Presentation

Yoga Sutra Trees is a graph visualisation web application to explore the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali and its commentaries. The purpose of the application is to allow an easy and immediate access to the Sutra text, its commentaries, and their multiple English translation. The application also allows to manually annotate the Sutra-s, adding tags, reference and notes to each Sutra.

At the center of the application it's the graph visualisation of the Yoga Sutra, realised through the library Cytoscape JS. Each node represent an aphorism, and the aphorism are disposed as multiple interconnected hierarchical trees. The hierarchy represent the structure of the text, which present multiple variation of the structure: 1) definition with a list of sub-possibilities, 2) explanation of each of the sub-possibilities; 3) further specification of the sub-possibilites. The nodes are selectable through click or tap. When a node is selected, the information regarding the selected aphorism are shown in the expandable left sidebar. Both the information on the node and on the left sidebar are completely editable by the user. By default they present the aphorism number, the Sanskrit text and the English translation for the node.

The main goal of the web application are the following:

1) Explore the Yoga Sutra as a dynamic and completely editable hierarchical tree;

2) Access and compare multiple translation and commentaries of the text in a single place;

3) Find and annotate the references and sources of each aphorism;

4) Employ the dynamic tagging system to understand the connections between arguments and sources.