The integrated digital resource

The archive aims to include every extant Khotanese manuscript unit, regardless of genre, material, or state of preservation. This includes Buddhist doctrinal texts, narrative and non-canonical literature, secular and administrative documents, medical treatises, bilingual and practical texts, as well as inscriptions and documents written on different surfaces such as paper, wood, and other materials.

Each manuscript unit is treated as a distinct object of study and is accompanied by detailed metadata concerning findspot, script type, orthography, writing material, format, and, where possible, dating. This granular structure allows the archive to reflect the diversity of the corpus and to support fine-grained comparative analysis across texts, genres, and periods.

At the heart of EKhA are digital scholarly editions of Khotanese texts. All texts are encoded in a machine-readable format following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), ensuring long-term interoperability and methodological transparency. The editions distinguish between secure and uncertain readings, and record restorations and emendations. 

A defining feature of EKhA is its rich linguistic and extra-linguistic annotation. Texts are ment to be systematically tagged for features relevant to historical and sociolinguistic analysis, including spelling variants, phonological developments, morphological forms, syntactic patterns, and lexical choices.

Crucially, the archive is designed to capture variation across multiple dimensions: diachronic, diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, and diamesic. This makes it possible to investigate how linguistic features cluster according to time, region, genre, social context, or writing practice, and to reassess traditional classifications of the Khotanese language on an empirical basis.

The Electronic Khotanese Archive is closely integrated with a comprehensive manuscript catalogue, implemented as a structured database. This catalogue allows users to search and filter manuscripts by a wide range of criteria, including location, collection, script type, material, format, genre, and linguistic features.

Advanced query functions enable researchers to extract and compare datasets across the corpus—for example, to track the distribution of specific forms, orthographic conventions, or genre-specific patterns. These tools support both qualitative philological analysis and quantitative, corpus-based approaches.