. Remember, it was a Chinatown kind of, you know, experience. And now, with one in the international market place, Yau Cha, and others were coming, really upscale dim sum kind of places. So that will be a change, because I think there's more Chinese from the mainland who miss that. There's one place in 808 near Keomoku that features Sichuan cooking, Chengdu restaurant. We need more of that. Yeah, and that's very unusual. It's almost all mainland Chinese who were eating that all the night, and it's quite spicy and, you know, a lot of peppers and so forth. But that is unusual, because the Chinese cooking in Hawaii was all Southern Chinese, you know, Guandung province style. So that's the change. So there's several trends happening. Perhaps in the future, maybe there'll be Zabar's West, you know why, you know, Upper West Side comes to, you know, Manoa. But you're right, there's no community. It's very hard to get that going and so forth. But on the fast food, yeah, that will still be popular and even more popular. There's, you know, the inner core of Honlulu just is full of fast food restaurants. I mean, and it's sad because that's all that's going to be. It's true. So many people eat so many meals at fast food restaurants, and it's just corn syrup, is what it is, the whole thing. And it's really too bad.  We had ethnic food, but we didn't have great food. Nobody was into building a great restaurant. Candleston, you know, would be an exception, but most restaurants were not really fabulous. And we didn't have that aspiration of building great restaurants. And now we find that in the world today, people are interested in building great restaurants. You can make a lot of money building a great restaurant, but it's happening elsewhere, not necessarily here. We're importing. So what I'm thinking, when I'm thinking, right, I'm interested in what you thought about it, is that if we get great food, I mean, really great world-class food that will attract people, they'll come here for the food. It'll be food from somewhere else. It'll be restaurant concept from somewhere else. But you know, who could do it? We have all these millennials, young entrepreneurs here, who are creative and innovative and, you know, they like to discover things. And restaurants are the most wonderful platform for discovering things. They could do that.  They could adopt new concepts. And they could build restaurants that would attract people far away. It would not be the fusion that we've been waiting for. It would not be the Ocasio that has come current. It would be from somewhere else, but it would attract people from everywhere. What do you think? I think so. I was giving a talk at Shadler the other day and met this student who was a business student, but he was thinking of launching a truck, you know, a little mini restaurant on wheels. Oh, sure. So that is... A food truck idea. Yeah, a food truck is a first step in going to a restaurant business. The restaurant business attracts a lot of people who are young and driven. And they... We have some great culinary programs. Scopulani has one. Of course, they're building the... You know, what was the Canon Club? The new... Oh, really? We're trying to build that for years. Maui College is a very good culinary program. Leeward has this restaurant, again, a culinary program. So there are a lot of teaching restaurants in the works here. And they have a lot of ideas. But as you know, opening a sustaining restaurant is hard. It's a challenge. It's a whole new ladder into which you pour money, and then you wind up going bankrupt anyway. It's a 24-7 job.  But a lot of them just can't be sustainable. Yeah.  So it's not just the food, it's the business and building a brand. What is L&L's, that term, is a brand. That's worth a lot of money. It's like a Coca-Cola, a micro Coca-Cola.  Right.  You want to go to Alamo One, it's going to cost you a lot of money to be there. Or any shopping center. You really got to get out, but getting out is very hard because the real estate economy doesn't support a restaurant.  Give them parking. Right. Give them an opportunity to create a restaurant that would compete with what's in the shopping centers. Because the shopping centers do not, you know, provide quality food usually. And we have to do that as part of growing tourism, of keeping tourism global in Hawaii. And some very local places still attract, but you have to find them. Ethos in Kalihi, for example, it's going strong for decades, and it's hard to get parking, but people are still attracted to their, you know, value for money over there. But it's like you say, location is everything, you know. I'm not going to Kalihi for dinner at the night, it's going to be tough. But in Kakaako, Alamo One, the rents are sky high. It's really, really hard for a person starting out to really launch a restaurant. But I'm really, you know, happy that things are happening in Chinatown. It's a revival going on.  Now, it's a hub of energy restaurants and bars. Restaurants included. Yeah. And some of the food is excellent there.  