Pathways to Higher Education

November 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-01-10T01:57:29Z

November 2017 Newsletter

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
Anubha Sinha took part in the 35th Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”) at Geneva from 13 November, 2017 to 18 November, 2017. She posed a question on the agenda 'Other Matters' on behalf of CIS on Day 5, 17 November, 2017. CIS also gave statements on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives and GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment. CIS-A2K signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Telangana Government’s IT, Electronics & Communications Department with to catalyse the development of the Wikimedia movement in Telangana and improve the state of free-licensed digital content in Telugu and Urdu. The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India has published the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW). Nirmita Narasimhan on behalf of the Centre for Internet & Society gave comments on GIGW. The government has already set up a Nudge unit; now, it should apply the Nobel laureate's insights on auctions relating to essential infrastructure wrote Shyam Ponappa in an article in the Business Standard on November 1, 2017. DataMeet and CIS have collaborated on identifying and addressing the challenges to open up and integrate data and information in the water sector. CIS commented on the Consultation Paper on Privacy, Security and Ownership of Data in Telecom Sector published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on August 9, 2017. CIS published a report that compares laws and regulations in the United Kingdom and India to see the similarities and disjunctions in cyber security policy between them. CIS sent comments on TRAI consultation paper on promoting local telecom equipment manufacturing. The submission drew on research primarily done in the Pervasive Technologies project.

Highlights

Anubha Sinha took part in the 35th Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”) at Geneva from 13 November, 2017 to 18 November, 2017. She posed a question on the agenda 'Other Matters' on behalf of CIS on Day 5, 17 November, 2017. CIS also gave statements on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives and GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment.
CIS-A2K signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Telangana Government’s IT, Electronics & Communications Department with to catalyse the development of the Wikimedia movement in Telangana and improve the state of free-licensed digital content in Telugu and Urdu.
The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India has published the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW). Nirmita Narasimhan on behalf of the Centre for Internet & Society gave comments on GIGW.
The government has already set up a Nudge unit; now, it should apply the Nobel laureate's insights on auctions relating to essential infrastructure wrote Shyam Ponappa in an article in the Business Standard on November 1, 2017.
DataMeet and CIS have collaborated on identifying and addressing the challenges to open up and integrate data and information in the water sector.
CIS commented on the Consultation Paper on Privacy, Security and Ownership of Data in Telecom Sector published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on August 9, 2017.
CIS published a report that compares laws and regulations in the United Kingdom and India to see the similarities and disjunctions in cyber security policy between them.
CIS sent comments on TRAI consultation paper on promoting local telecom equipment manufacturing. The submission drew on research primarily done in the Pervasive Technologies project.

CIS in the News:

Big Data for governance (Alekhya Hanumanthu; Telangana Today; November 4, 2017).
How tech is making life easier for differently-abled (Shalini Umachandrani; November 7, 2017).
India Today Conclave Next 2017: Aadhaar was rushed, says MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar (Priya Pathak; India Today; November 8, 2017).
What You Need To Worry About Before Linking Your Mobile Number With Aadhaar (Roopa Raju and Shekhar Rai; Youth Ki Awaaz; November 8, 2017).
OPINION | Data is New Oil and Human Mind the New Battlefield. India Must Wake Up Now (Lt. General (Retd.) D. S. Hooda; News18.com; November 11, 2017).
Aadhaar seeding: benefits and concerns (Shaikh Zoaib Saleem; Livemint; November 14, 2017).
Privacy issues exist even without Aadhaar (Ronald Abraham; November 15, 2017).
Advocating for Openness: Nine Ways Civil Society Groups Have Mobilized to Defend Internet Freedom (Centre for International Media Assistance; November 15, 2017).
Govt working to set up financial CERT to tackle cyber threats (Komal Gupta; Livemint; November 16, 2017).
Financial CERT to combat cyber threats, says MoS home affairs (CISO MAG; November 17, 2017).
UIDAI admits 210 government websites made Aadhaar details public (Financial Express; November 20, 2017).
India’s internet missionaries: The women Google is relying on to spread its Next Billion message (Sunny Sen; Livemint; November 21, 2017).
FCC’s plan to repeal net neutrality may not impact India (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; November 23, 2017).
Indian activists slam FCC decision to ditch net neutrality (Kul Bhushan; Hindustan Times; November 23, 2017).
FCC’s plan to repeal net neutrality may not impact India (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; November 23, 2017).
Why should you keep a close eye on the net neutrality debate in the US (Subhrojit Mallick; Digit; November 24, 2017).
Cyberattacks a significant threat to democracy: Modi (Komal Gupta; Livemint; November 24, 2017).
Aadhaar verification at airports raises need for stricter data privacy regulations (Aman Sethi; Hindustan Times, November 27, 2017).
IDAP Interview Series: Interview with Nirmita Narasimhan (IDIA Law; November 27, 2017).
Govt releases white paper on data protection framework (Komal Gupta; Livemint; November 28, 2017).
Bengalureans to receive Helen Keller award (Deccan Herald; November 30, 2017).

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Submission

Comments on Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (Nirmita Narasimhan; November 26, 2017).

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Copyright & Patent

35th SCCR: CIS Statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (Anubha Sinha; November 15, 2017).
35th SCCR: CIS Statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (Anubha Sinha; November 17, 2017).
35th SCCR: CIS' Question to Dr. Rostama on her Study on the Impact of the Digital Environment on Copyright Legislation (Anubha Sinha; November 19, 2017).

►Wikipedia

Blog Entry

CIS-A2K signs MoU with Telangana Government (Manasa Rao; November 8, 2017).

►Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Privacy

Blog Entries

A Comparison of Legal and Regulatory Approaches to Cyber Security in India and the United Kingdom (Divij Joshi; edited by Elonnai Hickok; November 12, 2017).
Counter Comments on TRAI's Consultation Paper on Privacy, Security and Ownership of Data in Telecom Sector (Amber Sinha; November 23, 2017).

Participation in Event

BIS International Seminar on Internet of Things (Organized by BIS; November 15, 2017; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi). Amber Sinha attended the event.
Internet Universality Indicators for a Safe, Secure and Inclusive Cyberspace for Sustainable Development (Organized by UNESCO in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India; UNESCO Conference Room, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi; November 17, 2017). Amber Sinha attended the event.

Roundtable on Data Integrity and Privacy (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; November 18, 2017). The round table discussion was chaired by Shri Baijayant Panda, Hon'ble Member of Parliament.

►Cyber Security

Blog Entry

Breach Notifications: A Step towards Cyber Security for Consumers and Citizens (Amelia Andersdotter; November 14, 2017).

Event Organized

Roundtable on Enhancing Indian Cyber Security through Multi-Stakeholder Cooperation (Indian Islamic Centre; Lodhi Road; New Delhi; November 4, 2017).
Open House on Security Practices in FinTech (Organized by CIS and Has Geek; November 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

Multinational Cyber Security Forum at University of Haifa (Organized by Center for Cyber, Law and Policy and University of Haifa in collaboration with the Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative; November 5 - 7, 2017). Sunil Abraham participated in the meeting held in Israel.
Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) (Organized by GCSC; November 21, 2017; New Delhi). Pranesh Prakash participated in the event.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler's Views On Auctions (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; November 1, 2017).

Submission

Comments on TRAI Consultation Paper on Promoting Local Telecom Equipment Manufacturing (Anubha Sinha; November 26, 2017).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Articles

Digital native: Rebellion by Google Doc (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; November 4, 2017)
Digital native: Let there be life (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; November 19, 2017).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/november-2017-newsletter

Digital native: Let there be life

nishant — 2018-01-09T16:05:37Z

The first robot citizen of the world is from Saudi Arabia, and she has the dubious fame of having more rights than human counterparts in the country.

The article was published in Indian Express on November 19, 2017.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. (Image Source: Thinkstock)

Last week, Saudi Arabia made Sophia — a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence and neural networked computation — an honorary citizen. Saudi Arabia, thus, becomes the first country to recognise that the boundaries of human life and technology have been blurring for quite a while. This is not unprecedented because in other countries personhood has been granted to many other non-human agencies. For example, companies like Google, across the globe, have exercised their rights to free speech and expression. In other parts of the world, conversations have emerged around environmental rights where rivers and forests were given human rights in order to save them from exploitation and erasure. In Japan, the committee for the regulation of artificial intelligence for social good, since 2016, has already forwarded the idea of companion robots who will become quasi members of society, and, how artificial intelligence will help these robots integrate into human lives.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. While this well-calculated public relations gimmick might be positioned to put Saudi Arabia on the innovations map of the future, it does betray the fact that it now has the dubious fame of being a country where female-shaped robots have more rights than human women. In its press conference, Sophia appeared without the traditional headscarf, which is mandatory for all Saudi women to wear in public at all times. Sophia is allowed a voice, an agency and a sense of humour. It has been given the capacity and choice to talk to strangers and, in the future, the freedom to drive cars and stand up for its rights in a way that women in Saudi Arabia can’t.

