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Reading from a Distance – Data as Text
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<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the third among seven sections.</b>
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<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <strong>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</strong></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
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The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on DH given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding <strong>[1]</strong> to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of social media such as Storify <strong>[2]</strong> or Scoop-it <strong>[3]</strong> have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm <strong>[4]</strong>. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation (Wieseltier 2013). But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts.
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<p>The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts '<em>massively addressable at different levels of scale</em>' as suggested by Michael Witmore (Witmore 2012: 324-327, emphasis as in the original). According to him: "[A]ddressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction" (Ibid. 325). This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, "textuality is addressability and further ... this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event" (Ibid. 326). What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book (Ibid. 327).</p>
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<h2>Of Texts and Hypertextuality</h2>
<p>An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of 'Bichitra' <strong>[5]</strong>, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore variorum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation. Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri <strong>[6]</strong>, Professor Emeritus, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata has been part of the process of setting up this variorum. According to him the most novel aspects of this platform, or as he calls it - 'integrated knowledge site' - are to do with these functions of cross-referencing and integration. The bibliography is a hyperlinked structure, which connects to all the different digital versions of a particular text (the most being 20 versions of a single poem). The notion of a bibliography has always evoked hypertextuality – the possibility to link and cross - reference texts, but with the advent of the digital, this possibility has been fully realized, as seen in the case of the hypertext <strong>[7]</strong>. For collation, the project team developed a unique software, titled 'Prabhed,' (meaning difference in Bengali) that helps to assemble text at three levels (a) chapter in novel, act/scene in drama, canto in poem; (b) para in novel or other prose, speech in drama, stanza in poem; (c) individual words.. For instance, you can choose a particular section of a book, poem or play - and compare its occurrences across different editions and versions of the work to note their matches and differences. If two paragraphs have been removed from one chapter, and put into another, that can be traced through the collation software. If a particular word has been omitted in a later edition, or if certain lines have been rearranged in a poem, these changes can be tracked <strong>[8]</strong>. What makes the search engine 'integrated' is not simply that it can search all Tagore's works in one go, but that it links up with the bibliography and thereby with the actual text of the works. It is interesting to note here the different changes that the text undergoes to become available for study on a digital platform, where it is amenable to intense searching and querying of this kind. It is now possible to search across a large corpus of texts, for minute changes in words or sentences, and ask questions of these in terms of their usage, instances and contexts of their occurrence, thus facilitating a kind of enquiry previously never undertaken in textual studies.</p>
<p>The project however is not without its challenges, as Prof. Chaudhuri further outlines. Working with Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India. In Bengali some work has been done in the form of a scientifically designed keyboard software called Avro, which stores all the conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics <strong>[9]</strong>. Developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned material in Indian languages remains a crucial issue for most digitization and archival initiatives in India. Other issues include the problem of vowel markers appearing before the consonants, even if phonetically they follow and are keyed in afterwards. To get the font and keyboard software to recognize this is a big challenge. The third challenge, especially in the case of works printed from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, is that there are vast differences in spelling; the same word can be spelt in different ways, and as there is no lexicon, one may not do any kind of general search. There is also the issue of a high degree of inflection in the language. A word may have a suffix (or, <em>vibhakti</em>) attached to it to indicate the case: one for the subject of the sentence, another for the object, another for the possessive case and so on. These are multiplied by the different forms of the verbs. The development of a lexicon in Bengali would be one of the ways to resolve many of these issues. However, as most people can only see and interact with the digital interface of Bichitra, and not really understand the process behind it, or the amount of work involved in making the platform work the way it does, funding for research and development, maintenance and sustainability is difficult to obtain. Backroom file management, which includes both paper and digital files remains a big but largely invisible task on such a platform. The total number of files generated from Bichitra is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, and many of these are offline files which would not even go on to the website. Hence while uploading the files, the basic groundwork for a retrieval system for different files serving different functions had already been laid, including the creation of a bibliography, which was a huge exercise in itself. The process of making text available as hypertext is labor that is invisibilized, and is rarely or never available to the end user.</p>
<p>Prof. Chaudhuri also speaks of ways in which the notion of textuality has been rendered differently through the use of the internet and digital technologies. Digital or electronic text has helped theorize better the notion of a fluid text - the fact that a text is never complete, but only bound between the covers of a book at a given point of several processes that are technological as well as social. The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change in the last several decades. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content and process seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the 'text' through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces.</p>
<p>Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker, further espouses this thought when she talks about the new possibilities of textual analysis of film that are now possible, particularly in terms of temporal control, first with the DVD, then the internet and now with online archival platforms like Indiancine.ma <strong>[10]</strong> and the Public Access Digital Media Archive, or Pad.ma <strong>[11]</strong>. The first is an online archive of Indian film from the pre-copyright era (so effectively before 1955), while the second is an archive of found and archival footage, images sound clips and unfinished films <strong>[12]</strong>. Both platforms allow the user to search through an array of material, view/listen to them download or embed them as links. They make available to users not just an online database for storage and retrieval but also a space to work with a range of materials in multiple video and audio formats and themes through annotations and referencing. The annotation tool is perhaps the most innovative aspect of these platforms, wherein a user can pause, isolate a section of a sequence and annotate it using a range of options and filters. The annotations are textual, in the form of comments, commentary and marginalia (in the case of Pad.ma) and can also link to other paraphernalia around the film object, such as posters, images, advertisements and other literature. Users can also contextualize material by adding transcripts, descriptions, events, keywords, and even locating the events in the video on a map. These have brought to the fore several questions on relevance, accessibility and ownership, as in the case of raw footage from films, and opened up possibilities for such materials to be re-contextualized by the reader in different ways. This layering of annotations around the film object also creates a new research object, or text that then necessitates new methods of studying it as well. As opposed to the earlier practice of the researcher/critic having to watch the film first and then comment or analyse it, and relying on memory to generate the scholarship, it is now possible to pause, analyse or read and come back to the film and annotate the text in several ways. What does this do to the film text - the process documenting the form is new, not cinema as a form itself – is a question that comes up quite prominently here. The computational aspect also is important here, given the vast amount of footage that is now available, which then requires better lexical indexing to compute and manage large data sets. This has been a constant endeavour with Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma as well.</p>
<p>As in the case of film, what becomes prominent here is the move to a digital text of some sort. One such example of a digital text perhaps is the hypertext. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited as the 'ideal text' by Barthes (Landow 2006: 2). Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the possibilities of multilinearity of a text that can be realised in the digital, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture. As such it is only the narrative, and not the form itself that is multi-linear in hypertext fiction.</p>
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<h2>Textual Criticism in the Digital</h2>
<p>But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the 'text' is manifested through practices of reading and writing (Barthes 1977). So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, in his book <em>Graphs, Maps and Trees</em> talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an 'abstract model of literary history' (Moretti 2005: 1). He describes this approach as "within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study." He further says, "Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a <em>specific kind of knowledge</em>: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005: 1, emphasis as in original). The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can 'facilitate' this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods of reading.</p>
