All Blogs
Gender and Technology
A course module designed by CIS for the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
The 'Dark Fibre' Files: Cable TV Technology for Dummies
In the fourth entry documenting the making of 'Dark Fibre', a film by Jamie King and Peter Mann, Siddharth Chadha simplifies cable TV technology for the uninitiated.
Pleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects
In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn.
Transparency and Politics: Politically Aware and Participatory Citizenry
In this, her fourth blog post on her CIS-RAW project, Zainab Bawa looks at the notions of Stakeholder and Participation.
Archive and Access: Documents in the Time of Democracy
This is the seventh in a series of blog posts documenting Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijeet Bhattacharya's CIS-RAW project, Archive and Access. In this entry, Rochelle Pinto introduces a sub-set of posts that will look at the political significance of public access to official documents on the internet.
The 'Dark Fibre' Files: The Grey Market Deficit
In this, the third entry in his series discussing the making of 'Dark Fibre' by Jamie King and Peter Mann, Siddharth Chadha gives an overview of piracy in the pay TV industry.
An Interview With Arjen Kamphuis
In an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Dutch open source activist Arjen Kamphuis discussed his experience of successfully working with the government for a policy mandating open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands.
The Project Vidya Story: 'Study Locally, Learn Globally'
This is first of a series of blog entries by Ajay Narendran, the architect of Vidya and former Content Manager and Webmaster, Amrita University, guest blogging on the CIS website. His blog series will attempt to capture the experience of building an intranet archive at Amrita University, Coimbatore.
Analysing Wikipedia: A First Attempt at Clustering
In this, their second update on their Analysing Wikipedia project, Kiran Jonnalagadda and Hans Varghese Mathews discuss their first attempt at grouping the various editors of a frequently edited Wikipedia document, each distinguished from the others by some particular interest, through a quick machine process requiring minimal human intervention.
The 'Dark Fibre' Files: Interview with a Cable Operator
This is the second in a series of posts documenting the making of the film 'Dark Fibre' by Jamie King and Peter Mann, in Bangalore. In this post, Siddharth Chadha shares an interview he had with Thyagraj, a cable operator in Austin Town, to throw some light on the world of the cable operator, the subject of the film.
International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009: A Report
Open Access activist Madhan Muthu recently attended the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, held in Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009, in company with CIS Distinguished Fellow Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. In this entry, as a guest blogger for CIS, he files a report on the proceedings at the workshop.
Transparency and Politics: Talk by Barun Mitra
A talk by Barun Mitra, Chairperson of the Liberty Institute, a Delhi-based think tank, was held at CIS recently, organised by Zainab Bawa in relation to her CIS-RAW project on 'Transparency and Politics'. In this post, the third in a series exploring questions of transparency and politics, Zainab reports on the lecture and discussion.
Archive and Access: The Inalienable Right to the Archives - Entering the Capital
This entry complements the prior discussion by Aparna Balachandran of the Delhi State Archives and its status as a repository of records. Her discussion compares the place of the user and that of the document in the Delhi State Archives as opposed to in the National Archives. This post by Rochelle Pinto discusses questions relating to the National Archives of India and other archival entities.
Archive and Access: The Delhi State Archives
In this, the fifth entry in a series on the CIS-RAW Archive and Access project, Aparna Balachandran reports on two state archives located in Delhi, the National Archives of India, and the Delhi Archives.
Postcolonial Hybridity and the ‘Terrors of Technology’ Argument
In the last couple of posts, Asha Achuthan has been building towards an understanding of how the anti-technology arguments in India have been posed, in the nationalist and Marxist positions. She goes on, in this sixth post documenting her project, to look at the arguments put out by the postcolonial school, their appropriation of Marxist terminology, their stances against Marxism in responding to science and technology in general, and the implications of these arguments for other fields of inquiry.
Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories
Prof N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, discusses open access in his keynote address at the 26 March 2009 one-day conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons'.
ಚರ್ಚೆ: ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಜ್ಞಾನ ಹಾಗು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ ಕುರಿತ ಬರವಣಿಗೆ (Discussion: Writing Science and Technology in Kannada)
ಭಾನುವಾರ, ಮಾರ್ಚ್ ೨೯ ರಂದು ಸಂಪದ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞರ ತಂಡ ಹಾಗು ಸೆಂಟರ್ ಫಾರ್ ಇಂಟರ್ನೆಟ್ ಎಂಡ್ ಸೊಸೈಟಿ ಜೊತೆಗೂಡಿ "ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಜ್ಞಾನ ಹಾಗು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ ಬರಹ" ಕುರಿತ ಚರ್ಚೆ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ಇಟ್ಟುಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದರು. ಈ ಬರಹ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ವರದಿ. ಕನ್ನಡ, ಭಾರತದ ಹಲವು ಭಾಷೆಗಳಂತೆ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ, ವಿಜ್ಞಾನ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಶೇಖರಿಸಿಡಲು ತುಂಬ ಕಡಿಮೆ ಬಳಕೆಯಾಗುತ್ತಿದೆ. ಹೀಗಿರುವಾಗ ಕನ್ನಡ ಭಾಷೆಯನ್ನು ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಸಂಗ್ರಹಿಸಿಡಲು, ವಿಜ್ಞಾನ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ ಕುರಿತ ವಿಷಯಗಳನ್ನು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಬಳಸುವಾಗ ಏನೇನು ತೊಂದರೆ ಅಡಚಣೆಗಳನ್ನು ಎದುರಿಸುತ್ತೇವೆ ಎಂಬುದರ ಸುತ್ತ ಚರ್ಚೆ ನಡೆದಿತ್ತು. ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದ ಸವಿವರ ವರದಿ ಲೇಖನದಲ್ಲಿದೆ.
Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law
In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.
RTI Application to Visvesvaraya Technological University
The Centre for Internet and Society filed an RTI application to Visvesvaraya Technological University asking it to provide details about its curriculum design, and its tie-ups with various software vendors.
The (Postcolonial) Marxist Shift in Response to Technology
In her previous post, Asha Achuthan discussed, through the Gandhi-Tagore debates, the responses to science and technology that did not follow the dominant Marxist-nationalist positions. Later Marxist-postcolonial approaches to science and responses to technology were conflated in anti-technology arguments, particularly in development. In this post, the fifth in a series on her project, she will briefly trace the 1980s shift in Marxist thinking in India as a way of approaching the shift in the science and technology question. This exercise will reveal the ambivalence in Marxist practice toward continuing associations between the ‘rational-scientific’ on the one hand and the ‘revolutionary’ on the other.