But let me ask you this. If I gave you money, if I gave you money, investors say, who are willing to put a million dollars down for a restaurant, what would you, what would you build, Ray? And where would you build it? Do you give us some thoughts about that? Yes. If I had money to burn, I would build a restaurant in Waikiki Hawaiian food with local Hawaiian music and promote young artists and expose them because there is no place to hear really good Hawaiian music in Waikiki. That's the most bizarre thing that you heard of. It used to be the Kodakula show years and years ago until, you know, the mayor put it back. But when you think about it, there's no kind of small play, and then you hear really good music, and you have Hawaiian food, and you have an entree to Hawaiian culture and tradition. That's what's missing.  And my mother-in-law really loved it from Japan. And I think that's a linkage, have a mini, micro, merry monarch every night with excellent food. Yeah. And what kind of food exactly? Well, it'll be, you know, a blend of Hawaiian food plus some Japanese Chinese food. Oh, a whole food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A whole food. Yeah, yeah. And serve it all. Yeah. But it'll be really good sourced with local, you know, vegetables and meats and fish and so forth. So it promotes Hawaii. Yeah. So you eat it a familiar fish, something from Alaska or, you know, a line of grocery. Right. It's kind of local. That's right. That's right. We've got to show up for it. Well, yeah, but it's just local sourced, great, you know, materials, sourcing. And that you have a venue for local culinary, you know, graduates. Right. Right. Art, music. That's right. That's right. You're making me more hungry than I've been in a long time. That's why Tsuchiyama informed citizens here on Life After Statehood, the assimilation of ethnic foods in Hawaii. We're not done. We'll be back.


Yeah, so maybe just before I'm sharing my presentation, I'll tell you how I have come to be working on this particular thing, which is for maybe about 15 years. Most of my work was on Tibetan Dunhuang documents. And then I, and I was, how can I say I didn't like reading canonical texts because I was suspicious about what had happened to them, you know between when they were translated and when they were published and for linguistic purposes I wanted to rely on genuinely old materials. But then I was looking into the morphology of certain verbs, and I found that they just, there weren't enough of them in the Dunhuang materials, in particular I was looking at the verb for to shave. I found that in the Vinaya in on a single folio, there were all of the paradigm of the verb to shave. So then I thought, oh, I have been too hard on the canonical texts you know they are really essential for linguistic study, but in order to get back to the old Tibetan period, then of course you need to do textual criticism and doing just work on this, this short passage sort of three folios or something it has you know I haven't finished and it's been years although I don't work on it every day. And I've only collated 14 concerts.  It was too difficult to task so I'm discussing the application of natural language processing to Buddhist textual criticism. To start off, I think it's useful to contrast the state of textual criticism between Europe and Asia. So it's one of great inequality and I just think a salient point is that the Nestle Allen critical edition of the Greek New Testament has appeared in 27 different traditions since its initial publication in 1898, whereas the canonical literature of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and so on have never been fully critically edited and I, and that's both because we have larger canonical traditions in Asia but also because we have fewer philologists. So I think it's true radically more efficient methods are needed if these vast Asian literary traditions are to receive the editorial attention that they deserve. So my presentation will touch on three research context, traditional editorial methodology, textual criticism in digital humanities, and the study of the Tibetan conjure. So what sort of definition of what do we mean by a critical edition, well, an editor faced with disagreements in the wording of different copies that purport to contain the same word which we call witnesses, either can faithfully copy one manuscript, which is a diplomatic edition, or can pick readings from multiple manuscripts to create a new version that is believed to best reflect a lost original and this we call an eclectic edition. In this case, the editor should, you know, record the different variants in an apparatus. And the critical edition is an eclectic edition that has such an apparatus and sometimes you see in people, you know, call things critical editions, which are diplomatic editions, or which are, you know, commented editions I think this is bad practice I think we should really say critical edition, only for eclectic editions with an apparatus. So looking at traditional editorial methodology, certain outright mistakes are both obvious and unlikely to happen independently. And this is the key insight to Lachman's editorial method. So manuscripts that