<p>As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as not just a reference to volume but also its other aspects of data such as velocity, scope, and granularity among others significantly increases the ambit of what the term covers, with implications for new epistemologies and modes of research (Kitchin 2014). But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text – and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a certain form of cultural and literary production (Wilkens 2012). Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by working with corpora as opposed to select texts, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper (Fitzpatrik 2011). Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc. acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content (Ibid.). More importantly, it also points towards a change and diversity in the disciplinary method. Where close reading was once the only method by which a text became completely accessible to the reader, it is now possible to approach it through a set of processes, thus urging us to rethink the method of enquiry itself.</p>
<p>Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question we may still need to ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading (quoted earlier in this chapter) suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions (Kirschenbaum XXXX: 3). The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if DH can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located. The digital text, owing to the possibilities of ‘massive addressability,’ mentioned earlier is now more fluid and socialized. The renewed focus on the textual is most apparent in this manner of imagining the text, using the metaphor of a highly interlinked, networked and shared text. It also puts forth important questions then of how we understand technology a certain way, especially in the context of language and representation as an important factor of understanding new textual objects. Is technology a tool for textual analysis, or is it in inherent to our understanding of the nature of the text? Is the development of these methods of enquiry shaped by certain disciplinary requirements, and do they also challenge or create new conflicts for traditional methods of enquiry? The growth in the study of different media objects, such as video and cinema, and the advent of areas such as media studies, oral history, media archaeologies has further prompted concerns regarding the study of the digital object in these disciplines, and a rethinking of how we understand the notion of the text.</p>
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<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation." See: <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/">http://www.tei-c.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://storify.com/">https://storify.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.scoop.it/">http://www.scoop.it/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more on text mining see Lisa Guernsey in 'Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom,' in The New York Times, October 16, 2003 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print</a>. For more on data mining, distant reading, and the changing nature of reading practices see Matthew Kirschenbaum in 'The Remaking of Reading,' <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Interview with author, July 30, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as "a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." As quoted in George Landow, <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 2-12.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Bichitra, 'Collation Guide,' accessed on September 17, 2015, <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Omicron Lab, accessed September 17, 2015. <a href="https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html">https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> For more on these platforms see the section on DH institutions in India.</p>
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<h2>References</h2>
<p>Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text". In <em>Image, Music, Text</em>. London: Fontana Press, 1977.</p>
<p>Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Texts" in <em>Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy</em>. New York: New York University Press, 2011.</p>
<p>Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "The Remaking of Reading". <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/%7Ehillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob. 'Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,' <em>Big Data & Society</em>, 2014, April–June, pp. 1–12, DOI: 10.1177/2053951714528481.</p>
<p>Landow, George. <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Moretti, Franco. <em>Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History</em>, Verso, 2005.</p>
<p>Wieseltier, Leon, 'Crimes Against Humanities,' The New Republic, September 3, 2013, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism">http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism</a>.</p>
<p>Wilkens, Mathew. "Canons, Close Reading and the Evolution of Method". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities </em> Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.</p>
<p>Witmore, Michael. "Text: A Massively Addressable Object". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text'>https://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>
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No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:58ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities Alliance of India - Inagural Conference 2018 - Keynote by Puthiya Purayil Sneha
https://cis-india.org/raw/dhai-inagural-conference-2018-puthiya-purayil-sneha-keynote
<b>The inaugural conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) was held at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore on June 1-2, 2018. The event was co-organised by the IIM and the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, with support from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Puthiya Purayil Sneha was a keynote speaker at the event. Her talk was titled ‘New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital’. Drawing upon excerpts from a study on mapping digital humanities initiatives in India, and ongoing conversations on digital cultural archiving practices, the keynote address discussed some pertinent concerns in the field, particularly with respect to the growth of digital corpora and its intersections with teaching learning practices in arts and humanities, including the need to locate these efforts within the context of the emerging digital landscape in India, and its implications for humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy.</b>
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<h4>Tweets from the Conference: <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/dhai2018?f=tweets&vertical=default" target="_blank">#DHAI2018</a></h4>
<p>The above photograph of Sneha presenting at the Conference is courtesy of <a href="https://twitter.com/meldelury/status/1002760287223549952">Melissa DeLury</a>.</p>
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<h3><strong>Abstract of the Keynote</strong></h3>
<p>The discourse around the field of digital humanities in India has emerged at an interesting and crucial juncture, where the ‘digital’ has been the focal point of several changes in governance, policy, industry, education and creative practice among other areas over the last couple of decades. Even as the field has garnered much interest globally, it has also invited criticism, especially due to its largely Anglo-American framing, which traces a history in humanities computing and textual studies, located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. Now with increasing efforts to address issues of representation and diversity in emerging digital initiatives, it is imperative to trace where efforts within India have been speaking to these concerns within the global discourse as well.
In India, as with several parts of the world, a large part of the work and scholarship around digital humanities, as we have seen so far has centered around two key processes/concepts - that of digitization, or the creation of a corpora of cultural content, enabled by the availability of the internet and digital technologies, and the need for new methods and tools to work with or study them. These conversations have largely organized around two thematic areas of work within digital humanities and related digital practices - namely the creation of digital corpora in the form of archives and repositories, and the advancement of digital technologies and methods of research, or more specifically through the development of digital pedagogies. Drawing upon excerpts from a study on mapping digital humanities initiatives in India, and ongoing conversations on digital cultural archiving practices, this talk discussed some pertinent concerns in the field, particularly with respect to the growth of digital corpora and its intersections with teaching learning practices in arts and humanities, including the need to locate these efforts within the context of the emerging digital landscape in India, and its implications for humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy.</p>
<h3><strong>Conference Agenda</strong></h3>
<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_About.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - About" class="image-inline image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - About" /></div>
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<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day1.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1" class="image-left image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1" /></div>
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<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day12.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1+2" class="image-left image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1+2" /></div>
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<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day2.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - Day 2" class="image-left image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - Day 2" /></div>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/dhai-inagural-conference-2018-puthiya-purayil-sneha-keynote'>https://cis-india.org/raw/dhai-inagural-conference-2018-puthiya-purayil-sneha-keynote</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDHAIDigital KnowledgeResearchDigital ScholarshipDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2018-06-26T12:02:09ZBlog EntryNothing to Kid About – Children's Data Under the New Data Protection Bill
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/ijlt-shweta-mohandas-and-anamika-kundu-march-6-2022-nothing-to-kid-about-childrens-data-under-the-new-data-protection-bill
<b>The pandemic has forced policymakers to adapt their approach to people's changing practices, from looking at contactless ways of payment to the shifting of educational institutions online.</b>
<p class="public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr fixed-tab-size public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 iWv3d b+iTF _78FBa _1FoOD iWv3d _1j-51 mm8Nw" style="text-align: justify; ">The article was originally <a class="external-link" href="https://www.ijlt.in/post/nothing-to-kid-about-children-s-data-under-the-new-data-protection-bill">published in the Indian Journal of Law and Technology</a></p>
<hr />
<p class="public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr fixed-tab-size public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 iWv3d b+iTF _78FBa _1FoOD iWv3d _1j-51 mm8Nw" style="text-align: justify; ">For children, the internet has shifted from being a form of entertainment to a medium to connect with friends and seek knowledge and education. However, each time they access the internet, data about them and their choices are inadvertently recorded by companies and unknown third parties. The growth of EdTech apps in India has led to growing concerns regarding children's data privacy. This has led to the creation of a <a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/startups/edtech-firms-work-to-get-communication-right-with-the-asci/articleshow/89082308.cms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">self-regulatory</a> body, the Indian EdTech Consortium. More recently, the <a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/startups/edtech-firms-work-to-get-communication-right-with-the-asci/articleshow/89082308.cms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Advertising Standard Council of India</a><span class="_3zM-5"> has </span>also started looking at passing a draft regulation to keep a check on EdTech advertisements.</p>