Sophia, with its humanoid futures rendered in silicon and fibres, also gets citizenship in a country where tens of thousands of immigrant workers — who live in conditions of slavish exploitation — are not allowed citizenship or even permanent residence. Saudi Arabia’s laws do not allow for citizenship by naturalisation. Sophia’s honorary citizenship is yet another signal of how the future of human rights and entitlements is going to be blurred when technological artefacts and artificial intelligences start competing for similar status.

However, the most interesting part of Sophia’s new found personhood, is that Sophia, in fact, is not an individual entity. The robot might mimic human form and emotions, but, as a product of deep neural networking and machine learning, Sophia is extensively connected to multiple layers of computational data processing. There are super computers processing all its sensory input, algorithms that help it to navigate physical and social structures, distributed databases drawing from a language corpus that help it to formulate meaningful sentences; and, there are multiple artificial intelligence softwares that evolve and change Sophia’s behaviour through pattern recognition and deep learning.

Sophia is not just a thing in isolation. It is a gateway robot that opens up a series of questions of what happens when we actually interact with and invite sapient technologies into our lives. Granting Sophia citizenship also includes granting citizenship to a server situated somewhere else in the world. In fact, if you establish a connection between Sophia and your machine, and manage to merge the two computing systems, your machine could easily make claims to be a part of the extended citizenship that has been granted to Sophia.

It is important to remember that even as our machines appear more human, more personalised, they are not just a single thing. As we develop new intimacies with our neural networked devices, it is good to take a step back and remember that the rights of humans might still be worth championing over the state of machines.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-november-19-2017-nishant-shah-digital-native-let-there-be-life

Digital native: Rebellion by Google Doc

nishant — 2018-01-09T16:19:49Z

The List is an example of the power of digital anonymity and solidarity. But we need to move beyond it.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 5, 2017.

For the last few weeks, the social web has been preoccupied with a hashtag and a list. #MeToo has been trending in different parts of the world, as it invites people who have suffered sexual abuse and violence — especially women — to come out and narrate their experience to name the problem that remains a well-known secret. The hashtag is a call for action to break through the taboo of owning sexual abuse and calling out the cultures of silence that protect sexual predators and perpetrators of violence. For the last few weeks, the social web has been preoccupied with a hashtag and a list. #MeToo has been trending in different parts of the world, as it invites people who have suffered sexual abuse and violence — especially women — to come out and narrate their experience to name the problem that remains a well-known secret. The hashtag is a call for action to break through the taboo of owning sexual abuse and calling out the cultures of silence that protect sexual predators and perpetrators of violence.

While there have been many battle calls in the past for victims of sexual abuse to not give in to shame, the response to this hashtag appears unprecedented because of two conditions that digital networks offer. The first is the possibility of anonymity. The victims can, while remaining anonymous, still express their grief, anger, frustration and despair at continued cycles of abuse. The second is the breaking of the isolation chambers, where they no longer feel isolated but realise that they are struggling to fight a larger problem — and that they have allies they can depend on.

This digital invitation has generated an inspiring number of people — expectedly, largely women — who have produced the largest consolidated testimony of how everyday experiences of abuse become allowed, condoned, and even defended by institutions like families, markets and governments. The hashtag created a particular furore in India, because it elicited a militant response — #himtoo.

There was a suggestion that maybe it is also time to name the perpetrators rather than just reliving grief and facing a politics of despair. A list was curated, first on Facebook and then on an open Google document, which named some very influential names within Indian (and some global) academic institutions. Some of these names already have a history of public accusations and legal cases. Some of the names opened up a stream of accusations, which have been shored up but never released for the power that their institutional positions wield. And a few of the names were shocking because they are people who have positioned themselves as allies in the social justice movements in the country. Indeed, some of the men on the list have made professional academic careers out of their solidarity with women’s and queer rights activism.

The list — digital in nature and hence, unforgiving and unforgetting — has performed the act of transgression that digital technologies always offered the scope of. The list isn’t just content, but a potent digital object. It connects, circulates, and finds new relationships of causality and correlation that transcend localised human networks. The list has become a space of huge contention because the digital native feminists who are using social media to find solidarity in numbers and catharsis in naming are using newer strategies. These are particularly different from the pre-digital feminist tactics, which have depended more on secret connections and expanding circles of trust. There is, in the feminist groups within the country, a lot of debate (and some hostile name-calling) for and against the list.

While there is much to think about and discuss, something that strikes me is that the debates follow an expected trope in digital activism. Researchers of digitally mediated activism have long warned that digital technologies have a strange way of turning the conversations inwards. Every time there is a digital platform or technology used to effect change, more often than not, the conversations end up being about the digital and its efficacy rather than the problems that are at hand. In this case, the entire debate seems to now be focused on whether the list is valid, whether the anonymous spaces of the social web are the best space for this activism, the potential for abuse if people with false agendas infiltrate these list-making exercises, and the labour of due process that must be performed to give the list credibility. All of these are fair debates. But it’s quite telling that the energy that should have been invested in thinking about systemic injustice and structural abuse is being diverted to thinking about digital technologies, forms, and processes.

There are not going to be any easy answers to the list. However, there’s something we need to remember from the history of digital activism: we can’t lose focus of what is really at stake here — cultures of sexual violence that perpetuate themselves in silence — and we need to stop fetishising digital objects and processes as primary objects of our obsession.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-5-2017-digital-native-rebellion-by-google-doc

October 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-01-10T00:53:03Z

October 2017 Newsletter

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India. Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post. Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done. Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

Highlights

CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India.
Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post.
Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done.
Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

CIS in the News:

Attempted data breach of UIDAI, RBI, ISRO and Flipkart is worrisome (DailyO, October 4, 2017).
Sex, drugs and the dark web (Hindu; October 7, 2017).
Ahead of data protection law roll out, experts caution that it shouldn't limit collection and use of data (First Post; October 12, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: The economics and business models of IoT and other issues (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: Data standards for IoT and home automation systems (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
Majority of top politicians' Twitter followers fake: audit (Furquan Moharkan; Deccan Herald; October 24, 2017).
Awards for those working on employment opportunities for disabled (Eastern Mirror; October 24, 2017).
Nibbling away into your bank account, salami attackers cart away a fortune (New Indian Express; October 25, 2017).
Nirmita Narasimhan wins the 18th NCPEDP-Mindtree Helen Keller Award 2017! (National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People; October 31, 2017).

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Odia Wikisource Turns 3 (Manasa Rao; October 22, 2017).
Wikimedia Workshop at Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aurangabad (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Orientation Program at Kannada University, Hampi (A. Gopalakrishna; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Solapur University (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Discussion on Creation of Social Media Guidelines & Strategy for Telugu Wikimedia (Manasa Rao; October 24, 2017).

►Openness

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Internet Governance
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►Freedom of Expression

ICANN’s Problems with Accountability and the .WEB Controversy (Padma Venkataraman; October 24, 2017).
Why Presumption of Renewal is Unsuitable for the Current Registry Market Structure (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).
CIS’ Efforts Towards Greater Financial Disclosure by ICANN (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

CyFy 2017 (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; October 2 - 4, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

►Privacy

Blog Entry

GDPR and India: A Comparative Analysis (Aditi Chaturvedi; October 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

Securing The Digital Payments Ecosystem (Organized by NITI Aayog; October 9, 2017).

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Revisiting Per Se vs Rule of Reason in Light of the Intel Conditional Rebate Case (Shruthi Anand; October 4, 2017).

Event Organized

Emerging Issues in the Internet of Things (CIS, Bengaluru; October 23, 2017). Andrew Rens gave a talk.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

NPAs & Structural Issues (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 4, 2017).

Articles

Digital Native: There is no spoon, There is no privacy (Nishant Shah; October 9, 2017).
Digital Native: Finger on the buzzer (Nishant Shah; October 22, 2017).