share these indicative errors can be placed as sisters in a family tree which we call a stemma. The structure of the manuscript tradition is clear. The most ancient readings present themselves as those that are inherited on independent branches of the family. So just to emphasize this point because editors will more likely agree on what is obviously a bad reading than what must be the author's original reading this system which uses the bad readings in order to lead to the good readings is quite objective. The textual tradition is reconstructed in three steps, we can describe and call it the witnesses in for the stemma based on the distribution of indicative errors. And then at each place of disagreement choose the best reading given the stemma structure and external factors. The ability to recover the origin point of a textual tradition rests on two preconditions. First, the tradition must have a meaningful origin point and second, we have to have sufficient evidence available. That is pertinent to that origin point. So just to give two examples that are kind of extreme cases. The 394 extent manuscripts of day to be taught a day or reflect reflect a single work written by St. Augustine. And in this case, Lachman's method organizes this evidence really well. Whereas the works attributed to Homer lack a meaningful origin point because they have a fluid and oral origin. But nonetheless, parts of originally fluid traditions may go through a redactional zero point that is amenable to recovery. Whereas it's meaningless to reconstruct Homer's Iliad reconstructing the Iliad of his editor Aristarchus is methodologically possible if the evidence permits. So Buddhist sacred literature overall like the Homeric or rabbinical corpora emerged from a pool of tradition that is unaminable to reconstruction. And then, nonetheless, the systematic translation of Buddhist texts at the Tibetan Imperial Court is a reconstructable zero point. So, you know, which is to say it should be possible to do a critical edition of the conjure in a sense. Yeah. So let's make a critical edition of the Tibetan conjure. So, you know, as I was saying, that's impractical given current methodology so we see what tools the digital humanities furnishes us. And most research in computational textual criticism focuses on drawing up stemata from a pre prepared collection of potentially significant variance, a computer infers a stemma using one of three approaches and I'll go through these quickly. This is based parsimony or maximal likelihood. So, distance based methods measure a texted text disagreement disregarding processes of change so basically they just say how many letters are different in these two versions. It's, it's a, the main advantage is it's computationally easy it's quick for the computer. It's a pretty naive approach that doesn't have much to recommend it. Then parsimony methods are what most people use in in this technique. We look for a family tree that presumes the fewest number of changes it's the ideas is sort of Occam type razor right the, the simpler explanation is probably the right explanation. But as a heuristic, it assumes that all changes are equally likely and that's just manifestly not the case, right. So this approach falls prey to what's called long branch attraction, where coincidental innovations are mistaken as diagnostic in the terms I was talking about traditionally, then it identifies shared innovations, but not shared diagnostic innovations. So the third type is maximal likelihood methods. In this case, a different likelihood is assigned to different types of changes relying either on a priori assumptions or on training data. And possible stomata are then tried out to find which one best matches the, the actual data as it exists. And this is a realistic approach, but it has a very high computational cost. And in addition, change models built on faulty assumptions can yield worse results than parsimony and models derived from training data which, you know, won't be built on faulty assumptions because they're based on, you know, judgments that philologists have made are on the other hand very expensive to create. So, overall, it's a sort of it's the approach that, you know, all things being equal one would want to take that should one should take, but it's too expensive in terms of computer time in terms of philologist time. So it's not currently really used very much. So philogenetic methods, even worth the trouble I think is a good question to ask. Oftentimes there's little benefit over traditional approaches and I'm just going to give one example and I don't mean to pick on him for it but Apple in 2019 collated 12 witnesses of the aria avalokiteshvara paripurcha Saptadarmaka, and he used the parsimony based approach to draw up their stemma. But his addition merely transcribes one of the 12 12 versions which is a diplomatic edition is not a critical addition. And he doesn't even report the indicative errors that the stemma relies on. So the application of computational techniques has not in fact added any value. And because the primary branches of the conjure stemma are already securely