<p class="public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr fixed-tab-size public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 iWv3d b+iTF _78FBa _1FoOD iWv3d _1j-51 mm8Nw" style="text-align: justify; ">The Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC), tasked with drafting and revising the Data Protection Bill, had to consider the number of changes that had happened after the release of the 2019 version of the Bill. While the most significant change was the removal of the term “personal data” from the title of the Bill, in a move to create a comprehensive Data Protection Bill that includes both personal and non personal data. Certain other provisions of the Bill also featured additions and removals. The JPC, in its revised version of the Bill has removed an entire class of <a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://prsindia.org/billtrack/the-personal-data-protection-bill-2019#:~:text=Obligations%20of%20data%20fiduciary%3A%20A,specific%2C%20clear%20and%20lawful%20purpose" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">data fiduciaries</a> – guardian data fiduciary – which was tasked with greater responsibility for managing children's data. While the JPC justified the removal of the guardian data fiduciary stating that consent from the guardian of the child is enough to meet the end for which personal data of children are processed by the data fiduciary. While thought has been given to looking at how consent is given by the guardian on behalf of the child, there was no change in the age of children in the Bill. Keeping the age of consent under the Bill as the same as the age of majority to enter into a contract under the 1872 Indian Contract Act – 18 years – reveals the disconnect the law has with the ground reality of how children interact with the internet.</p>
<p class="public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr fixed-tab-size public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 iWv3d b+iTF _78FBa _1FoOD iWv3d _1j-51 mm8Nw" style="text-align: justify; ">In the current state of affairs where Indian children are navigating the digital world on their own there is a need to look deeply at the processing of children’s data as well as ways to ensure that children have information about consent and informational privacy. By placing the onus of granting consent on parents, the PDP Bill fails to look at how consent works in a privacy policy–based consent model and how this, in turn, harms children in the long run.</p>
<h3 class="public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr fixed-tab-size public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 iWv3d aujbK _3M0Fe _1FoOD iWv3d _1j-51 mm8Nw">1. Age of Consent</h3>
<p class="public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr fixed-tab-size public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 iWv3d b+iTF _78FBa _1FoOD iWv3d _1j-51 mm8Nw" style="text-align: justify; ">By setting the age of consent as 18 years under the Data Protection Bill, 2021, it brings all individuals under 18 years of age under one umbrella without making a distinction between the internet usage of a 5-year-old child and a 16-year-old teenager. There is a need to look at the current internet usage habits of children and assess whether requiring parental consent is reasonable or even practical. It is also pertinent to note that the law in the offline world does make the distinction between age and maturity. For example, it has been <a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/pallavi-bedi-and-shweta-mohandas-cis-comments-on-data-protection-bill" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">highlighted</a> that Section 82 of the Indian Penal Code, read with Section 83, states that any act by a child under the age of 12 years shall not be considered an offence, while the maturity of those aged between 12–18 years will be decided by the court (individuals between the age of 16–18 years can also be tried as adults for heinous crimes). Similarly, child labour laws in the country allow children above the age of 14 years to work in non-hazardous industries, which would qualify them to fall under Section 13 of the Bill, which deals with employee data.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>A 2019 </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://reverieinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/IAMAI-Digital-in-India-2019-Round-2-Report.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a><span> suggests that two-thirds of India’s internet users are in the 12–29 years age group, accounting for about 21.5% of the total internet usage in metro cities. With the emergence of cheaper phones equipped with faster processing and low internet data costs, children are no longer passive consumers of the internet. They have social media accounts and use several applications to interact with others and make purchases. There is a need to examine how children and teenagers interact with the internet as well as the practicality of requiring parental consent for the usage of applications.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Most applications that require age data request users to type in their date of birth; it is not difficult for a child to input a suitable date that would make it appear that they are </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jul/26/children-lie-age-facebook-asa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">over 18</a><span>. In this case they are still children but the content that will be presented to them would be those that are meant for adults including content that might be disturbing or those involving use of </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jul/26/children-lie-age-facebook-asa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">alcohol and gambling. </a><span>Additionally, in their privacy policies, applications sometimes state that they are not suited for and restricted from users under 18. Here, data fiduciaries avoid liability by placing the onus on the user to declare their age and properly read and understand the privacy policy.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Reservations about the age of consent under the Bill have also been highlighted by some members of the JPC through their dissenting opinions. </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="http://164.100.47.193/lsscommittee/Joint%20Committee%20on%20the%20Personal%20Data%20Protection%20Bill,%202019/17_Joint_Committee_on_the_Personal_Data_Protection_Bill_2019_1.pdf#page=221" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MP Ritesh Pandey </a><span>suggested that the age of consent should be reduced to 14 years keeping the best interest of the children in mind as well as to support children in benefiting from technological advances. Similarly, </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="http://164.100.47.193/lsscommittee/Joint%20Committee%20on%20the%20Personal%20Data%20Protection%20Bill,%202019/17_Joint_Committee_on_the_Personal_Data_Protection_Bill_2019_1.pdf#page=221" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MP Manish Tiwari </a><span>in his dissenting opinion suggested regulating data fiduciaries based on the type of content they provide or data they collect.</span></p>
<h3><span>2. How is the 2021 Bill Different from the 2019 Bill?</span></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="http://164.100.47.4/BillsTexts/LSBillTexts/Asintroduced/373_2019_LS_Eng.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2019 </a><span>draft of the Bill consisted of a class of data fiduciaries called guardian data fiduciaries – entities that operate commercial websites or online services directed at children or which process large volumes of children’s personal data. This class of fiduciaries was barred from profiling, tracking, behavioural monitoring, and running targeted advertising directed at children and undertaking any other processing of personal data that can cause significant harm to the child. In the previous draft, such data fiduciaries were not allowed to engage in ‘profiling, tracking, behavioural monitoring of children, or direct targeted advertising at children’. There was also a prohibition on conducting any activities that might significantly harm the child. As per Chapter IV, any violation could attract a penalty of up to INR 15 crore of the worldwide turnover of the data fiduciary for the preceding financial year, whichever is higher. However, this separate class of data fiduciaries do not have any additional responsibilities. It is also unclear as to whether a data fiduciary that does not by definition fall within such a category would be allowed to engage in activities that could cause ‘significant harm’ to children.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The new Bill also does not provide any mechanisms for age verification and only lays down considerations that verification processes should be undertaken. Furthermore, the JPC has suggested that consent options available to the child when they attain the age of majority i.e. 18 years should be included within the rule frame by the Data Protection Authority instead of being an amendment in the Bill.</span></p>
<h3><span>3. In the Absence of a Guardian Data Fiduciary</span></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The 2018 and 2019 drafts of the PDP Bill consider a child to be any person below the age of 18 years. For a child to access online services, the data fiduciary must first verify the age of the child and obtain consent from their guardian. The Bill does not provide an explicit process for age verification apart from stating that regulations shall be drafted in this regard. The 2019 Bill states that the Data Protection Authority shall specify codes of practice in this matter. Taking best practices into account, there is a need for ‘</span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://cuts-ccier.org/pdf/project-brief-highlighting-inclusive-and-practical-mechanisms-to-protect-childrens-data.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">user-friendly and privacy-protecting age verification techniques</a><span>’ to encourage safe navigation across the internet. This will require </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://cuts-ccier.org/pdf/bp-global-technological-developments-in-age-verification-and-age-estimation.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">looking at </a><span>technological developments and different standards worldwide. There is a need to hold companies </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/theres-a-better-way-to-protect-the-online-privacy-of-kids-11615306723478.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">accountable</a><span> for the protection of children’s online privacy and the harm that their algorithms cause children and to make sure that they are not continued.</span></p>