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About CIS
-----------------------------------

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2017-newsletter

Digital Native: Finger on the buzzer

nishant — 2018-01-10T00:38:24Z

Which Hogwarts House are you? No, you don’t really want to know.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 22, 2017.

Internet browsing histories are dangerous things. One of the reasons why I would not want mine made public is because it will expose the part of my surfing that I am the most ashamed of — click-bait quizzes. No matter how frivolous the quiz might be, I can’t resist taking it. From which Hogwarts House I belong to (Hufflepuff all the way) to which Hollywood celebrity I look like (the last result was Matt Damon! Go figure); from how many books I can name by their first lines (92 on a score of 100) to how many words I can spell correctly (always a 100 per cent). While I know that most of these are completely pointless and a huge distraction from watching videos of hamsters eating carrots and goats butting people, I am a complete sucker for these quizzes. I even have an entire anonymous social media account just to take and share these endless no-sense time-sinks that populate the social web.

Recently, while succumbing to the late-night temptation of answering questions on one of these “tests” that challenged me to identify the correct spelling of the most commonly misspelled words, I erred. I am embarrassed (that was one of the word) that I am always a little confused when it comes to the word “accommodate” — I can never remember if the number of “c”s and “m”s are the same in the spelling and I made the wrong choice. I knew it, in a split second after choosing the option, that I was wrong. However, like the boy scout that I am, I decided to just continue with the test rather than re-doing it, and be content with a less than perfect score.

So imagine my surprise, when I got the final results. The test declared I was the next of kin to Shakespeare (which is weird, because he was such an atrocious speller) and that I had a 100 per cent accurate result. The analysis sang paeans (see, I can spell that without a spell-checker!) to my prowess at spelling and how, when it comes to the English language, I am nothing short of a savant. But I knew I had made a mistake, and so I decided to take the test again. This time, I deliberately made more than one mistake, carefully choosing wrong spellings for different words. Lo and behold, my final analysis still announced me as the peer of Shashi Tharoor, with the capacity to confound the Tweetosphere with my verbiage.

The pronouncements of my spelling skills had nothing to do with my ability. No matter how many times you took the quiz — with varying degrees of error — like a doting mother, it insisted that you are the best. Quizzes like these, which pretend to test and give an insight into our own capacities, are the new click bait. These quizzes have nothing to do with content or our skills. They have a simple function: they want us to feel validated so that we share the results as a humble brag with others in our social networks, catalysing an avalanche of people who would perpetuate the cycle. In this indiscreet sharing, these quizzes collect valuable data without our consent.

It is impossible to take such quizzes without signing in through our existing social media accounts and giving access to data that we would otherwise never think of giving to complete strangers promising to tell us our fake futures. These quizzes have identified that the biggest currency of the digital web is personal data, which, then, gets collected, collated, correlated and circulated to other actors who capitalise on it. This is the promise and threat of the big data industries that we live in. I do not want to add to the fear-mongering that often surrounds data theft — if data is the currency, then it is obvious that we are going to have to trade it, guard it, and save it, just the way we do our other currencies.

What I do want to point out is, that if there was a quiz, an app, a programme or a device, which asked to access our bank accounts in order to tell us that we are geniuses, we would be very suspicious of them. Remember, we are still hesitant to even giving our credit card details to websites (you know the premium platforms I am talking about) that have questionable content. We do not easily part with our passwords and keys to Artificial Intelligence scripts masquerading as fake prophets. Similarly, we need to give equal attention to the personal data sets that we give away to seemingly harmless things like quizzes and apps. Indeed, it is fun to indulge in this world of self-congratulatory feedback loops, but it is also good to pay some thought to the cost of this fun. Because when it comes to the world of data driven digitality, the axiom is really simple: if you are having fun for free, you are paying in ways that you cannot see. Often, it is through your personal data and private information.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-22-2017-digital-native-finger-on-the-buzzer

Digital Native: There is no spoon, There is no privacy

nishant — 2018-01-10T00:27:24Z

It should be common knowledge by now, in our lived experiences of big data, that digital privacy is a battle ground.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 9, 2017

Like persistent viruses, some things on the social web just resurface. This week it is a disclaimer that’s making the rounds on social media, where people announce that they hereby declare all their material private, and that any unauthorised use of this material for any commercial or non-consensual purpose is not allowed. The announcement has a semi-legalese tone – or, at least the kind of language that non-lawyers think law uses. It cites some random and pointless official sounding clauses which, apparently, reinforce the claim of the user to absolute privacy and ownership of their content.

Much screen space has been spilt in trying to question, mock and educate the people who put out these notices. It should be common knowledge by now, in our lived experiences of big data, that digital privacy is a battle ground. Most of us, as we click on Terms of Services and accept ‘free’ services for our search, browse, connect and share needs, sign off almost all moral and legal rights to the content that we produce online. Most of us would be lucky if suddenly, our Internet Service Provider (or platform and app of choice), didn’t turn around to claim our first borns and our souls — because we might have unwittingly accepted that clause too, when we clicked on “Accept and Proceed”. And yet, most of us, when it comes to thinking of digital privacy, hold on to a romantic idea of how, if we merely say it loud enough, we can reclaim our right to the information about us.

I am curious about where this notion comes from. Because it is definitely not the digital natives who foster these illusions. This year we have been working with a group of school girls between the ages of eight and 13, to understand how they experience and inhabit their digital spaces. Most of these young girls are not on public social media – they are generally not allowed to be there unless they lie about their ages – but, they are all in possession of smart phones and belong to micro social networks like WhatsApp groups and hangouts, where they connect with the people they know and go to school with. Most of them have never encountered strangers on the web, but their social media is saturated with messages and information from friends, families, colleagues and cohorts.

One of the questions posed to these groups was about the kind of material they produce within their networks. Surprisingly (because of their age group) but predictably (because it is the Internet), almost all of these girls told us about how they experimented with sexting and producing images of themselves that they have shared in these groups. We were wondering if they thought it was safe to do this. And almost all of them looked at us as if we were mad, and said “of course not!”. They talked to us that there is no privacy in the digital world – not even if it is in closed and curated groups. They were well aware that once they put out these images in the world, they will spread and be out of their control. They recounted incidents of how, when things did go terribly wrong in a couple of instances, the interventions from parents, teachers, and in one instance, even law enforcement, were of no help — the images continued to spread. What we thought were exceptional cases of loss of privacy and sexual harassment, turned out to be the status quo for these young girls’ experience of being online. As a 9-year-old, at the end of a focus group discussion said, with a rather chilling effect “it happens to everybody!”.

The younger users of the web, it seems, have no fantasies about their privacy and ownership of information. Through experiences and through shared knowledge, they already know that being online is to be in the public eye of unforgiving algorithms that spread you thin, beyond will and consent, over databases that never forget. They are aware of the mechanics of their actions, even if not the consequences. When we showed these user generated disclaimers of privacy to the young girls, they all laughed and joked about how silly these people were. And yet, the privacy disclaimers continue to be all around us. It is almost as if, the older users of the web are in a space of denial, where they refuse to acknowledge that in the corporatization of the web, we have already been sold. That these performative acts of personal protection are not just redundant but also foolish. However, this denial does help these older users to continue abdicating their responsibility towards holding governments and companies accountable for how they deal with our data. Hence the user seems to see no paradox on putting these disclaimers on their Facebook feeds while signing up for Aadhaar numbers, not recognising that the biggest agents of any breach in their privacy are themselves!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-9-digital-native-there-is-no-spoon-there-is-no-privacy

Internet Researchers' Conference 2018 (IRC18): Offline - Call for Sessions

sneha-pp — 2017-11-29T12:30:13Z

Does being offline necessarily mean being disconnected? Beyond anxieties such as FOMO, being offline is also seen as disengagement from a certain milieu of the digital (read: capital), an impediment to the way life is organised by and around technologies in general. However, being offline is not the exception, as examples of internet shutdown and acts on online censorship illustrate the persistence and often alarming regularity of the offline even for the ‘connected’ sections of the population. The *offline* is the theme of the third Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC18). We invite teams of two or more members to submit sessions proposals by Sunday, November 19 (final deadline). The session selection process is described below. The Conference will be hosted by the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (Kandbari, Palampur, Himachal Pradesh) on February 22-24, 2018.

