Now, access Punjabi PhD thesis online

Ravneet Singh

Advertisement

Tribune News Service

Patiala, September 30

Researchers and professors would now be able to access Punjabi PhD thesis stored at the Punjabi Sahit Academy online for the first time.

The project compiled by professors of the Punjabi University and DAV College, Jalandhar, would also help curb plagiarism. Till now, thesis from throughout India (since 1980) could be accessed by personally visiting the centre.

The Punjabi Sahit Academy in Ludhiana has over 350 Punjabi thesis projects. A team of two professors, a programmer, and a language expert worked on more than 150 thesis. 

Dr Vishal Goyal, Associate Professor at the Punjabi University’s Department of Computer Science, and Dr Rajeev Puri, Assistant Professor at the DAV College, Jalandhar, said this was done to check plagiarism for thesis written in Punjabi and other Indian languages. The duo compiled Punjabi version for the project.

Dr Goyal said, “We accessed PhD thesis that were stored at the academy for more than 40 years. Some amongst these were worn out. Our students visited the academy and clicked photographs of each and every page. Later, we extracted the text from MPEG files and stored them in PDF format.”

Dr Goyal said text of aound 100 thesis projects written with typewriters could not be extracted due to lack of the software. The team will provide digitised version of thesis projects to the academy in the form of mpeg files stored in pdf format.

Dr Rajeev Puri said, “We found as many as 100 thesis projects which were not in readable condition. Now, PhD thesis can be accessed online and this will help professors to check plagiarism as well.”