<p class="public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr fixed-tab-size public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 iWv3d b+iTF _78FBa _1FoOD iWv3d _1j-51 mm8Nw" style="text-align: justify; ">The JPC in the 2021 version of the Bill removed provisions about guardian data fiduciaries, stating that there was no advantage in creating a different class of data fiduciary. As per the JPC, even those data fiduciaries that did not fall within the said classification would also need to comply with rules pertaining to the personal data of children i.e. with Section 16 of the Bill. Section 16 of the Bill requires the data fiduciary to verify the child’s age and obtain consent from the parent/guardian. The manner of age verification has also een spelt out. Furthermore, since ‘significant data fiduciaries’ is an existing class, there is still a need to comply with rules related to data processing. The JPC also removed the phrase “in the best interests of, the child” and “is in the best interests of, the child” under sub-clause 16(1), implying that the entire Bill concerned the rights of the data principal and the use of such terms dilutes the purpose of the legislation and could give way to manipulation by the data fiduciary.</p>
<h3><span>Conclusion</span></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Over the past two years, there has been a significant increase in applications that are targeted at children. There has been a proliferation of EduTech apps, which ideally should have more responsibility as they are processing children's data. We recommend that instead of creating a separate category, such fiduciaries collecting children's data or providing services to children be seen as ‘significant data fiduciaries’ that need to take up additional compliance measures.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Furthermore, any blanket prohibition on tracking children may obstruct safety measures that could be implemented by data fiduciaries. These fears are also increasing in other jurisdictions as there is a likelihood to restrict data fiduciaries from using software that looks out for such as </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/cybercrime/module-12/key-issues/online-child-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Child Sexual Abuse Material</a><span> as well as online predatory behaviour. Additionally, concerning the age of consent under the Bill, the JPC could look at international best practices and come up with ways to make sure that children can use the internet and have rights over their data, which would enable them to grow up with more awareness about data protection and privacy. One such example to look at could be the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) in the US, where the rules apply to operators of websites and online services that collect personal information from kids </span><a class="_1lsz7 _3Bkfb" href="https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule-six-step-compliance" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">under 13 </a><span>or provide services to children that are directed at a general audience, but have actual knowledge that they collect personal information from such children. A form of combination of this system and the significant data fiduciary classification could be one possible way to ensure that children’s data and privacy are preserved online.</span></p>
<hr />
<p>The authors are researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society and thank their colleague Arindrajit Basu for his inputs.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/ijlt-shweta-mohandas-and-anamika-kundu-march-6-2022-nothing-to-kid-about-childrens-data-under-the-new-data-protection-bill'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/ijlt-shweta-mohandas-and-anamika-kundu-march-6-2022-nothing-to-kid-about-childrens-data-under-the-new-data-protection-bill</a>
</p>
No publisherShweta Mohandas and Anamika KunduDigitalisationDigital KnowledgeInternet GovernanceData ProtectionData Management2022-03-10T13:19:52ZBlog EntryDigital Transition in Newspapers in India: A Pilot Study
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study
<b>This pilot study situates itself at the intersection of global trends in news and journalism, and emergent practises of legacy print media in India. Our aim is to explore how legacy print newspapers are transitioning to the online space. The study will address questions in two thematic clusters: 1) the work of journalism, and 2) how the emergence of the digital, both as a source of news, and the medium of distribution, is shaping the work of newspaper journalists.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>This pilot study situates itself at the intersection of global trends in news and journalism, and emergent practises of legacy print media in India. Our aim is to explore how legacy print newspapers are transitioning to the online space. The study will address questions in two thematic clusters: 1) the work of journalism, and 2) how the emergence of the digital, both as a source of news, and the medium of distribution, is shaping the work of newspaper journalists, which has expanded to include various functions particular to the digital environment. And two, newsroom practices, which focus on the different modalities of convergence emerging in Indian newsrooms, and the organisational re-engineering that is being attempted in order to do journalism in a space where professional editors and journalists no longer have dominance with respect to the production and distribution of content.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>News Culture in Transition</h2>
<p>The influx of digital technology combined with advancements in the field of telecommunications has had a disruptive effect on the global news industry. This year’s World Press Trends survey, released last month, reports that at least 40 per cent of global internet users read newspapers online and that in most developed countries, readership on digital platforms has surpassed that in print(WAN-INFRA, 2016). However, while revenue from print is said to be declining, it still makes up for more than 92 per cent of all newspapers revenues. At the same time, circulation increased by 4.9 per cent globally, mostly owing to the 7.8 per cent growth in numbers from India, China and other parts of Asia which made up 62% of the global average daily print unit circulation in 2015. This growth, the report suggests, is a function of low prices and expanding literacy in these markets.</p>
<p>While newspapers are a thriving industry in India, newspaper organisations and journalists are adopting new technology in order to remain relevant in a fast changing environment (Chattopadhyay 2012, Panda 2014). One one hand, they are swept up in the disruptive shifts in the global media economy, while on the other, they are in a unique position to convert this disruption into an opportunity.</p>
<p>The WPT report also notes, perhaps to the relief of those struggling to find a sustainable revenue model for digital news, that revenue from paid digital circulation has increased 30 per cent in 2015 and that one in five readers from the countries studied are willing to pay for online news. Revenue from digital advertising on the other hand, is growing at the slower pace of 7.3 per cent.</p>
<p>The report points out that there is a huge opportunity in mobile growth, with more than 70 per cent of readers in countries like USA, UK, Australia and Canada reading newspapers via a mobile device. Similar trends can be seen in India, as internet usage here is increasingly shaped by mobile growth (Google India Report, 2015). The fact that many digital-born news sites are adopting a mobile-first strategy (Sen and Nielsen, 2016) reflects this. More recently, Hindustan Times has hired a mobile editor to build a team of over 700 journalists specialising in mobile journalism.</p>
<p>Earlier this year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released a report on digital news start-ups in India (Sen and Nielsen, 2016), which explores how digital-born news start-ups are developing new editorial priorities, funding models and distribution strategies for news in the Indian digital media market. The study, which included observing the practices of The Quint, Scroll, The Wire, Khabar Lahariya, Daily Hunt and InShorts, concluded that India was not short of noteworthy experiments in journalism and online news. It also found that more news publishers are adopting mobile-first approaches, given that internet use in India is increasingly through mobile devices. More relevant to this study, the report established that social media has emerged as a tool for distribution and also stated that digital news start-ups are turning their focus to Hindi and local language content, in order to serve new audiences.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Studying the Effects of Convergence</h2>
<p>Their digital transition can be witnessed on two counts: publishing with digital and publishing for digital. The first involves a shift towards using the digital in the process of sourcing and publishing news. Workflow is managed by advanced content management systems, news articles contain multimedia and interactivity that require technical expertise, and the web and social media are increasingly becoming a reliable source of primary and secondary information for journalists. Second, publishing for the highly competitive comes with it’s own challenges. Distribution and consumption of news is increasingly being carried out on digital platforms, fostering a culture of interdependence that impacts news providers in previously unforeseen ways. As the decision to prioritise their digital products take hold, newsrooms themselves evolve to contain a diverse range of skill and expertise.</p>
<p>According to the 2015 Trends in Newsroom report, editors and senior reporters in newsrooms across the globe are experimenting with new ways of storytelling using podcasts, chat apps, automation, virtual reality and gamification, as well as dealing with new challenges with respect to source protection in the face of increased surveillance and intermediaries like Facebook and Google and reporting on culturally sensitive subjects(World Editors Forum, 2015).</p>
<p>The dynamics of these shifts in different countries may be shaped by several factors including the availability of human and financial resources, and pace of adoption of new technologies by the readers. In markets like Japan, complexities of the existing newspaper trade in the country act as a deterrent to technological change (Villi and Hayashi, 2014). Given the pace at which the media ecology of the web evolves; this transition is an ongoing process characterised by experiments in business, marketing and editorial strategies. A good example of such an experiment is last week’s decision by leading Indian newspapers, to make their content unavailable to those consumers who had ad-blocking software installed.</p>
<p>Such a shift also demands that we ask new questions of news in journalism. In his paper on studying computational and algorithmic journalism, C. W. Anderson tackles how sociologists and media scholars can frame inquiries related to journalism, given its computational turn (Anderson, 2012). He suggests using the added lens of ‘technology’ and ‘institutions and fields’ to Michael Schudson’s (Schudson, 2010) typology on the sociology of news which approaches the study of news from economic, political, cultural and organisational approaches. While most of these are self-explanatory, by institutions and fields, he refers to the ‘field of journalism’ as a whole and the different actors that shape it. This frame will examine the cultural power struggles that occur within the field and the way these struggles shape newsroom practises and news content (Anderson, 2012). Anderson adds that it is imperative to understand that the dynamics of the field of journalism are closely connected to nearby fields which now include computer science, web development and digital advertising.</p>