IRC18: Offline

Call for Sessions

Proposed Sessions (Conference Website)

Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (External Link)

IRC18: Offline

State and commercial providers of internet and telecommunication services work in tandem to produce both the “online” and the “offline” - through content censorship, internet regulation, generalised service provision failures, and so on. Further, efforts to prioritise the use of digital technologies for financial transactions, especially since demonetisation, has led to a not-so-subtle equalisation of the ‘online economy’ with the ‘formal economy’; thus recognising the offline as the zones of informality, corruption, and piracy. This contributes to the offline becoming invisible, and in many cases, illegal, rather than being recognised as a condition that necessarily informs what it means to be digital.

Who is offline, and is it a choice? The global project of bringing people online has spurred several commendable initiatives in expanding access to digital devices, networks, and content, and often contentious ones such as Free Basics / internet.org, which illustrate the intersectionalities of scale, privilege, and rights that we need to be mindful of when we imagine the offline. Further, the experience of the internet, for a large section of people is often mediated through prior and ongoing experiences of traditional media, and through cultural metaphors and cognitive frames that transcend more practical registers such as consumption and facilitation. How do we approach, study, and represent this disembodied internet – devoid of its hypertext, platforms, devices, it's nuts and bolts, but still tangible through engagement in myriad, personal and often indiscernible ways.

For the third edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC18), we invite participants to critically discuss the offline. We invite sessions that present or propose academic, applied, creative, or technical works that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the offline.

For example, the sessions may explore one or more of the following themes:

Geographies of internet access: Infrastructural, socio-political, and discursive forces and contradictions
Terms, objects, metaphors, and events of the internet and their offline remediation and circulation
Minimal computing, maker cultures, and digital collaboration and creativity in the offline
Offline economic cultures and transition towards less-cash economy
Offline as democratic choice: the right to offline lives in the context of global debates on privacy, surveillance, and data justice
Methodologies of studying the *offline* at the intersections of offline and online lives

Please note that the above are not sub-themes or tracks under which a session should be proposed, but are illustrations of possible session themes and concerns.

Call for Sessions

We invite teams of two or more members to propose sessions for IRC18. All sessions will be one and half hours long, and will be fully designed and facilitated by the team concerned, including moderation (if any). Please remember this when planning the session. Everything happening during the session, except for logistical support, will be led and managed by the session team.

The sessions are expected to drive conversations on the topic concerned. They may include presentation of research papers but this is not mandatory.

We look forward to sessions that involve collaborative work (either in groups or otherwise), including discussions, interactions, documentation, learning, and making, are most welcome.

We also look forward to sessions conducted in Indic languages. The proposing team, in such a case, should consider how participants who do not understand the language concerned may engage with the session. IRC organisers and other participants shall help facilitate these sessions, say by offering translation support.

The only eligibility criteria for proposing sessions are that they must be proposed by a team of at least two members, and that they must engage with the *offline*.

The deadline for submission of sessions proposals for IRC18 is Sunday, November 19 (final deadline).

To propose a session, please send the following documents (as attached text files) to raw@cis-india.org:

Title of the Session: The session should be named in the form of a hashtag (check the IRC17 selected sessions for example).
Context of the Session: This should be a 300 words note discussing the context, the motivations, and the expectations behind the proposed session.
Session Plan: This should describe the objectives of the session, what will be done and discussed during the session, and who among the people organising the session will be responsible for what. This note need not be more than 300 words long. If your session involves inviting others to present their work (say papers), then please provide a description and timeline of the process through which these people will be identified.
Session Team Details: Please share brief biographic notes of each member of the session team, and contact details.

There is no registration fee for the Conference, but participants are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodation (to be organised by CIS) expenses. Limited funding will be available to support travel and accommodation expenses of few participants who are unemployed or under-employed.

Session selection process:

November 19: Deadline of submission of session proposals.All submitted sessions will be posted on the CIS website, along with the names and details of the session team members.
November 20 - December 17: Open review period. All session teams, as well as other interested contributors, are invited to review and comment upon each other's submitted proposals and revise their own. Read the proposed sessions here: Conference Website.
December 18-31: The selection process takes place. All session teams will select 10 sessions to be included in the IRC18 programme. The votes will be anonymous, that is no session team will know which other sessions have voted for their session.
January 08: Announcement of selected sessions.
February 22-24: IRC18 at Sambhaavnaa Institute!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18-offline-call

Digital native: What’s in a name? Privilege

nishant — 2017-10-13T00:51:04Z

Anonymity-based internet apps like Sarahah may not be as vicious for those surrounded by the comfort of social status. If your experience of Sarahah has been positive, it might be good to reflect on your own cultural and social capital.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 10, 2017.

After days of witnessing the brouhaha around Sarahah, I finally gave in and signed up for an account. Having been a part of the rise and fall of other similar anonymity-based spaces like QOOH, Secret, Yikyak; and, having lived out shamefully long hours on Internet-trawling platforms like Reddit, I was more or less ready for yet another app that invited the world to write to me anonymously, with no option of replying or engaging meaningfully.

When I signed up for it and shared the link on my social networks, I braced myself for the barrage to begin. As I went along with my usual day, with an eye on the app, the notifications started pouring in. Instead of the vicious and vitriolic tripe that I have come to expect from the anonymous message, my app was singing outpourings of love and celebration of different relationships. Friends shared memories that they wanted to re-live. Students wrote in with messages of joy, filling me with proxy pride at the wonderful young people I get to work with. Colleagues and acquaintances sent messages of celebration. One reluctant person regretfully told me that they find my work shallow but if I am successful doing it, then more power to me.

The invitation text on Sarahah says, “Say something constructive”, and it looked like people have been so well-conditioned to listening to bot-messages that they were actually following the instructions to the T. A few days of this euphoric validation from my social networks made me walk on clouds and smile at unsuspecting strangers. I also started thinking why people berate these anonymous app when they are such a wonderful celebration of a mediated social world, where performances of affection and appreciation are dwindling.

It would have been easy for me to dismiss the growing alarm around cases of bullying, harassment, threats, and destructive messages that others have experienced on this app. Absorbed in just my own bubble, I could insist the need for these kinds of platforms, ignoring the experiences of others. I had to remind myself that this super-positive response I have had in the last three weeks is not because of the nature of the app, but because of a confluence of privilege, sociality and demography inherent on my social networks.

As an independent expat living in Europe, with jobs that back me up with cultural and economic capital, and with years of fluency and familiarity with the medium that I am engaging in, I am not an easy target. If barbs, jabs, insults and threats had made their way to me, not only would I be able to take it in my stride and shake it off, but would, possibly, be able to reciprocate in ways where I would find myself on the winning end. I also live in the comfort of knowing that if there was ever a public brawl, I have the cushion of networks, which would not only come to my defence but also protect me from further repercussions of such events. Also, much as I would like to be otherwise, I am not young. I moved out of the digital natives demography a few years ago, and the social networks that I have created around me comprise people who I know to be mature and sensitive. I would have been shocked if any of them had engaged in acts of bullying or vicious attacks.

These are all affordances that might appear natural to me because they are a part of my everyday experience, but I need to recognise these as privileges. If your experience of Sarahah has been positive, it might be good to reflect on your own cultural and social capital. Historically, those who carry the knapsack of privileges with ease, have never found themselves at the centre of bullying, intimidation or harassment. Those are always saved for minorities, people who do not fit, people who are marked by precariousness in a way that does not even give them the voice to narrate their stories or the capacities to deal with the abuse that is sent their way. It is very easy to just look at our experiences, shaped by privilege, and use it to dismiss the pain, sorrow and the turbulence that is often reserved for women, people of colour, people defined by markers of language, literacy, location and class. It is necessary to remind ourselves that the personal is not a symptom of the universal experience. More often than not, it is only a testimony of the extreme customisation that the digital world offers, so that, ensconced in our own filtered bubble, we can easily forget and devalue those who suffer through other conditions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-10-2017-digital-native-what-s-in-a-name-privilege

The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden

sneha-pp — 2017-10-04T11:02:10Z

What do Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower behind the NSA surveillance revelations, and Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit, who worked for almost his entire life on Saint Thomas Aquinas, have in common? The simple answer would be: the computer. Things however are a bit more complex than that, and the reason for choosing these two people to explain what the Digital Humanities are, is that in some sense they represent the origins and the present consequences of a certain way of thinking about computers. This essay by Dr. Domenico Fiormonte, lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre, was originally published in the Media Development journal.

Cross-posted from Media Development, Vol. LXIV 2/2017. Published on May 13, 2017.

