Education Germany Project #9256

Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

by Berzin Archives e.V.

Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

Project Report | Jun 3, 2022
Berzin Archives Report: March through May 2022

By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Founder and Author of Berzin Archives

Buddha statue in Nissankamallapura, Sri Lanka

Over the spring, we’ve been engaged in intense work here at the Berzin Archives headquarters, and we’ve made impressive progress on our Study Buddhism project.

Over the last few months, our various translators, editors, and assistants, who are based all over the world, have prepared over 250 article translations and more than 500 subtitle files. This work, such as that on preparing subtitles for our videos on YouTube, which are also embedded across the website, is proving more and more invaluable for our audience. Over the last three months, 51% of our videos have been watched with subtitles turned on. When compared with the 29% of videos watched with subtitles during the same period in 2021, it is heartening to see that our hard work is going to good use. Meanwhile, the videos themselves continue to perform well. During March, April, and May, we had over 340,000 views of our videos on YouTube, which is a 25% increase from the previous three months. This was in part due to great interest in our interview with Venerable Thupten Ngodup, the medium of the Nechung Oracle, the Chief State Oracle of Tibet, which we released at the end of April. Engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has also been increasing steadily as we post more specific content, not only more frequently but in formats suited to each platform. All in all, over the last three months, our content has been seen more than 3.8 million times on the social media platforms we use.

We have worked hard over the last few years to create a rich resource which is as accessible as possible – to people of all backgrounds, cultures, and abilities. And this work continues now. We are very excited to announce that we have a new project: the creation of beautiful, read-out-loud versions of our articles. As usual, we like to make use of current technologies, and so the articles have not been read out loud by a human, but by ultra-realistic AI-generated voices. These recordings will be of great use to our visually impaired audience, and also to those who simply want to listen to articles about Buddhist wisdom on their journeys to and from work. You will see some of these recordings pop up in the Essentials section over the next few weeks and months, so please do take a look and share with your family and friends!

You’ll find all the details of what we’ve been up to in the bulleted list below. Here are some of our accomplishments over these last three months:

Preparation and publication of 251 translations into our various languages
Preparation and addition of 4 new English articles
Preparation of 10 further parts of “Details of Karma,” containing extensive translations of Sanskrit and Tibetan primary sources
Copyediting of 20 English transcripts and files
The creation of 527 subtitle files in our 32 languages, for use on our YouTube channel
Preparation and addition of the third set of new descriptions and abstracts in English, completing the task of providing them for all our articles
Preparation and addition started of translations of the new descriptions and abstracts into our various languages
Expansion of the Spanish glossary to more than 1000 terms
Preparation of a working list of all articles already having and those still needing images
Editing of 13 videos of our interview with Venerable Thupten Ngodup, the medium of Nechung, the Chief State Oracle of Tibet.
English translation of the interview with Venerable Thupten Ngodup based on a thorough editing of the Tibetan transcript.
The subtitling in Tibetan and English, and addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel of the above-mentioned interview clips with Venerable Thupten Ngodup.
English translation of the interview about Kalachakra with Jhado Rinpoche – retired Abbot of both His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Namgyal Monastery and Gyuto Upper Tantric College – based on a thorough editing of the Tibetan transcript.
Video interview with Dr. Philippe Goldin – professor of cognitive-affective neuroscience at UC Davis and consultant at Google – about the neuroscience studies conducted on meditation
Creation of AI-generated ultra-realistic text-to-speech audio files for 30 articles from our Essentials section
Preparation of 12 different video clips and uploading them to social media channels. Each video was prepared for posting on Facebook with 32 language subtitles, on Twitter with embedded English subtitles and a maximum length of 2 minutes and 20 seconds, and on Instagram and TikTok at 9:16 format with embedded English subtitles.
Preparation of 12 quotes taken from our video interviews and other sources from the website, accompanied with graphics, and the uploading of these to social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter).
Preparation of 12 article posts for our social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) along with introductions.
Creation and design of User Accounts for the website, including pages for signing up, signing in, authentication of emails and passwords, “remember me” function, utility functions for serializing the user into a cookie and retrieving the password from the cookie, locking function of an account after a specified number of failed sign-in attempts and unlocking it after a specific time period, forgotten password, sending email with reset password instructions, and changing the Study Buddhism Google email configuration to send emails from the studybuddhism.com domain.
On User Accounts pages, automatically creating favorite lists for every user, require sign in or sign up to accesses account page, logout link, user image taken from Gravatar service if available, feature for editing user profile, links for saved (bookmarked) articles, and features for creating and managing custom lists
Addition of account and bookmark icons on all pages of the website, ability to save an article to the user account after clicking on the bookmark icon
Testing and debugging of all the above features of User Accounts before deployment on the website.
Fixing and maintenance of various issues with our content management system.

