Towards a digital, data-driven wayang kulit encyclopedia

• Published in: Indonesia and the Malay world Vol. 47; no. 137; p. 23
• Main Author: Escobar Varela, Miguel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Taylor & Francis Ltd 01.03.2019
• Subjects: 20th century; Cultural sensitivity; Diagrams; Disruption; Encyclopedias; Epistemology; History of ideas; Philosophy of science
• ISSN: 1363-9811; 1469-8382
• DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2019.1553382

Wayang kulit encyclopedias were first produced in the early 20th century, but their publications have experienced a recent surge in interest that has received little academic attention. This article chronicles the intellectual history of these encyclopedias and describes an experiment where their contents were reformatted into a data-driven web portal. This re-ordering and disruption allow for a different interaction with encyclopedic knowledge on wayang. For example, it enables the identification of statistical patterns in the connections between puppets that can be visualised as network diagrams. All encyclopedias distort and interpret the living tradition of wayang according to specific knowledge projects, and with different audiences in mind. In this article, I use the concept of epistemic virtues, borrowed from the philosophy of science, to help elucidate what these different encyclopedias aim to achieve and how they do so. Thinking in terms of epistemic virtues has the advantage that it underlines the culturally specific and historically contingent aspects of different epistemic projects.