Although it is true that computer science was born from the needs of calculation (i.e. computing), in other cultures and languages the usual term is “informatics”, or the science of information. The difference is not trivial, and in fact the encounter between the computer and words, or rather with language, can be considered a cultural watershed. Father Busa himself was one of the protagonists of this meeting which came about in 1949 when he visited New York to ask Thomas J. Watson Sr, the president of IBM, for permission to use computers to study the vocabulary of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Jones, 2016). That endeavour is considered by many to have signalled the birth of computer-based “Natural Language Processing”, the inter-disciplinary field behind many of the digital tools that we use in our everyday life: from the technologies of T9 on our smartphone to voice recognition and synthesis, etc.

But these tools, although fundamental, are not the most striking (or perhaps disturbing) results of this age of transformation. Through the gesture of entering words in a computer, Busa framed the basis of a new concept of hermeneutics that was no longer based solely on purely subjective interpretation, but also on automatic processing of linguistic data, and hence in some sense “objective”. Busa’s undertaking founded the discipline of Humanities Computing (although years later it was renamed Digital Humanities), but above all it laid the groundwork for a profound epistemological and cultural transformation. And at the heart of this revolution was the “written document”, the text, understood as an alphanumeric sequence. In an effort to best explain this revolution, I will concentrate on one aspect, the representation of the document, and return to the hermeneutical aspects in the final part.

The epistemological revolution of the digital document

My own association with Digital Humanities (DH), as for many humanists of my generation, came from philology and textual criticism. My first foray into electronic textuality was in 1990, when it became clear that the confluence of informatics and the humanities would revive an inherent, almost arcane dualism: in the beginning was the data… But I was unprepared to tackle the conflict between information retrieval and interface, or between a textual paradigm based on the idea of information (text=data) and a vision of the textual document as a stratified historical-material reality, visualized not only as information, but also as an object (or series of objects), to be ultimately used and enjoyed. This dualism certainly did not only come about as a result of the encounter between informatics and text, but what we can say is that the process of digitization from this point on would “enhance” certain characteristics of the document at the expense of others.

The problem of the digital document in fact cannot be understood unless one first understands what digitization is and how it works: that is to say, the process of translating what we who undertake the work call “encoding” or more generally “representation”. The pioneers of informatica umanistica in Italy (Tito Orlandi, Raul Mordenti, Giuseppe Gigliozzi, etc.) taught the students of my generation two key concepts: 1) the passage from the analogue to the digital implies a process that formalizes the object of research (from the single character to the more complex structures of the historical artefact); 2) each act of encoding, or rather each act of representation of the specific “object” via a formal language involves a selection from a set of possibilities and is therefore an interpretative act (Orlandi, 2010).

The fundamental difference is that the human language and its writing systems were always many and various, whereas formal computer languages are based on a codex universalis, an Esperanto derived for the most part from the English language. As George Steiner wrote in After Babel, “the meta-linguistic codes and algorithms of electronic communication are founded on a sub-text, on a linguistic ‘pre-history’, which is fundamentally Anglo-American” (Steiner, 1998: xvii). Digital “standards” always reflect a cultural bias, and the act of encoding is never neutral, but tends to assume (and overlap with) universalizing discourses that on the surface are hard to see.

An important standard for character representation with ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange created in the 1960s. That technology is continued today by Unicode, an industrial standard, which purports to represent the characters of all written languages. Beside the fact that it is directed by the usual mega-corporations, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc., Unicode is underpinned by an alphabet-centric logic that penalizes non-Western systems of writing. Given this weakness, it should come as no surprise that it has attracted criticism on several fronts, including the charge of ethnocentrism (Perri, 2009; Pressman, 2014: 151), and also because it ignores the difficulties faced by languages of low commercial value in their efforts to be properly represented (and therefore at risk of extinction). To paraphrase Alexander Galloway, “technical is always [geo]political” (Galloway, 2004: 243).

Even if our lack of awareness as humanists might have deceived us into thinking that the translation from the analogue to the digital was a neutral and painless process, we would soon have realized that, as with any change of format, digital representation can change and influence both the life of the original object and its digital future. And we would have discovered the “multiple biases” inherent in the digitization process. So in one respect we have entered in a post-Busa phase where interpretation is not something you can have without defining both the object and the source of your knowledge.

Busa never showed much interest in theoretical questions or in the link between hermeneutics and epistemology (and even less between semiotics and politics), or between the interpretation of the object and the nature of its representation. Perhaps this was because the question “What do I want to represent, and how?” would have provoked a series of more disturbing questions: “What is knowledge? Who produces it, how, and for what purpose?” These questions probably would have threatened to paralyze his pragmatic approach. On the other hand, it cannot have been easy to ignore the problem, since many philosophers, starting with Plato when discussing the transition from orality to writing, kept asking questions about the formats and systems of knowledge representation (Stiegler, 2006).

As humanists we then begin to understand that the problems information technology appeared able to resolve, soon created new problems which were not limited to a single discipline, like philology or textual criticism. To ignore the epistemological (and also ethical or political) problems generated by the confluence of the humanities and information science was certainly possible: but at what price? The more pragmatic among us would have been content to use machines for what they could immediately offer: the tremendous possibilities and tools for representing, archiving and automatic analysis of humanistic objects and artefacts. This approach seemed prevalent in the first historical phase of DH, reflected in canonical definitions like “the application of computational methods to humanities research and teaching” or “researching the Humanities through digital perspectives, researching digital technologies from the perspective of the Humanities” [1].

But what are the effects of these methods and technologies? The answer to this question coincides with the new phase that DH is actually in at the moment, a phase that forces us to consider the costs of all of the above, the ethical, social, and political implications of the instruments, resources and infrastructure, and the cultural biases inherent in their conception and design.

The social and political implications of DH

Fr Busa’s “hermeneutic” approach has been the main focus of the past 20 years of DH, while the methodological and epistemological concerns have been pushed to one side. The reason for this is fairly simple. Since the overwhelming majority of evidence on which the memory of people is based (particularly in the West) is the written text, the computer, a manipulator of alphanumeric symbols, has been shown to be a powerful agent of their preservation and management. This need to unravel the concept of the “text as data”, as mentioned above, has pushed aside for the moment the question of interface, that is, ways for the text to be used and read.

The materiality of written documents, given their incredible linguistic and cultural diversity, their visual and pragmatic dimensions, etc. (especially holographs and manuscripts) does not marry all that well with the limited possibilities offered by information science – or at least doesn’t fit with what has been produced by those who have guided its development thus far. Therefore, up until the early 2000s, the Digital Humanities focused especially on the design of tools and resources for the analysis and preservation of written documents. The spread of the Web from the mid-1990s, despite the first rumblings on the theme of user interface development (which Busa always considered to be a minor problem), ended by confirming this tendency.

There was in my view a precise moment when this concept of “text as data” reached a point of crisis, by showing its dark side. As humanists we would probably have preferred to continue our work quietly as if nothing had changed, but at a certain point something monumental happened, an event which has changed our relation with the digital dimension of knowledge, and hence of research. And this moment was the 6th of June 2013, when the Washington Post and the Guardian began publishing the documents supplied by Edward Snowden about mass surveillance by the NSA. The immensity of this event was immediately clear: a document published by the US National Security Agency and its British twin (GCHQ), said that in one month alone over 181 million records had been collected, including metadata and content (text, audio and video [Gellman and Soltani, 2013]).

The news that in July 2016 half of Silicon Valley, from Amazon to Google, had been co-opted by the Pentagon (Collins, 2016), and the dynamics of the last presidential elections in the USA confirmed, that the Net has become the field on which the geopolitical balances of the planet are played out. And at the centre of this “new world” is the idea of the “universal archive” where all data (past, present, and future) are stored. It is here that both the hermeneutical and epistemological questions fall down. In modern times, knowledge and interpretation depended on history, which we conceived as a linear process, i.e. based on space and time. But the dynamics of digital data seem to escape the logics of space and time, because the digital archive is ubiquitous and eternally present.

In my opinion, the heritage of Busa is reflected by the obsession with control (collection) and the analysis (interpretation) of data by government agencies and high-tech multinationals. Both have committed to the “hermeneutic” vision (although of the bare bones variety), or rather to the analysis of huge amounts of our data as the basis of their interpretation of the world. Welcome to the fantastic world of Big Data...

