Digital Natives Blog
Unpacking video-based surveillance in New Delhi
Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon presented at an international workshop on 'Urban Data, Inequality and Justice in the Global South', on 14 June 2019, at the University of Manchester. The agenda for the workshop and the slides from the presentation by Aayush and Ambika are available below.
Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers
This is an excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.
Can data ever know who we really are?
This is an excerpt from an essay by Zara Rahman, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.
Data Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention?
In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices unveils the gendered power differentials wedded into taken-for-granted “benign” monitoring processes. The unpacking of the Mother and Child Tracking System and the National Health Stack reveals the neo-liberal aspirations of the Indian state.
Digital Humanities Alliance of India - Inagural Conference 2018 - Keynote by Puthiya Purayil Sneha
The inaugural conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) was held at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore on June 1-2, 2018. The event was co-organised by the IIM and the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, with support from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Puthiya Purayil Sneha was a keynote speaker at the event. Her talk was titled ‘New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital’. Drawing upon excerpts from a study on mapping digital humanities initiatives in India, and ongoing conversations on digital cultural archiving practices, the keynote address discussed some pertinent concerns in the field, particularly with respect to the growth of digital corpora and its intersections with teaching learning practices in arts and humanities, including the need to locate these efforts within the context of the emerging digital landscape in India, and its implications for humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy.
New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital (Paper)
The ubiquitous presence of the ‘digital’ over the couple of decades has brought with it several important changes in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. Particularly in the arts and humanities, the role of digital technologies and internet has always been a rather contentious one, with more debate spurred now due to the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics. Even as these fields signal several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, portending a futuristic imagination of the role of technology in academia and practice on the one hand, they also reflect continuing challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines. A specific criticism within more recent debates around the origin story of DH in fact, has been its Anglo-American framing, drawing upon a history in humanities computing and textual studies, and located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. While this has been met with resistance from across different spaces, thus calling for more diversity and representation in the discourse, it is also reflective of the need to trace and contextualize more local forms of practice and pedagogy in the digital as efforts to address these global concerns. This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha draws upon excerpts from a study on the field of DH and related practices in India, to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice with the advent of the digital and explore the developing discourse around DH in the Indian context.
Making Humanities in the Digital: Embodiment and Framing in Bichitra and Indiancine.ma
The growth of the internet and digital technologies in the last couple of decades, and the emergence of new ‘digital objects’ of enquiry has led to a rethinking of research methods across disciplines as well as innovative modes of creative practice. This chapter authored by Puthiya Purayil Sneha (published in 'Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities' edited by Jentery Sayers) discusses some of the questions that arise around the processes by which digital objects are ‘made’ and made available for arts and humanities research and practice, by drawing on recent work in text and film archival initiatives in India.
Life of a Tuple: National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Reform of Citizen Identification Infrastructure in Assam
We are proud to announce that a research grant from the Azim Premji University has enabled us to initiate a study of the updation process of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and the resultant reform of citizen identification infrastructure in India. The study is being led by Khetrimayum Monish and Ranjit Singh, along with Sumandro Chattapadhyay.
Preliminary research result on Wikipedia gender gap in India
Since June 2016, Ting-Yi Chang from the University of Toronto has worked with the CIS-A2K team to conduct action research on the Wikipedia gender gap in India. The research aims to improve the understanding of the gender gap (imbalance) issue in the Indian Wikipedia communities while examining local interventions.
Exploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India
This working paper by Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster draws from the field study undertaken by Ritam Sengupta, and is published by the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. The field study was commissioned by the CIS, with support from the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield.
Evaluating Safety Buttons on Mobile Devices: Preview
Much technological innovation for women is aimed at addressing violence against women. One such ubiquitous intervention is mobile device-based safety applications, also known as emergency applications. Several police departments in India, public transport services, and commercial services such as taxi-hailing apps deploy a mobile device-based “panic button” for the safety of citizens or customers, especially women. However, the proliferation of safety apps through both public and private players raises several concerns, which will be studied through this study by Rohini Lakshané of the CIS and Chinmayi S.K. of The Bachchao Project. Research assistance for this report was provided by CIS intern Harish R.S.K. Visualisations by Saumyaa Naidu.
Digital transitions in the newsroom: How are Indian language papers adapting differently?
In a new report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Centre for Internet and Society, Zeenab Aneez explores how Indian newsrooms are adapting their workflow and processes to cater to an increasing digital audience and the implications these changes have on how journalists produce news.
Indian Newspapers' Digital Transition
This report examines the digital transition underway at three leading newspapers in India, the Dainik Jagran in Hindi, English-language Hindustan Times, and Malayala Manorama in Malayalam. Our focus is on how they are changing their newsroom organisation and journalistic work to expand their digital presence and adapt to a changing media environment. The report comes out of a collaboration between the CIS and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, and was supported by the latter. The research was undertaken by Zeenab Aneez, with contributions from Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Vibodh Parthasarathi, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.
Who Owns Your Phone?
The capacity of companies to defy standards that work tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices.
Digital Transition in Newspapers in India: A Pilot Study
This pilot study situates itself at the intersection of global trends in news and journalism, and emergent practises of legacy print media in India. Our aim is to explore how legacy print newspapers are transitioning to the online space. The study will address questions in two thematic clusters: 1) the work of journalism, and 2) how the emergence of the digital, both as a source of news, and the medium of distribution, is shaping the work of newspaper journalists.
RBI and Regulation of Digital Financial Services in India, 2012-2016
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) published its first guideline on mobile banking in 2008, and the conversation on integrating Aadhaar numbers with bank account numbers on one hand and mobile numbers on the other started as soon as UIDAI was established. However, it is the post-2010 period, with rapid growth of the e-commerce sector in India, that saw rise of digital financial services and intermediaries, and hence the demand for regulatory intervention in the sector. This essay by Shivalik Chandan tracks RBI policies and guidelines responding to and shaping the regulatory framework of the digital financial sector in India, including both mobile banking and online transactions.
How are Indian Newspapers Adapting to the Rise of Digital Media?
How are Indian newspapers adapting to the transition to digital news production, distribution, and consumption? How are they changing their journalistic work, their newsroom organisations, and their distribution strategies as digital media become more important? These are the questions we are pursuing in a joint pilot project with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Comparative Analysis of Recommendations by NASSCOM and iSPIRT, 2013-2016
This is the second of a series of three blog posts, authored by Pavishka Mittal, tracking the engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in suggesting and shaping the IT industry policies in India during 2006-2016. This post conducts a detailed comparative analysis of NASSCOM’s and iSPIRT’s specific policy recommendations from 2013-2016. To facilitate comparison, the blog post is written thematically on the lines of major issues highlighted by market players in the IT industry.
Data for Governance, Governance of Data, and Data Anxieties
The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) organised a panel discussion on 'The Data Explosion – How the Internet of Things will Affect Media Freedom and Communication Systems?' at Deutsche Welle's Global Media Forum 2016, held in Bonn, Germany during June 13-15, 2016. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited as one of the panelists.
Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Recommendations by NASSCOM, 2006-2012
This is the first of a series of three blog posts, authored by Pavishka Mittal, tracking the engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in suggesting and shaping the IT industry policies in India during 2006-2016. This posts focuses on the policy activities of NASSCOM in 2006-2012 with specific reference to Special Economic Zones, E-Commerce Industry and Transfer Pricing, along with a few other miscellaneous important recommendations.