identified, there is no need for philogenetic reconstruction. So computers are being used, most where they are needed least. And I think that's, you know, something we should change. Yeah. My proposal is instead that we use natural language processing for the steps of collation and reconstruction, not for drawing up a stemma at least not for the conjure. So, we should model and editors behavior in comparing different manuscripts of the same work as a series of natural language processing steps. We're adding a more abstract level of linguistic analysis from noting spelling variation up to understanding syntax. So there have been some efforts to computationally model of manuscript collation beginning already in the 1960s, and these are coalesced into two software products, which are called you stuff and co lot texts. And this is behind both tools subscribed to what they call the Gothenburg model and that's because they had a meeting in Gothenburg to decide on this model. And here is the Gothenburg model collation can be thought of as five consecutive steps, segmentation regularization, which is the purposeful ignoring of certain differences, alignment analysis and visualization. And this software automates the final three steps, but presupposes segmented and regularized machine readable transcriptions of the witnesses beforehand so you have to have, you know, have transcribed and regularized diplom, you basically have to have done a diplomatic edition of every single witness, and then feed that into the computer. Those are not yet widely used in transcription segmentation and regularization and just to give some examples, otherwise computationally well informed humanists working on Latin Greek and Tibetan, still transcribe manuscripts, segment the text into words and regularize the biography entirely by hand. So I think that, you know, the, let's say the model we should turn to is, I like to call it industrializing philology. So, we should get the computers to do the actual hard work as much as possible. And I turn for my theoretical framework here to Karl Marx. And he says the path of industrialization is analysis through the division of labor, which gradually transforms the operations of the worker into a more and more mechanical one. So the Gothenburg approach to dissect the problem of coalition into smaller, more manageable sub problems follows this course. But we must take their program further. So, in order to do that, let's look at what a human editor does. When a traditional scholar prepares a collation she reads each witness noting its spelling grammar and style, because scribes acted differently in different times and places, and with different genres editors consider all of these features. This segmentation, i.e. describing what to compare when you're collating requires an appropriate theory of scribal practice and regularization, which is deciding what to ignore while you're comparing requires an appropriate theory of scott scribal Caprice. I'll give one example, which is medieval French poetry scribes who were copying medieval French poetry freely changed the tense mood and person of works, the same scribes actually copying Latin poetry would never do that. Yeah, so that's just important to keep the concrete circumstances in which the scribal practice was happening in mind. So, so for medieval French, the regularization step of our workflow should ignore inflection and account only for distinct words that's lemmatization in NLP terms in a sense then coalition of you know medieval French manuscripts needs a different needs to target a different moment in the NLP pipeline than it would for for example, Latin. So, so mass describes the ideal editor in the following way says the most reliable collator best understands the text, but is able to switch off this knowledge in order to work with mechanical rigor. So a computer innately applies this rigor, but permits alignment at only one level of analysis, different levels lead to irreconcilable collations maybe I'll just like dwell on this for a moment. So when editing something by hand, you know I can decide in this case I'll look at all compare whole phrases. In this case I'll compare words. In this case maybe even I'll just compare letters, depending on you know my knowledge of the state of the field, using collation software you just feed in segments and then the computer compares them so you can only decide I'm looking at, you know, one level of analysis I'm either looking at. I'm either ignoring inflection or I'm not ignoring inflection I can't sort of turn it on and off and in some ways that's good because it means we have to be more explicit about what we're doing and rigorous but means we also have to teach the computers in a sense to be as capable as the philologists are. So existing computer approaches do not permit nesting units of comparison, even though they are frequent in traditional practice. So as the effectiveness of a machine relies on the power of knowledge objectified to again quote marks for each witness we must objectify all levels of linguistic analysis into explicit annotation, and then apply the alignment