The question is no longer what the document is or how it is represented (an epistemological question) or how it is to be interpreted (a hermeneutical question). Even if the better forces of DH have insisted on this point and on the necessity of proceeding in this order (because interpretation of the object is inseparable from the circumstance of its representation), these “humanistic” scruples appear suddenly irrelevant. The actual question is in fact “who are we really?” Or rather not us, but the creation through our digital footprint of an alter ego that the algorithms of Google or Facebook decree is more “true” than the other (which we mistakenly believe still to exist). But who will be able to decipher or take apart these stories (data + algorithms) which we daily write and re-write? And does it still make sense to investigate the instruments of production and preservation of memories and knowledge when we no longer have any control over them?

Geoffrey Rockwell and I recently tried to analyze a commercial surveillance package, Palantir, from the point of view of DH (Rockwell and Fiormonte, 2017). Palantir scans and combines data from “documents, websites, social media and databases, turning that information into people, places, events, things, displaying those connections on your computer screen, and allowing you to probe and analyze the links between them” (Anyadike, 2016). But these kinds of software can be also seen as story-telling tools, because they allow someone to build stories about us and through us. So there seems to be a “literary” and rhetorical side to surveillance software, which the digital humanist seems particularly well-equipped to analyze. After all, the story of Big Data is also our story. There seems to be an “original sin” present in Big Data, i.e. the information retrieval paradigm that treats stories as data and data as a resource to be mined. And this approach is clearly reflected in Busa’s original idea of computational hermeneutics: digitize your texts, get your data, then build an interpretation upon them.

A posteriori we can ask ourselves what happened on that distant morning in 1949 in the heads of Thomas J. Watson Sr. and Father Busa. Was the founder and owner of IBM conscious of what the vision of Father Busa would lead to? And could the Jesuit father have ever expected that his intuition would change not only our means of reading and interpreting history, but also how we construct it? No one can ever know. But history reaffirms once again the great responsibility of science – in this case the responsibility of the “ignorant” humanities. If anyone believes that the humanities do not have a future, it is good to read again how 70 years ago a meeting between Thomas Aquinas and computers formed the basis of a revolution in digital communication. But from now on, the role and responsibility of the humanist will not only be to preserve and interpret the signs of the past, but to engage critically with, and where necessary unmask, the technological, political and social discourses that are shaping our knowledge, memories, and consciousness.

This article was translated by Desmond Schmidt.

Note

[1] Selected responses to the question “How do you define DH?” from Day of DH 2012. Accessed from http://archive.artsrn.ualberta.ca/Day-of-DH-2012/dh/index.html.

References

Anyadike, Obi (2016). Spies Sans Frontières? How CIA-linked Palantir is gaining ground in the aid industry (and why some humanitarians are worried). IRIN, March 7, 2016. Accessed from https://www.irinnews.org/investigations/2016/03/07/spies-sans-fronti%C3%A8res.

Collins, Terry (2016). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos joins Pentagon innovation board. CNet, July 28, 2016. Accessed from https://www.cnet.com/news/jeff-bezos-amazon-blue-origin-pentagon-ash-carter-eric-schmidt-google/.

Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.

Gellman, Barton – Soltani, Ashkan (2013). NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say. The Washington Post, October 30, 2013. Accessed from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html.

Jones, Steven E. (2016). Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing. The Priest and the Punched Cards. London, Routledge.

Orlandi, Tito (2010). Informatica testuale. Teoria e prassi. Roma-Bari, Laterza.

Perri, Antonio (2009). Al di là della tecnologia, la scrittura. Il caso Unicode. Annali dell’Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Vol. II, pp. 725-748.

Pressman, Jessica (2014). Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Rockwell, Geoffrey and Fiormonte, Domenico (2017). Palantir: Reading the Surveillance Thing. Critical Software Stories as a Way of the Digital Humanities. Paper presented at the AIUCD 2017 Conference, University of La Sapienza, Rome, January 26-28, 2017.

Steiner, George (1998). After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Stiegler, Bernard (2006). Anamnesis and Hypomnesis. The Memories of Desire. In Armand, L. and Bradley, A. ed., Technicity. Prague, Litteraria Pragensia, pp. 15-41. Online version. Accessed from http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis.

Author

Domenico Fiormonte (PhD University of Edinburgh) is currently a lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre. In 1996 he created one of the first online resources on textual variation (www.digitalvariants.org). He has edited and co-edited a number of collections of digital humanities texts, and has published books and articles on digital philology, new media writing, text encoding, and cultural criticism of DH. His latest publication is The Digital Humanist. A critical inquiry (Punctum 2015) with Teresa Numerico and Francesca Tomasi. His current research interests are moving towards the creation of new tools and methodologies for promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in the humanities (http://www.newhumanities.org).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-digital-humanities-from-father-busa-to-edward-snowden

Mrutyunjay Mishra - India Online: Measuring, Understanding, and Making Decisions about Internet in India (Delhi, September 01, 6 pm)

sumandro — 2017-08-29T10:18:51Z

With great pleasure we announce that Mrutyunjay Mishra, co-founder of Juxt-SmartMandate and India Open Data Association, will be the speaker for the September #FirstFriday event at the CIS office in Delhi. Mrutyunjay is a recognised expert in data-driven decision-making and a leading commentator on Indian consumer behaviour. His talk will focus on the evolution of measurement of users and activities in the Indian telecommunication and online market sectors, and will highlight the critical challenges and opportunities faced by public and private entities in reliably and timely measuring, understanding, and making commercial and policy decisions about 'India Online'. If you are joining us, please RSVP at the soonest as we have only limited space in our office.

Mrutyunjay Mishra

Co-founder, Juxt-SmartMandate, and co-founder, India Open Data Association

Mrutyunjay is a recognised expert in data-driven decision-making and a leading commentator on Indian consumer behaviour. At Juxt Smart Mandate he oversees key account management, custom solution development, new product development, alliances, and ready-to-go market initiatives.

In his career spanning more than 20+ years, Mrutyunjay co-founded JuxtConsult and successfully merged it with Smart Mandate. Prior to that, he worked in a number of leading organisations including IMRB International (Kantar, WPP), IDC India (IDG Group), Convergys India Services, Annik Systems (Quatrro) and ASHA (a rural development NGO).

At various points in his career, he headed large volume data analytics, consumer research, strategic business research, quality projects, usability studies and change management projects. He has had considerable exposure to projects in a diversity of domains – ICT, media, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharma, healthcare, consultancy services, government, social development and public administration. He boasts functional consulting experience in implementing dashboards and reporting solutions in enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments.

He is involved in other compelling initiatives around analytics-driven health solutions, learning over education, digital marketing, and sustainable livelihood. He is the founding member of Centre for Marketing in Emerging Economies (CMEE) at IIM, Lucknow, an academic initiative to produce original research and attract collaboration for marketing theory creation. He is also the founding member of two other open sandbox projects, India Open Data Association (IODA) a non-profit company ‘to create, incubate, support and promote sustainable open data projects’ and Janwaar Castle Community Organisation (JCCO), a unique ‘initiative around learning over education and sustainable livelihood’.

He spent his formative years in Sambalpur (a small town in Odisha) University Campus, where his father was a professor. He is a graduate in commerce and a postgraduate in advertising and marketing. He loves dogs, likes reading, is a movie buff, collects stamps and matchboxes, enjoys being a weekend cook and likes travelling.

Twiter: @M2Od

RSVP

Location

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/firstfridayatcis-mrutyunjay-mishra-india-online-measuring-understanding-and-making-decisions-about-internet-in-india-delhi-sep-01

Digital native: You are not alone

nishant — 2017-09-12T13:22:14Z

Away from the guidance of adults, the internet can be a lonely place for youngsters, pushing them towards self-harm.

The article was published in the Indian Express on August 27, 2017.

We have always known that the World Wide Web is a terrifying space. From the vicious rickrolling on Redditt to the lynch mobs on Twitter, we have seen and heard enough to know that when it comes to the social web, nothing is sacred and nobody is safe. As the web exposes the dirty, dangerous, and forbidden desires of our collective depravity, there is a growing concern for the safety of digital natives who come of age online.

Children are taught to identify signs of danger, protect themselves from strangers, and remain alert when alone in public because we know that despite decades of governance, our physical spaces are not free from danger. However, we do not stop children from going out. Instead, we assign signposts and take responsibility to look out for young people who might end up in trouble because of their naiveté or poor judgement.

