Key Takeaways
Reporter Highlights
- 0118,000 manuscripts digitized in collaboration with 23 northern temples.
- 02Open-access viewer with handwriting-aware transcription tooling.
- 03Curatorial workshops scheduled in Lampang, Nan, and Mae Hong Son.
After seven years of fieldwork across Northern Thailand, CMU's Humanities cluster has launched a public archive of more than 18,000 digitized palm-leaf and mulberry-paper manuscripts. The collection spans religious, medical, and administrative texts dating from the 15th century onward, contributed by 23 partner temples and community archives.
The archive ships with a custom viewer built around handwriting-aware transcription, allowing researchers to layer modern Thai, romanized, and original Lanna scripts side by side. Educators can clip passages into reading sets, and machine-readable metadata is exposed via a public API.
The project pairs digitization with reciprocal value: every contributing temple receives high-resolution facsimiles, conservation training, and a portable scanning kit. Curatorial workshops are scheduled across Lampang, Nan, and Mae Hong Son through 2026.
Project lead Assoc. Prof. Sopit Charoenkit framed the work bluntly: "Heritage that no one can read is heritage that we are about to lose. The archive exists so that the next generation of scholars finds an open door, not a locked cabinet."