Become a sponsor to NaN

Making a Living Tradition Legible: Ground Truth for People and Machines

I am singlehandedly building the Lanna Manuscript Wiki—an ambitious open-source initiative to preserve, catalog, and translate a massive, unanalyzed corpus of 100k+ Northern Thai and Lanna monastery texts.

Lanna script and Tai Yuan languages are severely underrepresented in modern language models, OCR engines, and digital archives. This project bridges that gap by creating high-quality, structured datasets and publishing them to the public domain via the Internet Archive.

The Pipeline You Are Funding

Every donation directly keeps this automated data manufacturing pipeline running:

• Ingestion: digitizing and structuring raw text from forgotten monastic collections.
• Taxonomy: organizing historical metadata for computational linguistics.
• OCR Prep: cleaning data to build robust ground-truth training models.
• Machine Translation: making these texts accessible globally in modern languages.

Where the Funds Go

This is a solo project with significant ongoing infrastructure costs:

• API Tokens: High-volume commercial OCR and specialized Translation APIs.
• Data Pipelines: Bandwidth, processing power, and temporary cloud staging.
• Tooling: Upkeep of open-source scripts that automate metadata injection.

By sponsoring this project, you are directly funding the survival of an endangered writing system and providing the open-source community with an unprecedented linguistic dataset.