However, when it comes to the connected web, the youth don’t have the comfort of this buffering adult, who might guide, protect and direct them in difficult situations. The lives of digital natives are so new that most elders in their life do not have a sense of what is happening there. For most digital natives, the foray into the world of connected media is unchartered territory of collective trial and sometimes ruinous error. It puts them in a condition of profound vulnerability.

On the one hand, they are being subjected to incredible risks of bullying, exposure, manipulation and coercion by strangers on the web. On the other hand, they know that their teachers, parents or mentors are going to be useless in giving productive advice. This only gets compounded by the fact that most elders think removing access to these spaces would put an end to the problem — a solution that can lead to such extreme isolation that the young victim would prefer to struggle in that situation rather than go to an elder.

It is from these conditions of digital loneliness that we see the horrors of internet phenomenon like the Blue Whale. Disguised as a game, Blue Whale is not really a game but a finely orchestrated circus of violence that preys upon young teens struggling with depression. An anonymous coordinator, through temptation, coercion, threats and manipulation over 49 days, instigates the player to harm themselves and, on the 50th day, to take their own life and broadcast it online.

Blue Whale has now reportedly claimed victims in more than 21 countries and despite governments, schools and parents on the vigil, it continues to replicate on the darker nodes of the web. We know from the past that attempts at censorship or education are only going to take us so far. Since the Blue Whale reared its head in India, I get asked many times by concerned parents and teachers how they can stop this from happening to their children. Trying to impose bans or take away access is not the way forward. Here are three strategies you could try to let those digital natives in your life know that they are not alone:

Be a part of the digital world. One of the easiest responses that a lot of older people have is that they don’t understand technology. They roll their eyes at the social web and reminisce about how, when they were young, things were better. The web isn’t an additional thing for digital natives — it’s central to their growing up. The more you exclude yourself from it, the more they are going to find it difficult to talk to you about it. An easy way of doing this might be to set up family social time online. Just like your Sunday lunch, you have a Friday evening online time, where you talk, play, interact, share, make videos, pass comments and traverse the digital web together.

Learn with them. It is OK to admit that the digital natives know more about how to Boomerang and what filters to use on Snapchat. You are not competing with them for expertise. Instead, if you put yourself out there as a learner and ask for their advice, you’d be surprised at the nuanced information they might be able to give you.

Troubleshoot together. The internet is essentially a space for tinkering. Most digital natives learn by experimenting and, when things collapse, they learn from each other. The next time you face a problem with your gadget or can’t figure out a functionality, don’t just ask somebody to sort it out for you. Instead sit with the digital native — learn with them and show that you can take control once you have the information at hand.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-27-2017-digital-native-you-are-not-alone

July 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-08-23T02:03:19Z

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
In an article published in the Huffington Post on July 1, 2017, Nirmita Narasimhan stated that imposing taxes on assistive devices is unfair. It is unconscionable that disability aids and assistive technology are considered a luxury and taxed at a higher rate than rough semi-precious stones or cashew nuts. A research paper on patent working requirements and complex products in India authored by Prof Jorge L. Contreras, University of Utah, and Rohini Lakshané, CIS has been accepted for publication in the Jindal Global Law School Law Review 2017. Negotiators from 16 countries met in Hyderabad for discussing a free trade agreement titled Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Anubha Sinha along with Arul George Scaria reported this in an article published by Live Law.in. Supreme Court of India while dismissing an appeal by the Indian Reprographic Rights Organization ruled that there was no copyright infringement and no licence was required since the activities fell under the education exception in Indian copyright law. In an article published by EIFL, Anubha Sinha discusses the judgment and what it means for access to educational materials in India. Odia Wikipedians, in conjunction with Indian Athletics Federation and Sports and Youth Services collaborated to document the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships. Hundreds of photos were uploaded and new Wikipedia content added to inform the event’s fans, wrote Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu in a blog post. As recently as May 27, 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation (REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 was adopted The Data Protection Directive (1995/46/EC) will be replaced by this Regulation. It is expected that under this Regulation data privacy will be strengthened. Aditi Chaturvedi analyses the developments in a report.

CIS in the news:

UIDAI declining multiple requests by police to share Indian citizens’ biometrics (Justin Lee; Biometrics; July 4, 2017).
Act now to protect yourself against future ransomware attacks (Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; July 5, 2017).
Reliance Jio data leaked on website : report (Livemint; July 10, 2017).
Supreme Court sets up constitution bench to hear Aadhaar privacy issues (Priyanka Mittal; Livemint; July 12, 2017).
Centre to form panel to 'encrypt' MGNREGA-DBT database and prevent leaks (Sanjeeb Mukherjee; Business Standard; July 14, 2017).
Calls for law change after Indians left in dark over data leaks (Rahul Bhatia and Sankalp Phartiyal; Reuters; July 14, 2017).
Indians Call For More Stringent Data Protection Laws (PYMTNS; July 17, 2017).
Social Activist Alleges Threat By Police Officer Over Possession of Aadhaar (Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar; Wire; July 16, 2017).

Aadhaar privacy: Key issues that all Aadhaar card holders should bear in mind (Business Today, July 19, 2017).
Data in the open makes it easy for cyber criminals (Kiran Parashar KM; New Indian Express; July 26, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).
Course Packs for Education Ruled Legal in India (Anubha Sinha; EIFL; July 12, 2017).
Digital native: Not only words (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 16, 2017).
Aadhar: Privacy is not a unidimensional concept (Amber Sinha; Economic Times; July 23, 2017).
RCEP IP Chapter: A Serious Threat to Access to Knowledge/ Cultural Goods? (Arul George Scaria and Anubha Sinha; July 27, 2017).
Digital native: Ever on the go (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 30, 2017).

Article

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).

►Pervasive Technologies and Copyright

Research Paper

Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products: An Empirical Assessment of India's Form 27 Practice and Compliance (Jorge L. Contreras and Rohini Lakshané; SSRN and Jindal Global Law School Review; July 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

19th RCEP Meeting (Organized by Ministry of Commerce, Government of India; July 17 - 28, 2017; Hyderabad). Anubha Sinha participated in the meeting.

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

Note: The events were organized earlier but reports were published in July 2017:

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship (Manasa Rao and Ananth Subray; July 5, 2017).
Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Faculty Orientation Report (Ananth Subray; July 7, 2017).
How It Came To Be: Wiki Loves Uniformed Services (Krishna Chaitanya Velaga; July 10, 2017).
Tallapaka Pada Sahityam is now on Wikisource (Pavan Santhosh; July 10, 2017).
Thematic Edit-a-thon at Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; July 11, 2017).
Asian Athletics Championships 2017 Edit-a-thon (Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu; July 31, 2017).

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Internet Governance
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►Privacy

Blog Entry

Data Protection: Understanding the General Data Protection Regulation (Aditi Chaturvedi; July 4, 2017).

Participation in Event

IViR Summer Course on Privacy Law and Policy (Organized by the University of Amsterdam; July 3 - 7, 2017; Amsterdam). Amber Sinha attended the course.

►Free Speech and Expression and Cyber Security

Participation in Events

OHD on Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.
UNESCO Multistakeholder consultation at 8th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) (Organized by UNESCO; Bangkok; July 26 - 29, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Vidhushi Marda also participated in the event.
Cybersecurity Workshop: Spotlight On GCCS 2017 (Organized by Global Partners Digital (GPD) and the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi, in collaboration with Digital Empowerment Foundation, Digital Asia Hub and Open Net Korea; Bangkok; July 25 - 27, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Udbhav Tiwari and Vidushi Marda participated in the event.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Participation in Event

Workshop on Public Open Wi-Fi Pilot (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.

Event Organized

Dr. Prerna Prabhakar - Impact of Digitisation of Land Records in Rural India (CIS, New Delhi; July 7, 2017).

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► Support Us

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2017-newsletter

Digital native: Ever on the go

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:54:46Z

It is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.When the telephone was first introduced as a mass communication tool, one of the biggest fears was that it would allow people to lie and cheat at will.

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 30, 2017.

The social fabric of existence till then, was built on the idea that communication happens between two people who are in close proximity of each other, and thus, are careful of what they say, because there can be immediate consequences to their words. Editorials were written and codes were established trying to figure out how we will deal with this increased distance. When mobile phones came into the market, these fears were intensified. Because, the telephone, at least, had the individual tied to a location and fixed in a particular context. Whereas the mobile phone meant that you could be anywhere and lie about it.