All of this hard work is made possible by your continuing generous support. Together, we shall “Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”

Links:

Permalink

Mar 4, 2022
Berzin Archives Report: December 2021 through February 2022

By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Founder and Author of Berzin Archives

Prayer wheel in northern India.

As we wrapped up 2021 and entered 2022, we looked back at a successful year where we celebrated not only 5 years since the relaunch of the Berzin Archives website as Study Buddhism, but 20 years since the first version of the Berzin Archives launched on the web. From its humble beginnings in 2001, the Study Buddhism website now boasts over 12,700 articles in 32 languages, reaching all corners of the planet.

The work, of course, never stops! Over the last three months, our translators, editors, and assistants have prepared over 400 new articles and over 240 new subtitle files, working out to seven completed every single day. As part of the ongoing process to make the website ever more user-friendly, our English editors have copyedited more than 110 articles, making them more concise and easier to read.

On social media, we saw impressive results over the winter. On our YouTube channel, we are soon about to reach 40,000 subscribers, and in the last 90 days, we had 272,000 views of our videos, a 40% increase compared to the previous three months. Engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has also been increasing steadily as we post more specific content, in formats suited to each platform. All in all, over the last three months, our content has been seen more than 3 million times on the social media platforms we use.

Here are some of our accomplishments over these last three months:

Preparation and publication of 408 translations into our various languages
Preparation and addition of 20 new English articles
Creation and addition of 248 subtitle files
Copyediting of 111 English transcripts and files
Preparation and addition of 437 descriptions and 109 abstracts in English
Preparation and addition of 20 biographies for the newly expanded Spiritual Teachers section
Commenced editing of videos of our interview with the Nechung Oracle, the state oracle of Tibet.
Commenced editing of videos of our interview with Jhado Rinpoche, the retired abbot of Namgyal Monastery and one of the most highly esteemed masters of the Gelug tradition today.
Preparation of 8 different video clips and uploading them to social media channels. Each video was prepared for posting on Facebook with 32 language subtitles, on Twitter with embedded English subtitles and a maximum length of 2 minutes and 20 seconds, on Instagram at 9:16 format with embedded English subtitles, and on TikTok at 9:16 format with embedded English subtitles and a maximum length of 3 minutes.
Preparation of 8 quotes taken from our video interviews, accompanied with graphics, and the uploading of these to social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter).
Using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, preparation of a test program for improving the selection of related terms for the Glossary.
Investigation into how the above program can be integrated into the website code is underway.
Redesign and reprogramming for the newly expanded Spiritual Teachers section.
Preparation of a draft plan for user accounts for the website.
Updating of all embedded Youtube videos on the website with an application to speed their loading.
Improvement of various features in the data base and content management system for locating and deleting duplicates, making more frequent backups, and filtering and sorting article tags.

All of this hard work is made possible by your continuing generous support. Together, we shall “Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”

Links:

Permalink

Jan 5, 2022
Berzin Archives Year End Report 2021

By Dr. Alexander Berzin | Founder and Author of Berzin Archives

As another year draws to a close, we find that we have yet another variant of the Covid-19 virus now to deal with – Omicron – and in some countries further restrictions and possibly even lockdowns. It’s very important when facing such challenging times as these that, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama always advises, we do not lose hope. Hope gives us the strength and courage to face these difficulties, whereas if we get depressed, it depletes our energy, and we sink into a state of fear and despair. This is especially important to remember if we have children at home, who are perhaps having an even more difficult time coping with this situation. If we lose hope and get depressed, what kind of example are we setting for them?