<p>We adopted a similar approach for our study. We began our inquiry by asking questions about how the emergence of digital technologies and the Internet are changing the process of producing news and how news organisations are rising up to the challenges posed by the digital space: what technologies and software are being used in the production and distribution of news in India, how are these technologies and softwares influencing the process of news production and distribution, how are the everyday practices and roles with respect to journalistic and editorial work transforming with their transition to digital, how do media agencies conceptualise and measure online viewership, and how do these metrics impact journalistic and editorial practices.</p>
<p>These questions led us to explore how leading legacy print newspapers across three language markets - English, Hindi and Malayalam - are making the transition from producing news stories exclusively for print to producing multimedia stories for the highly competitive and and diverse media ecology of the web.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Research Plan</h2>
<p>As already mentioned, the study is divided into two thematic clusters: <strong>work of journalism</strong> and <strong>newsroom practises</strong>.</p>
<p>The former will include asking questions related to strategies and skills of information gathering and validation, methods and tools of communicating a news story in an online-first (or simultaneously print and online) environment, personal engagements with audiences via social media websites, new methods of performance assessment and sources and practices of learning and capacity building.</p>
<p>The latter will explore how choice/emphasis of content and reportage is being re-shaped by the digital environment by inquiring into changes in editorial responsibilities, dynamics of decision making, news-making workflows, technical diversity of the work force, and interaction between news producers within an increasingly convergent newsroom.</p>
<p>This being a pilot study, we will conduct intensive interviews with journalists, editors, and management personnel associated with one newspaper in each language market: 1) <strong>Hindustan Times</strong> in English, 2) <strong>Dainik Jagran</strong> in Hindi, and 3) <strong>Malayala Manorama</strong> in Malayalam. We selected these three languages due to their large market sizes and geographic distribution, and selected the newspapers for either their pioneering efforts in adopting digital technologies, or their dominant position in terms of circulation.</p>
<p>The research team includes Zeenab Aneez and Sumandro Chattapadhyay from CIS, and RISJ Director of Research Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Vibodh Parthasarathi from CCMG, Jamia Millia Islamia, will contribute to the study as an advisor.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
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<p>Panda, Jayanta K. 2014. ‘Impact of Media Convergence on Journalism: A Theoretical Perspective’. <em>Pragyaan</em>, 14.</p>
<p>Paulussen, Steve and Pieter Ugille. 2008. ‘User Generated Content in the Newsroom: Professional and Organisational Constraints on Participatory Journalism.’ <em>Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture</em>. 5(2): 24-41.</p>
<p>Royal, Cindy. 2010. ‘The Journalist as Programmer: A Case Study of The New York Times Interactive News Technology Department.’ Presented at the International Symposium in Online Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin, April 20. Accessed from <a href="https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2010/papers/Royal10.pdf">https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2010/papers/Royal10.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Schudson, Michael. 2010. ‘Political Observatories, Databases * News in the Emerging Ecology of Public Information’. <em>Daedalus</em>. 139(2): 100–109. doi:10.1162/daed.2010.139.2.100.</p>
<p>Scott, Ben. 2005. ‘A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism.’ <em>Television & New Media</em>. February. 6(1): 89-126. doi: 10.1177/1527476403255824.</p>
<p>Sen, Arijit and Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2016. <em>Digital Journalism Start-Ups in India</em>. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Accessed from: <a href="http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital%20Journalism%20Start-ups%20in%20India_0.pdf">http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital%20Journalism%20Start-ups%20in%20India_0.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>‘Nine top #TrendsinNewsrooms’. 2015. WAN-IFRA blog. <a href="http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/06/02/nine-top-trendsinnewsrooms-of-2015">http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/06/02/nine-top-trendsinnewsrooms-of-2015</a>.</p>
<p>Villi, M., and K. Hayashi. 2014. ‘“The Mission Is to Keep This Industry Intact”: Digital Transition in the Japanese Newspaper Industry’. In 64th Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference, Seattle, WA, 22-26 May.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study</a>
</p>
No publisherzeenabDigital NewsDigital KnowledgeResearchDigital MediaResearchers at Work2016-07-20T11:43:53ZBlog EntryTalk on Game Studies by Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, July 28, 6 pm
https://cis-india.org/raw/talk-on-game-studies-souvik-mukherjee-july-28-6-pm
<b>This talk will explore the story-telling aspects of game studies and how it relates to discussions of other digital media, Internet cultures and also traditional Humanities. As an introduction, it also aims to open up discussions for Game Studies in India.</b>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://cis-india.org/home-images/call-of-duty-no-russian" alt="Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - No Russian" />
<p> </p>
<h2>Abstract</h2>
<p><em>You are a CIA agent who has infiltrated the Russian mafia and the mafia bosses want you to shoot down innocent civilians in a crowded Moscow airport. What do you do - kill the civilians or blow your cover?</em></p>
<p>The above scenario is taken from the controversial ‘No Russian’ chapter in the videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Graphically realistic and often provoking us to explore deeper questions, videogames have changed from simplistic beat-em-ups to more thought-provoking media through which stories can be shaped and retold. Videogames are, therefore, storytelling media although traditional Humanities and Information Technology both struggle with this notion. This talk will explore how videogames tell stories and why traditional academia finds them problematic. It will also address how understanding this ‘new; storytelling could result in the creation of eminently more innovative and arguably, more marketable gaming software.</p>
<p>Coming back to the Call of Duty scenario, one notices a significant difference from most stories that we get in books or movies. The reader / player has a choice and this is a nontrivial choice that influences the furtherance of the story. The story therefore has multiple endings and is, in effect, constructed jointly by the affordances and mechanics created by the game designer and by the choices and the playing skill of the player. Further, the player can save and replay a game sequence over and over - each time the game plays out differently and the story changes, at least slightly. Moreover, the involvement of the player with the game environment can be very intense and create the feeling of being within the story-world. Finally, there is the issue of accepting that games, usually likened to the playful and the non-serious, can be instrumental in creating a thought-provoking narrative experience. Likewise, the idea of a computer program spinning out a story is equally unexpected and looked upon with suspicion.</p>
<p>For all the problems posed by game-narratives, the consideration that videogames tell stories and that some videogames tell very thought-provoking tales is an unavoidable one. Recent trends in Humanities criticism and in Computing recognise the synergy between the disciplines. Gaming is no longer all about creating Shooters such as Doom; videogames have changed in concept, have entered social networking platforms and are increasingly beginning to comment on real-world issues. In terms of software development, the storytelling game has made it imperative to study the player’s responses; how players interact with the game-world and how they innovate strategies are of key importance to designing successful gameplay sequences. As far as the Humanities are concerned, the game-narrative can provoke thought into philosophical problems such as the morality of killing civilians in the Call of Duty sequence; further the videogame-story also helps explore storytelling in a multiple and shared textual form and to think about inherent linkages between games, stories and machines.</p>
<p>The aim of this talk is to raise questions regarding the storytelling aspect of videogames rather than coming up with any set conclusions. Ultimately, such a discussion aims to lead to the development of some new pointers for rethinking the videogame industry, especially in terms of the global marketplace and in terms of how the story-experience in videogames is a key factor in shaping player interest. This talk is an introduction to the now slightly over a decade old field of Game Studies and how it relates to discussions of other digital media, Internet cultures and also traditional Humanities. As an introduction, it also aims to open discussions for Game Studies in India.</p>
<h2>Speaker</h2>
<p><strong>Souvik Mukherjee</strong> is currently employed as Assistant Professor of English Literature at Presidency University (earlier Presidency College), Calcutta. Souvik has been researching videogames as an emerging storytelling medium since 2002 and has completed his PhD on the subject from Nottingham Trent University in 2009. Souvik has done his postdoctoral research in the Humanities faculty of De Montfort University, UK and as a research associate at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India where he worked on digital media as well as narrative analysis.</p>
<p>Souvik's monograph <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137525048"><em>Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books</em></a> was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. His research examines their relationship to canonical ideas of narrative and also how videogames inform and challenge current conceptions of technicity, identity and culture, in general. His current interests involve the analysis of paratexts of videogames such as walkthroughs and after-action reports as well as the concept of time and telos in videogames. Besides Game Studies, his other interests are (the) Digital Humanities and Early Modern Literature. He also blogs about videogames research on <a href="http://readinggamesandplayingbooks.blogspot.in/">Ludus ex Machina</a>.</p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/talk-on-game-studies-souvik-mukherjee-july-28-6-pm'>https://cis-india.org/raw/talk-on-game-studies-souvik-mukherjee-july-28-6-pm</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppGamingWeb CulturesDigital KnowledgeGame StudiesDigital MediaResearchers at WorkEvent2016-09-16T13:21:58ZEventDeployment of Digital Health Policies and Technologies: During Covid-19
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/deployment-of-digital-health-policies-and-technologies-during-covid-19