In her hilarious book on modern day etiquette, Talk to the Hand, Lynn Truss describes how she spent hours in public spaces eavesdropping on people, hoping to catch them in the middle of spectacular lying. She was disappointed when people on the train, when called by their partners and bosses, honestly confessed that they were, indeed, aboard a train. In the hours spent lurking in public spaces, never once did she uncover a juicy story of somebody sitting in a park and trying to convince somebody else that they were in the middle of work on a hectic day. Disappointed as she was by the lack of imagination shown by her fellow human beings, Truss does remind us that this new condition of being mobile because we have a mobile phone is one of the most liberating moments of digital telecommunications. And, largely, it is true — our everyday communication now no longer takes for granted that we could know where people are when we are talking to them. Ubiquitous mobile coverage and ever-ready connections mean that we could be interrupting people in their most intimate moments — of making love or doing the morning needful in the loo, or, we could be reaching out to them in moments of such extreme boredom, that they have started tweeting back at celebrities in the hope of making a human connection.

This mobility has been celebrated as a part of our digital make up. Especially with high speed mobile data and almost a seamless access to the web, we now seem to think of this distributed and fragmented nature of our being as the new real. Conversations on apps like WhatsApp continue across spaces and time zones almost seamlessly. Our physical and contextual locations change rapidly even in the course of just one Twitter war. With streaming services like Netflix offering multi-device access to our favourite shows, binge watching is not just limited to the favourite couch at home. A series that starts on the laptop at home, might continue on the phone as we walk down to the cab or train, and then shift to the tablet as we switch from device to device.

Mobility has become such a celebrated way of life that we now presume that, to be truly digital, we have to be truly mobile — the figure of the millennial digital native as the global citizen who navigates geographies, cultures, distances and time easily has emerged as the face of the digital. In our quest for mobile information, we have also created ourselves as mobile people. Mobility is now equated with flexibility and is an increasing skill that is required in new workforces. Mobility is rewarded and also incentivised by the labour markets that are supported by gig economies like Uber. The mobile body in its interaction with the mobile devices is the new normal.

And yet, it is good to remember that the mobility we see as natural and desirable is a condition of privilege. The mobile phone might have penetrated the last mile in developing countries but it does not guarantee meaningful access or inclusion of large parts of underprivileged communities in the mobility networks. Even as new digital competition lowers the threshold of access and affordability, it is good to remember that having a mobile and being mobile are not the same thing. We are slowly witnessing different kinds of users beginning to get onto mobile networks, but their connectivity is always going to be undermined — the mobility expected from the mobile bearing bodies can be afforded only by those who can calibrate lives without the established social safety nets of static living. A mobile life is a migrant life which has uprooted individuals from families, communities and contexts, which might have supported them in times of crises.

The mobile individual has to form new connections, forge new support systems, and learn to cope with the precariousness of mobility in a way that is unprecedented. Otherwise, the continued reports of depression, burn-out, breakdown and mental health issues that we find increasing in digital migrant populations, is only going to get dire. If we make mobility the precondition of being digital, it is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-30-2017-digital-native-ever-on-the-go-digital-india-mobility

Digital native: Not only words

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:33:20Z

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 16, 2017.

Emoticons, or if you prefer the original Japanese word emojis, are everywhere. We are used to emoticons in all shapes and sizes — from animated gifs jumping out at us on our social media feed to yellow-faced smileys that we use to add tone and feeling, nuance and layers to our text-heavy conversations in the digital world. For many of the current users of digital communication, emoticons are pre-defined pictures that they select from a menu that gives them access to add a wink, a nod, a smiling or sad face to their messages. However, there are power users who, I am sure, still remember the times when emoticons were things that you created.

Before the emergence of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that turned the computer into a box of cuteness, turning all of us into eternal children playing with the friendly faces of the digital platforms, the digital world was flat and largely textual. Emoticons were first proposed in 1982 to take away the density and the unforgiving monotone of text-based conversations on digital platforms. From that first proposal of a : ) and : ( sign to indicate the mood of a text, emoticons have had a fascinating history of evolution. Following the proposal of the basic emoticons by Scott Fahlman, a variety of early adopters of the web came up with a wide range of options. The smiley became a grin with : D and the sad face was made to weep with : ‘ (. The face became mischievous and winked with a ;) and swooned in love with a <3. It became silly with its tongue poking out :p and sprouted devil horns to show its inherent wickedness with >:D.

Early users will remember how, from that first explosion, the emoticons grew into forming extremely intricate art forms. In the world of text-based virtual realities, the shrugging emoticon was my constant companion when giving up on futile internet arguments : ¯\_(?)_/¯ . From there, we were only one step away from complex ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) art forms that made punctuation and critical marks the new tools for emerging artists to play with. The ASCII characters were keyboard symbols, letters and numbers mixed together to produce images ranging from flowers and animals to the globe and human bodies. In fact, ASCII became such a huge rage that there were special forums where people submitted their ASCII art. Even though we have now achieved high visual fidelity with our powerful computing devices, the ASCII messages still continue on our WhatsApp groups and discussion forums. So that we still tell people we love them in ASCII

(¯`v´¯)
`·.¸.·´ I Love
¸.·´¸.·´¨) ¸.·*¨)
(¸.·´ (¸.·´ .·´ You… or pledge friendship in punctuation
(‘,’)/\(‘,’)
<) )—( (>
_\\__//_

One of the lesser known histories of emoticons and ASCII, however, has been forgotten in the gentrified, cute and commodified mass produced usage that we have put them to. In many cultures and spaces in those early days of the web, emoticons were also ways of resisting censorship and circumventing supervision. As the web became more open and more people started signing up for digital conversations, there was also an increase in the monitoring and surveillance of things online. In more conservative cultures, there were immediate bans on conversations that were considered pornographic or obscene. In stricter work places, the system administrators were trying to filter messages which might have certain words or images in their content. ASCII and emoticons came to the rescue, because, using these characters which the computer only read as punctuation marks without content, people were able to communicate sexual content without the fear of censorship.

In the late ’90s, there were graphic and explicit ASCII images that were circulated, so that the content filters would not detect them, and, using just the characters, the earliest internet porn, or Pr0n as it was tagged, came into being. The emoticon-filled messages were not just about nodding and winking at each other but also a way for people to question authority and to find new modes of expression. Since those days of subversion, emoticons have come a long way, becoming appropriated in our everyday practice — they have been tamed and made mainstream.

I am sure that the ubiquity of the emoticons produces a sense of irritation sometimes, and you want to send a slapping emoticon when you find a work email with a smiley face at the end. But before you announce the death of the emoticon, you might want to know that digital natives are experimenting with the radical power of these emoticons. They are developing an entirely new language filled with exploding bananas, pulsating aubergines, peeking monkeys, dancing unicorns, and victorious roosters to communicate in ways that are not accessible to the parents, teachers and authority figures around them. The repurposing of emoticons by young users to chat, express, flirt, tease and engage with each other in ways that defy all conventional sense. I find this fascinating because it gives me hope that the web is not going to just produce all users as cheap copies of each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-16-2017-digital-native-not-only-words

Dr. Prerna Prabhakar - Impact of Digitisation of Land Recods in Rural India (Delhi, July 07, 5 pm)

saikat — 2017-07-06T10:51:19Z

It is our priviledge to annouce that Dr. Prerna Prabhakar will be the speaker for the July #FirstFridayAtCIS event. Dr. Prabhakar is an Associate Fellow with the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). She is involved in a project that looks at the digitisation of land records in India and its impact on land ownership across the country. In the talk, she will evaluate the impact that digitisation of land records has had in parts of rural India. If you are joining us, please RSVP at the soonest as we have only limited space in our office.

Dr. Prerna Prabhakar

Associate Fellow, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)

Dr. Prabhakar's primary research area is in International Economics. She has done extensive work on trade and primarily the linkages between trade and environment and regional trade integration for developing economies. She has a MSc in Economics from TERI University and a PhD from the Department of Business, University of Delhi. Her PhD thesis was on international trade, environment and regional integration. She has also worked in a South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE) funded Project titled “Carbon Embodied Trade and Trade Resistances: Evidence from South Asian Countries”. Earlier, she worked as a Research Assistant with Dr. Ram Upendra Das at Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS).

Profile on NCAER Website: External Link.

RSVP

Location

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/firstfridayatcis-dr-prerna-prabhakar-impact-of-digitisation-of-land-recods-in-rural-india-july-07