Unfurl a Tibetan Thangka - Immerse Yourself in the Ocean of Ancient Spiritual Knowledge

A Tibetan Thangka is a traditional intricate scroll painting on cotton or silk, featuring Buddhist deities, mandalas, or scenes from the life of HH Dalai Lama. It contains a plethora of deities symbolysing ancient and rich spiritual lineages. Visitors in art galleries are often awestruck when they see a Thangka. Its intricate details contain a plethora of deities and stories. While the dense information arouses the visitor's curiosity, they get overwhelmed and lost as to what all this information signifies? How does the visitor unfurl these details and navigate through the portals of ancient knowledge?    The core idea of this talk is to demo the proposed solutions to the above questions.  If the Thangkas are represented on a digital "canvas", then creators can digitally annotate each iconography and story in a Thangka. These digital annotations can be used as markers to link the details of the selected section and further categorisation and elaboration of the ancient spiritual lineages. Each annotation "bubble" in a Thankga will contain the basic information of the icon eg. deity, event or story. The bubble will also contain links to:

1. The elaboration of the icon including links to purchase the artifact or browse through related artifacts.
2. The associated MindMap to categorise the icon in the appropriate Central Figure, Geographic Region, Religion or Lineage Affiliation, Period, Collection, Thematic Sets, Exhibition Appearances, Publication Appearances etc.

This topic connects to conversations in data viz by merging physical and digital mediums of communication through digitally annotated narratives. The overarching structure and design of the talk is based on the communication of Arts & Culture through digital mediums. The main sections and flow of the presentation are as follows:

1. Introduce the concept of Tibetan Thangkas - What, Where and How from a physical real world perspective.
2. Display the corpus of digital knowledge that is already available as textual web resources and that has been graphically organised into MindMaps.
3. Merge the physical and digital worlds into a coherent navigation to immerse the users into ancient spiritual knowledge.

The intended audience are:

1. Collectors of museums interested to navigate and purchase artifacts about Tibetan Buddhist spiritual lineages.
2. Scholars interested in researching Tibetan Buddhist history.
3. Visitors who would like to get initiated into the practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

The key takeaways from this Lightning Talk are:

1. Opening new realms of ancient spiritual Arts & Culture
2. Innovative methods to categorise and visualise digital resources for the same
3. Merging the physical and digital worlds to navigate through oceans of ancient knowledge.