<b>In the last twenty years or so, the Indian government has adopted several digital mechanisms to deliver services to its citizens. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Digitisation of public services in India began with taxation, land record keeping, and passport details recording, but it was soon extended to cover most governmental services - with the latest being public health. The digitisation of healthcare system in India had begun prior to the pandemic. However, given the push digital health has received in recent years especially with an increase in the intensity of activity during the pandemic, we thought it is important to undertake a comprehensive study of India's digital health policies and implementation. The project report comprises a desk-based research review of the existing literature on digital health technologies in India and interviews with on-field healthcare professionals who are responsible for implementing technologies on the ground.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">The report by Privacy International and the Centre for Internet & Society can be <a href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/deployment-of-digital-health-policies-and-technologies" class="internal-link"><strong>accessed here</strong></a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/deployment-of-digital-health-policies-and-technologies-during-covid-19'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/deployment-of-digital-health-policies-and-technologies-during-covid-19</a>
</p>
No publisherpallaviPrivacyDigitalisationDigital HealthDigital KnowledgeInternet GovernanceDigital MediaDigital TechnologiesDigitisation2022-07-21T14:49:56ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities for Indian Higher Education
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education
<b>The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. To discuss these changes and what it means for research work, a multidisciplinary consultation was held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on July 13, 2013. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hosted by <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/">HEIRA, CSCS</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/">Tumkur University</a>, the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tiss.edu/">Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)</a>, Mumbai the <a class="external-link" href="http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/ragh/ccs/">Center for Cultural Studies (CCS)</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge Programme</a> of <a href="https://cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)</a>, the consultation addressed what it meant to be a Digital Humanities researcher and how to curricularize something that refuses to confine itself to disciplinary boundaries. The introduction note had <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/tejaswini-niranjana">Tejaswini Niranjana</a> of HEIRA-CSCS & TISS speak of the promise of free and democratic education on the Internet, which had so far failed in a sense that scholarship was having difficulties with justifying work produced online. Especially in India the question of integrating scientific work in local languages was of importance, as mainly research is happening in and for the English-speaking world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, as <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Visdaviva">Vishnu Vardhan,</a> Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS pointed out when taking over the second part of the introduction, projects like the Indian language Wikipedia project are making an attempt to fill that gap. One of the key aspects to digital humanities is that knowledge should be free and open source and providing Wikipedia in Indian languages is a step towards more accessibility. Of course the field is not easy to define. The digital humanities embrace everything technological, which means that often one could be doing digital humanities work without actually realizing it, as Vishnu Vardhan exemplified with the media archive work he had been doing before the term "digital humanities" was properly coined.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This example serves for one of the many ways in which digital humanities is work that involves not just reading theory but actually "building", as Stephen Ramsay had called it. As has been hinted at in the previous blog posts on digital humanities, this calls for a new set of tools and skill sets for students entering the "field". Again, there is little clarity on whether or not the digital humanities can be seen as a field, however, for the sake of simplicity, I address it as one. It should be stated, though, that this field does not have the classical confines and closed boundaries of disciplines, but is conceived as an open, ever-changing space in which work is being done in a trans-disciplinarily way. Within this field, new questions arise: What exactly is this producing? Is the archive the number one research output? And if yes, what does that mean for the humanities field? As the way archives are produced influences the very content of knowledge, digital technologies being implemented must have an impact on today's knowledge inventory. Passing knowledge and improving scholarship is therefore an important factor for accessibility and an equalizing societal factor.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the first session of the day <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/profile.php?uid=140">Amlan Dasgupta</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/index.php">Jadavpur University</a>, Kolkata addressed the problems of curricularising digital humanities. As it is a field that deals with contemporary social factors, which are ever-changing, it is difficult to set up a course much in advance, which will match the expectations it produces. Nonetheless, the instability of digital platforms is not only negative. While a course should have a certainty about what it needs to deliver, the openness of digital humanities seminars enable venturing into unknown research territory with possibly unpredictable and therefore fruitful outcome. While the internet suggests a world wide collaboration possibility, little research is being done in local Indian languages, as optical character recognition is a problem online. Which is why India has experienced what Dasgupta calls an 'archiving moment', several older texts and research work are being digitally archived so as to make them more accessible and increase the native language portfolio. This is part of what can be called the first wave of digital humanities, where mainly non-digital material are transferred into a field of digital operability.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The so-called second wave of digital humanities focused on things "born" digital, inherently digital experiences, like computer games, 3D modeling, GIS mapping and digital surrogates. In the digital age, all cultural experiences have a digital part. While aforementioned categories are purely digital, cultural and societal objects are not necessarily that easily defined. We are experiencing the merge of the digital and analog, it is impossible to think the one without the other. This is where the digital humanities step in, as they are not only about using these experiences, but actually about making them. Therefore, the field could be about evolving tools, free and open-source tools, which ensure access, build databases and create metadata. It is essential that one develops ones own methods and tools to do digital humanities work. Metadata should be community held and a collaborative process, not only to include many voices but also because authorship is evolving and there is no one single heroic individual who processes data.</p>
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<td style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/faculty_ravi_sundaram.htm">Ravi Sundaram</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.sarai.net/">Sarai programme</a> at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/index.php">Centre for the Study of Devloping Society</a> added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and<br /></td>
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<td colspan="2" style="text-align: justify; ">therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="https://cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Nishant Shah</a>, joining in on Skype in digital humanities manner, explained his first encounter with digital humanities arising the hopes of his science fiction dreams finally coming true. The encountered reality, however, faces many challenges amidst the number of possibilities it brings. Digital humanities are complex as the field incorporates the object of study, just as it uses it as a methodology. As it uses the very tools and methods which define its existence, questions of humanities scholarship are getting reframed. Digital humanities rephrase questions of the social, cultural and political, making them more and more about infrastructure, turning the information society mainly into a data society. T<span>he critical skills of human intervention are now being replaced by new skills required in the time of data. This leads to a naturalization of data, which carries the danger of seeing knowledge once again as a given. As was explained in the last blog post, data is just as subjective as information and hiding this factor by neutralization and naturalization is a concern digital humanities need to address, as data has now become a structural component of being. When it was just information we were talking about, it was easy to distinguish between information and reality, as information was </span><i>about</i><span> reality. With data, however, this distinction is no longer possible as the data </span><i>produces </i><span>a reality. Therefore, data is a metaphor, which stands for the structure of our experiences. The problem is that most of the data being created is invisible to the human. What we post, blog or tweet creates a lot more behind the surface of computer interfaces. F</span><span>acebook is not information technology like cinema was. It produces data which is not for human consumption, namely algorithms, which are read only by artificial computer programs. We are in the service of producing data which cannot be neutral as we can not read it. In this way data dislocates the human and traditional humanities work is no longer sufficient. </span><span>So in digital humanities work we need to see what it cannot reflect. How do we translate humanities political idea to data management? This implies that digital humanities are not a continuum from traditional humanities, as digital humanities challenges aspects of humanities skills and beliefs. However, this does not mean that humanities have become dispensable. In fact humanities and digital humanities should not compete with, but add to each other. So the thought process should not be what the digital can do for the humanities, but what the two fields could do for each other. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Returning to scholarship, </span><span><a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy_of_sabah-siddiqui">Tanveer Hasan</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy2_of_sabah-siddiqui">Sneha PP</a> introduced the Pathways to Higher Education project they had been working on, which focuses on language and technology in the undergraduate space. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of access in higher education and focused on the linguistic and digital divide in India. Workshops were organized on social change and collaborative learning, in which students could look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement, raising the question of how that defines the way someone looks at a project. As students are stakeholders in knowledge production, their input is much required and forms academia. There seems to be the perception that the digital is only for a certain group of people and predominantly produced in english. However, the course of the project showed that the digital can be produced in alternative, non-hegemonial spaces and realities. Digital platforms join debates based on global and local knowledges, so it is vital to employ them so as to strengthen community knowledge. However, digital debates are not easily accepted in the classroom, as social media platforms like Facebook are frowned upon by teachers, who see them only as a socializing tool. One of the challenges digital humanities face therefore surely is the skepticism it receives upon trying to produce knowledge outside of classical academic institutions. Related to this the question arose on how this 'doing' in digital spaces translates into 'learning' in an academic sense. Many of the scholars in the project were very happy to produce visual material. However, when they were asked to write in their local languages, text production was reluctant or not happening at all. One suggestion the project made to this was to stop devaluating Wikipedia as a source and scholarly tool, and instead to get students to contribute to its knowledge repositories as it is included in academia.</span></p>