algorithm to this united goal. So this is my proposed workflow. We divide the Gothenburg five steps of collation into eight steps, five for inspection and two for collation. Now, this is not I don't want to present this dogmatically. You know, if we if a project actually got up and running and maybe we would need 11 steps or 15 steps or whatever. Yeah. But here they inspection, which consists of transcription segmentation orthographic regularization part of speech identification and syntactic analysis. And collation which is the actual alignment analysis and visualization so basically the last three steps are, you know, in principle automated, but the first five are not yet. I just want to flag the risk of compounding error rates. So more full automation faces the obstacle that errors compound at every step. And just, you know, to as a kind of thought conceit, if you like, if each step was 97% accurate, then this eight step pipeline would yield an overall accuracy of 78%. So it's just to say that you know the the accuracy will go down over time. But actually these don't don't put too much stock in these calculations because that calculation assumes that the errors at each level are independent whereas of course they're not they're going to rely directly on each other so the concrete results might be a lot worse or might be a lot better depending on exactly what kind of error is made. But in any case, you can bring down the error rates by increasing the manual training data at each step. But the manual preparation of data required for training statistical models is always the most onerous aspect of NLP it's extremely expensive to compare to compile manual training data. And it's very boring to do it if you're the person who has to do the training. So we can get over this bottleneck using a relatively, well, at least in this area. New technique, which is called active learning and I'll describe that here in a moment. The computer guides the editor to annotate just those examples that most improve the performance of the models. In this way, the number of cases requiring human intervention is kept as low as possible. And you can think of it, you know, basically as a trade off between with manual training data you might have a lot of students or even like monks in somewhere do the more basic tax tasks manually. It's not expensive because it involves a lot of human labor, or you can have the computer itself tell you which examples would most improve its own performance, and then have like an expert philologist, just annotate those examples, and then retrain the whole system, which is very expensive in terms of computer time.  To date, there's only been one paper as far as I can tell that has applied active learning in digital humanities, and only for one NLP tasks so there's a lot more that could be done in this area. So now turning to the conjure, the comparative conjure the conjure paid your most sponsored by the China to bet all the research center in Beijing includes an apparatus, and it was begun in 1986 and published between 2006 and 2009. The text itself reproduces the 1733 dergue version, but it records variants from seven other would block conjures produced between 1410 and 1934.  So I haven't produced a complete edition of the conjure so so I think that you know this was a wonderful project that has had great results. The eight collated witnesses reflect only one quarter of the available evidence, excluding all manuscripts from Bhutan from Nepal and Ladakh, and those held in foreign libraries, in addition, by sticking to the 1733 text, which is to say by doing by doing a diplomatic edition, the editors made no use of the variants that they so carefully assembled and now I think that was prudent in many ways but it does mean that we don't yet have a critical edition of the Tibetan conjure. So the limits of this 20 year project, I think that's what I want to emphasize was, was that, you know, this was a great project, it was very expensive took a lot of work, but only got us so far and I think that those limits foreground the need for a radical change in methods. So, just to give you one sample I referred at the very beginning that I to the fact that I had edited a short passage from the, from the, the vanilla. So I did I compared 14 conjures, which is sort of less than half of the available conjures. And here I've circled the ones that are included in the pay Dorma. And so you'll notice just from that structure that half of the tradition, you know, is not reflected in the in the pay Dorma collection, simply because they've omitted the Dolpo conjure so it just shows you that you know you. Yeah, even if you've edited a lot of conjures it doesn't mean that that one you haven't edited. You can actually hold, you know, some really important information. So I would, you know, like to propose that that there be a complete critical addition of the conjure by complimenting traditional scholarship with cutting edge technology this project I think it becomes feasible, particularly in China where the state of NLP is so advanced and and including for Tibetan. So let's just sort of reiterate if you like the methodology. First we use natural language processing tools to model a critics understanding of a text. Then we use active learning both to maximize the impact of critics labor and to minimize the errors that can attend a long NLP pipeline. So two overall approaches, in terms of how it would be done in a linear fashion.  