Further, if we think only of ourselves and our own situation, that just leads to self-pity and unhappiness. But we are not alone in this situation – this pandemic is affecting everyone. Staying mindful of that, we gain a stronger conviction in the oneness of humanity. Knowing that we are not alone gives us further strength and courage. So, try to think of all the others around the world who are similarly facing this situation and perhaps having to deal with even more difficult circumstances than we have.

As the new year dawns, let us all resolve to try our best not to let worry, fear and other upsetting emotions defeat us. We need all our strength to face the possible challenges that lie ahead and emerge victorious. There are many obstacles we need to overcome on the road to enlightenment and, in that larger context, this pandemic is just one of them. So, if we are aiming to become Buddhas to be of best help to everyone, let’s not let this pandemic get in the way. Together with all humanity, we are stronger than that. We can transform this negative circumstance into a positive one to give us even more determination to follow the path to enlightenment to its end.

2021 has been quite the year for us at Study Buddhism. Back in May, we celebrated 5 years since the relaunch of the Berzin Archives as Study Buddhism. And now in December, we celebrate 20 years since the Berzin Archives went online. If you didn’t catch it before and you’re interested to see how the website has changed over the last few years, you can see that in the GlobalGiving report we sent out in early December.

Now, let me share with you some of our achievements over the past year. In 2021, we have had more than 1,000,000 unique users of the website, who've read over 2.37 million articles in our 32 languages. The amount of readers in English dropped by 3% to 27%, no doubt due to our hard work in bringing the website’s content in 11 new languages - covering the whole of Southeast Asia, much of the Indian subcontinent, and Israel.

We now have 12,526 articles on the website, which means that this year we have added to the website just about 1,900 articles. Altogether, we worked on and produced more than 6000 translations of articles and subtitles, which comes to a whopping 16 every single day! Just under two-thirds of users visited the website on a mobile device, 2.6% visited on a tablet, and desktop readers actually grew by a few percentage points, making up close to 34% of users, as people around the world spent more time at home.

Our social media community has continued to grow, with our Facebook page seeing new users - especially from India, Nepal, and Bhutan - join our pages. This year, we have shared 19 videos on Facebook, which have garnered 2.1 million minutes viewed on the platform - that’s over 1450 days worth of non-stop viewing! Meanwhile, all of our content put together - including videos, articles, quotes and so forth - has been seen 5.8 million times.

Despite the fact that our video production has slowed down - the coronavirus pandemic has brought a stop to travel and many in-person events - Study Buddhism’s YouTube channel is enjoying great success, with our subscribers now shooting past 35,000, and our all-time views also passing the 2 million landmark this December. We now have a total of 437 videos, and have expanded out of the Tibetan Buddhist circle to include Chan Buddhist teachers from Dharma Drum Mountain, engaged-Buddhism-expert Sulak Sivaraksa, and authority on Buddhism in the USSR, professor Andrey Terentyev.

Over on SoundCloud, we’ve had a 15% increase in followers and a large increase in people downloading our audio tracks. Our top listeners are from Sydney and Perth in Australia, followed by San Francisco in the US, Moscow in Russia, and Ma On Shan in Hong Kong. This year, we also relaunched our Instagram account which had been dormant for some time. In the space of a few weeks, our followers shot up to 3,400, and our videos, quotes, and articles have proven to be extremely popular, with over 1 million views since October.

All of our work, from maintaining the website and creating new material, to producing video content and translating thousands of subtitles and articles, relies upon you, the public, and your donations. So, I wish to thank you all for your continuing support. Please share with your loved ones and friends our project, or anyone who might be interested in the wisdom of Tibet but does not know of our website and might like to help support our work. Together we shall “Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”

Links:

Permalink

‹ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... 22 ›

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.