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<p>Video</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a session of participants responding to the presentations, many anxieties in doing digital humanities was addressed. A fear was voiced that digitization might be destroying archives, just as it attempted to reconfigure them. The relationship with text was becoming more difficult, as digital humanities tend to reject written work, feeling it was becoming more and more of just an add-on, which felt artificial. This could result in an analytic vs. artistic divide and the question formed was how to play with text in digital humanities work in a less frontal and confrontational manner.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>It was noted that even as data is becoming synonymous with reality, interpretational challenges persevere. Entering a google search query can generate meaning, however its outcome is obscured by algorithms. A difficulty, especially in India, is that databases are only being implemented in a low percentage, once they are produced. So creating data is not enough to overcome knowledge gaps. Digital humanities are faced with the challenge of making information and data literacy increase. This needs to happen in collaboration with governmental organs, as India's government has difficulties with patent licenses and digital rights. As the perception remains that the digital is natively english-speaking, less value is given to resource material in local languages. As all computer updates, etc., run in english language, the fact that knowledge can and should be produced in one's own native language is obscured. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The expressive potential of these minority languages is therefore decreasing, a matter of concern for Indian academia. Knowledge production of educational material must be included into scholarly work, to work against this decline. In this sense, the importance of the community was addressed. When experimenting with tools and technology, it is vital to exchange experiences and build a communal exchange. However, it was lamented that often ICT courses remain at a basic office-tools level. The content of digital humanities work cannot remain at a simplistic level but must include values and methods which go into greater detail and implement guerrilla methods. If we are not able to articulate a way of understanding the problem through these contexts, what is the good in sources of voices? The fear is that digital humanities is undergoing a shift from representation to segregation of knowledge repositories.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The digital age does not only influence knowledge repositories in the academic sense. In his talk, <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/ashish-rajadhyaksha">Ashish Rajadhyaksha</a> describes the political perspective of digital humanities by the example of the UID project in India as something that has inhabited the digital ecosystem. Within the digital, what used to be public space is now perceived more as public domain – a trend towards making data compulsory. As one can see with UID and the condition of transfer from a state to an e-state in which India seems to find itself, forced digitization can increase the digital divide and marginalize certain groups of people. Rajadhyaksha's "Identity Project" looks at what it means to have a digital identity and how it can occupy space within digital ecosystems. This project is transparently documented under </span></span><a class="external-link" href="http://pad.ma/CIZ/editor/BR">Pad.ma</a><span><span>, encouraging alternative publishing methods, such as QR-codes in text sequences leading to the video interviews they refer to. With this explosion of data being created, it should be considered that it impacts on personal views of privacy. One theory is that the anonymity rises in the sea of data, another could be that personal inhibition thresholds are lowered. It also gives rise to the question, what it means to have free digitization. As we can see with the example of google's data mining, free internet does not mean you are not paying in some way. Apart from the data you provide in exchange for online services, these are of course always gadget-based, forcing users to invest in new appliances. If digital humanities relies on the hardware and software of mainstream corporations, can it express capitalistic critique?</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In several ways the answer to that question remains unclear. While traditional humanities addressed social inequalities and expressed critique, a technologized humanities concept has different aims, as <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/students-cscs/copy17_of_ashwin-kumar-a.p">Arun Menon</a> of CSCS explains. Digital humanities has a scientific approach which does not reflect in humanities work. The computational turn has taken scientific work towards an affirmative and essentialist perception of truth, which claims to be exact and precise. This is the crisis the humanities are facing and that require a reshaping of the new arising field that is the digital humanities in India. Menon believes that digital humanities does not have content per se, but works along the boundaries of the humanities and the sciences. In this sense it cannot be a discipline or a field of its own, but can address the gray areas being left out by other disciplines and create new research paradigms by co-opting humanities with sciences.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">James Nye addressed the materiality of digital humanities by discussing what it meant to have and to hold them – materially and physically, as well as virtually. Physical resources are not enough but must be provided in local languages and virtual spaces. Good dictionaries are important resources for language knowledges not only on the basis of the commonest meaning but also its social connotations. The need is for librarianship to change to accommodate these diverse features.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The last presentation of the day had <a class="external-link" href="http://presiuniv.academia.edu/SouvikMukherjee">Souvik Mukherjee</a> addressing the non-boundaries of digital humanities again, stressing the fact that </span></span><span><i>the </i></span><span><span>digital humanities did not exist. Rather, a multiplicity of digital humanities had arisen to incorporate topics like data mining, games studies, software studies and digital cultures. These study areas, rather than disciplines, are not always connected with concerns of humanities, but still make up a large part of digital humanities work. They, too, produce narratives as does any other research, however, often these narratives can be completely fictional and take place in digital realms. Facebook micro story telling serves as an example, just as gaming narratives do. While involved in gameplay, users create, read and write narratives as they play. At the same time they create identity and involvement, which can be diverse according to the digital space that identity is occupying. Therefore it definitely plays a part in deconstructing rigid ideas of identities. Tools like Poll Everywhere, Zotero or Posterous make academic work just as playful in a digital realm and create narratives similar to the ones in videogames as they construct an informational cloud on a discourse, which is not limited to ones immediate peers but invites a collaborative process. The suggestion is that discussions and research will remain fertile as long as they are not limited. Therefore digital humanities should be seen as an emerging field of enquiry rather than a discipline or even a non-discipline, embracing the intellectual culture of convergence that is happening online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Summarizing the consultation, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ashwin-Profile-ENGLISH.pdf">Ashwin Kumar</a> articulated four rubrics under which the single presentations could be grouped. A large part of the presentations discussed digital humanities for and in pedagogy. These talks discussed what digital humanities was doing for the classroom, for teachers and teaching situations and academia in general. A second module saw digital humanities as a research modality and a tool developing discipline. The third rubric formed around seeing digital humanities as a new social skill, which enables a new way of sociality and mirrors society for it to be open for scrutiny. Another fourth rubric was around seeing the digital humanities as a new way of archiving, of storytelling and transmitting knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The question now is how to collaborate so as to take each of these areas forward and to evolve in the digital humanities under its redefined premisses. The data being produced cannot just be categorized and put on an x/y axis. So when humanities seems to have the systematic problem that it struggles to find the technology to accompany its work, for the digital humanities it seems to be the other way around. This implies a certain lack of content in digital humanities and it is a necessity to look beyond algorithms. The questions of digital humanities cannot simply be how many times a word comes up in a text. Digital humanities will generate this kind of enormous data which in itself is meaningless but will push us to ask the right questions. It will strengthen research by adding a new dimension to data. So anxieties about what it will do to the field are misplaced. Much more, the hope is that it will introduce new objects in questions on the paths we take to find new tools.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherSara Morais and Subhashish PanigrahiVideoResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeDigital Humanities2015-04-17T10:53:17ZBlog Entry #CultureForAll Conference on Cultural Mapping
https://cis-india.org/raw/culture-for-all-conference-on-cultural-mapping
<b>Sahapedia is organising the #CultureForAll Conference on Cultural Mapping, digitally on September 28 and 29, 2021. The conference will take place in collaboration with the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Azim Premji University, the Centre for Internet and Society, and the Re-Centring Afro Asia project at the University of Cape Town.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Cross-posted from <a class="external-link" href="https://www.sahapedia.org/conferences">Sahapedia</a></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Featuring 15 papers across 4 sessions, the conference will present research primarily from South Asia with some papers discussing experimental mapping techniques in Africa and Europe. Sessions will be chaired by academicians from among our collaborators and promise to interrogate, discuss, and reflect upon the complex questions of who, what, how, and for whom to map culture. Speakers at the conference will present work ranging from literature in Nagaland and food in Goa to music in South Africa and architecture in Delhi. They include researchers in history, literature, and music, as well as architects and educators.</p>