Then inspection, we transform the bear e text into increasingly linguistically annotated e text. Then we compare these enriched e text to each other. Then we restore the archetype in as far as possible. And, well, and then and then we've done it. Yeah, as long as you record all the variance. And just a look at the Tibetan NLP tools that would be necessary for doing this. They by and large exist which is not to say that some of them wouldn't have to be improved but they by and large exist. So, for instance, there is a handwritten text recognition. And, and in this case I'm just putting citations for, you know, papers that discuss the tools involved so handwritten text recognition segmentation, orthographic regularization, part of speech tagging and parsing. So there are, you know, there are solutions to each of these steps. And that's, that's all of my presentation. Basically, so I, you know, I'm, let's say, to some extent it's a sales pitch, you know, I think that those people who are interested in in canonical Buddhist texts is particularly those that exist on a large scale like the conjure might want to think you know, some, some, some NLP approach to editing the conjure. So thank you very much for your time and attention. So, in a sense, the answer is no and here's the reason why is, is, let's say I can point you to the specific successful NLP tasks. So for instance, the, the, the BDRC, you know, the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, they are working on OCR a lot now. So, especially for kind of nicely printed Tibetan texts, but also increasingly also for xylographs. And they have, I think, together with this organization called Asukia, they have done, they've made digital copies of three conjures. I think they're the, they're the lead tongue. I don't remember, I would have to check, but any case. So, for, for example, we do have now, you know, e-text of three different conjures. And, and those have used some quite fancy, especially for the xylographs, some quite fancy digital techniques. But of course, you know, what I'm proposing is we have to do that for the other, you know, 25 conjures, right. You know, like James Apple is, I think the person who has done this kind of work most in terms of using actual collation software. But as I was saying, you know, he, the poor fellow, he does all the transcription himself, he does all of the orthographic regularization himself. Well, he prepares everything, you know, painstakingly for the computer, then runs it through the collation software and then is told that the stem, the Stombam, sorry, the stemma. And it turns out it's the stemma we already knew. Yeah, so, um, and, and maybe what I would say is I think that this kind of work he's been doing is extremely important. And just in order to, you know, because let's say now he knows how to do it, right, which is to say like this is quite technical work and just getting those skills is important. But I think that the vision of actually combining NLP tools to do textual criticism has not yet really happened. But there are some I've, I've found some especially young scholars who are doing their PhDs on Latin, who have gotten pretty far, and I can send you some citations if you want for that but I don't I haven't seen any work that's been done in this area in although I would say that there's the tocariness in Vienna, of course, you know, they generally only have one fragment for each text right it's not, they're not needing to collate things, but they use some quite fancy tools. So they're also a good people to look at. So the problem that currently exists is that you have to convert, you know, your document into a string of symbols. And then you have the computer compare that string of symbols. So one way to do it let's say the way we do it in English actually is exactly what you're saying which is they just they actually just put a space, like let's say you have singing, you would just say sing space in. And then you would compare the roots and the inflection separately so that works for English, but it doesn't work for Tibetan, for instance, because Tibetan has a lot of work I mean so does English a little bit but Tibetan has a crazy verb system. So what you have to do in a language like Tibetan is you have to go through one one step where you do it in that kind of linear way and then you come back again, and you say something like zoom, you have to refer to zin, you know, like, you have to have some other step is called limitization. No, you can make that you can do that with software. Yeah, and we have software that does that actually for Tibetan. But let me just compare let's say Tibetan and Chinese. So for Tibetan, the easy part is recognizing the letters because there's only 30 of them. So that means that you're that early on in your in your in your natural language processing pipeline, you have very good results. So it's easy to get good results. But then later on, when you're doing something like, like referring some to the Psalms, then it's harder. And so that step might be worse. Whereas if you were doing it with Chinese. And then the step of actually just seeing what characters on the page is going to be, you know, perfectly possible. Yeah, but require more training data or require more active learning or somehow will be harder than it is for Tibetan. Yeah, but then later when you come to the limitization step, it's basically you get it free, you get 100% performance for free, because there's not any complicated morphology. So I would say basically any one language will have its own sort of weak points and strong points. And but those will appear at a certain moment in the in the workflow. Yeah. But but in principle it can all be dealt with with enough time or money. Yeah. And, and the point I'm trying to make is, you know, even if it costs I don't know $10 million or something like that. But it's going to be a lot cheaper than doing it the old fashioned way. I want to appeal to, let's say your, everyone's Buddhist nationalism in a way with this with this point about the Greek Bible which is to say, how can it be that the Greek Bible has been critically edited 28 times. Yeah, but that the, the, the conjure of Buddha Vachna has never once been critically edited. I mean, that's a history of scholarship thing. So let's say, let me just say where I'm where I'm taking this from is, is, is, is Paul Moss, who, you know, which is what we use to learn textual criticism back at Harvard. And there's a very nice recent book by an Italian guy who's actually a Dante specialist that I relied on a lot. His name is Provato. Yeah, this I mean, let's say I think that this stuff happened to Alexandria, but there's actually, there's also a tradition that Leonard has written about, you know, in, in, in Buddhist circles, and I actually have that in the written form of the paper but like say, people have been co-lating, you know, Taisi to Chuki Jumne did this. So I should just make clear that this presentation is is actually a sort of manifesto right like it's it's it's something I think everyone. It's like something I think we should all do. It's not something that I'm doing because I don't have money for it at the moment. I actually asked the British government, I asked the British government for some money to do it and they said no. So, so, so maybe I'll ask again in a year or something like that. But, but what I would say is on GitHub, there's a place where Tibetan NLP workers have are all sort of collaborating a little bit. So and on GitHub and on Zenodo and you know, these things are quite easy to find but also I'm very if someone wants to email me I can send you some links. Okay, so the question in a sense is if everything works well what would happen. And here's what I would say is I would say that we take like, you have a little machine, and you put into it photographs of the manuscript pages of all conjures. And I think there's about 40 now. Yeah. And then out the other end comes a something that looks a lot like the conjure page. I would put the notes at the bottom of the page. But there would be an addition with the very orm at the bottom. Now, if that's done entirely automatically which I think it could be. What problems will arise well all kinds of problems will arise maybe there was one spot in one manuscript that was particularly blurry, and the computer has mistranscribed it. You know, that's that will happen. Or maybe in some cases, it has chosen a reading that is consistent with the structure of the storm bomb. Sorry, of the stemma. But that happens to not be the, you know, in some absolute sense, the right reading maybe, you know, there needs to be, for instance, the computer cannot do. It's called conjectural amundation. So, you know, in many cases, it would need a good conjectural amundation to actually solve a difficult philological problem, which is to say, you know, like, am I trying to make everyone unemployed by replacing them with machine Well, in a sense, yes. But in a sense, no, think of it just as, you know, if you could go to the bookshelf and there was a beautiful critical addition of the conjure, you would still have to exercise your intelligence in using it. And you would still have to go back to the original manuscript for some purposes. But now I think you see people and let me just give you an example like Shane Clark, like let's say, Buddhologists people who who work in Sanskrit Chinese and Tibetan, they just kind of choose like the talk palace conjure because it's easy to read, and because it's relatively good philologically. I think that's a very practical choice, but you know, think how much better it would be if rather than just using the talk palace conjure, because you can't, you know, you would stop being a buddhologist if you read every single passage in all 40 conjures Right. Instead, you could just turn to this automatically made critical addition. I think that would be good. Thank you so much.