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<ul>
<li>The conference will be held on Zoom. Register here: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://bit.ly/2X4XAap">https://bit.ly/2X4XAap</a></li>
<li>For the schedule and more details, visit <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.sahapedia.org/conferences">https://www.sahapedia.org/conferences</a></li>
<li>The Cultural Mapping Conference is part of the ongoing <a href="https://www.sahapedia.org/culture-for-all">#CultureForAll (CFA) </a><span>festival by Sahapedia.</span></li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/culture-for-all-conference-on-cultural-mapping'>https://cis-india.org/raw/culture-for-all-conference-on-cultural-mapping</a>
</p>
No publishersnehaResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeEvent2021-09-20T15:18:02ZBlog EntryStudying Digital Creative Industries in India: Initial Questions
https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions
<b>This brief overview of the discourse around creative industries is an attempt to explore some ways of identifying what could be digital creative industries in India, and the questions they raise and problematize for us in terms of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity and labour. The term ‘creative industries’ has been around for a while now, but with the advent of the digital, and with interest from different sectors, especially with a focus on policy and economic development, it would be essential to critically examine the discourse around the term, and see where it may be changing to open up new possibilities, particularly for the arts, humanities and design.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>The term ‘creative industries’ has been popular for more than two decades now, and continues to remain an important sector for research and development, as indicated by several shifts in policy and public discourse in the last few years. A significant move has been the foregrounding of creativity and knowledge as important resources for economic growth and social well–being. The term has a connection with the older and more specific term ‘cultural industries’, with its origins in the Frankfurt School <strong>[1]</strong> of theory, but has developed as part of a larger discourse around the creative economy/knowledge economy. First used in Australia in 1994 as part of a report titled Creative Nation <strong>[2]</strong>, it became more widely recognized in the following years with the setting up of the Creative Industries Task Force by the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 1997.The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) <strong>[3]</strong> was perhaps the most prominent global effort in recognizing and taking steps towards fostering the growth of creativity and cultural production as part of sustainable development.</p>
<p>Following this there have been several other initiatives across the world, most noticeably in the Anglo-American context, that have built upon this framework to ease and facilitate cross-cultural flows and diversity in the circulation of information, labour and goods. Increasingly, the attempt now is to understand the relevance of these efforts in the digital age, where several advancements in technology and the ubiquitous presence of the internet continue to determine the creation, circulation and consumption of cultural commodities. This blog post is an attempt to outline some initial thoughts on what could be the possibilities of studying ‘digital’ creative industries in India. The digital is an inherent aspect of much cultural and creative expression today, given the steady transition from analogue to digital and the increased presence of internet in almost every domain. What would constitute creative digital industries in the present moment, how do they determine the larger course of cultural production, and pose new questions for labour, commodities, creativity and technology more broadly are some of the questions explored here.</p>
<p>According to the UN Creative Economy Report 2010 <strong>[4]</strong> the creative industries:</p>
<ul>
<li>are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs;</li>
<li>constitute a set of knowledge-based activities, focused on but not limited to arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights;</li>
<li>comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives;</li>
<li>stand at the crossroads of the artisan, services and industrial sectors; and</li>
<li>constitute a new dynamic sector in world trade.</li></ul>
<p>As the report mentions, these are ‘evolving’ concepts and definitions, and just the number of areas that can come within the purview of the creative industries has increased greatly in the last decade. The report classifies creative industries under four different models as illustrated here:</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/CIS-RAW_CreativeIndustriesClassification_CER2010.png" alt="Classification of creative industries." />
<h6>Source: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">UN Creative Economy Report 2010</a>.</h6>
<p> </p>
<h3>Creative Industries in India</h3>
<p>In India, there has been a keen interest in the potential of creativity as a resource, although creative industries may not be a popularly used term. From a policy perspective it is largely in terms of opportunities for economic growth, and more recently the potential for innovation and entrepreneurship, as seen in the Niti Aayog report presented in 2015 <strong>[5]</strong>, which says that:</p>
<blockquote>the committee proposes using digital platforms to encourage innovation, reforming the educational system to encourage creativity and upskilling workers to make them more employable, improving the ease of doing business, and strengthening intellectual property rights. Finally, the committee also proposes a number of measures to change cultural biases and attitudes towards entrepreneurship in the long-term, including attaching entrepreneurship to large scale economic and social programs, promoting new high-potential sectors via the government’s “Make in India” campaign, fostering a culture of coordination and collaboration, attempting to redefine cultural notions of success, and tying entrepreneurship with the social inclusion agenda.</blockquote>
<p>The report therefore reflects an interest in harnessing creativity or creative labour as a significant factor in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and in some sense also expanding the scope of such entrepreneurship by tying it with social inclusion and encouraging collaboration. What this also has implications then is for educational reform, capacity-building and upskilling for increased employability and better livelihoods, something that requires a systemic and focused effort spread over time. The report also explicitly speaks of strengthening an existing intellectual property regime, which also has been a rather dominant framework for the creative industries discourse from a policy perspective. While there is a need to focus on growth and innovation, a perceived objective of IP, the easy conflation of the two is problematic. Further, the role of IPR in fostering innovation and socio-economic development, as reflected in the draft National IPR policy (2014) <strong>[6]</strong> is contentious, as responses to the draft have pointed out <strong>[7]</strong>. It would also be imperative to understand better the ‘cultural notions of success’ and how these would also impact the creative industries discourse in India.</p>
<p>As part of a large research initiative titled <em>Culture: Industries and Diversity in Asia</em> (CIDASIA) <strong>[8]</strong> spread over two years, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Bangalore worked on some of the pertinent questions that emerged out of the creative industries discourse in India and the sub-continent. In a report produced as part of this initiative creative industries are described as:</p>
<blockquote>[T]he vast sector that has emerged with the arrival of modern technologies (emphasis as in the original) and forms of mass reproduction since the colonial period. This sector has now become an important site of intervention for both governments such as in UK, Australia and India and international agencies such as the United Nations.</blockquote>
<p>Further, about the programme the report says:</p>
<blockquote>The initiative attempts to assess the viability of international and government policies for cultural and creative industries and thus lay the groundwork for a hitherto unprecedented intervention of philanthropic organizations in the domain. We specifically focus on culture industries through the node of ‘livelihoods’ that we see as inextricably tied to this sector.</blockquote>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>There were several learnings from these initiatives about the nature of creative industries (audio-visual media including film and television), the conflation and overlap with culture industries (including craft and legacy industries) and the complex relationship between the two, and how the latter benefits from the first. The question of livelihoods, particularly those of non-citizens, or the migrant is an important one, for it highlights the cultural visibility of these industries, and more importantly establishes the presence of an underground economy that produces goods of high economic value, using cheap labour. Policy reforms, especially with respect to IPR and any regulation of these industries would need to take into account these features. The convergence of difference forms of cultural production with the growth of new media technologies, in particular is a pertinent question. Along with growing concerns around piracy, growth of new kinds of content, exclusivity and distribution become important factors here. The availability of capital and technology, and a growing global presence has also changed dramatically the nature of several creative industries, such as media, entertainment and advertising, but also brought with it challenges of finding creative and sustainable business models <strong>[9]</strong>. The problem of cultural impenetrability, or the difficulty of certain commodities to find a market in certain countries was also brought up as part of a study on the Korean wave in India. The translation of cultural worth into economic value, here studied through an examination of the cinema as cultural object, produced interesting observations in addressing the commodification of these objects and understanding the problem of value in this context <strong>[10]</strong>. The role of technology in the growth of the creative industries was an inherent aspect of all these studies, with factors such as context, conditions and quality of access, and the need to understand the problem of the 'last mile' as a conceptual and cultural problem, rather than a technological one, being emphasized in these findings <strong>[11]</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Creative Labour?</h3>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study also critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>In the last decade alone, the internet and digital technologies have grown at an exponential pace in India. Creative industries have been driven greatly by advancements in technology, and the role of the digital here then becomes an important aspect of the discourse, in terms of either a space, object or context. The term itself has drawn different kinds of criticism, beginning with the juxtaposition of creativity and industry, or the ‘economisation of culture’, as another product of contemporary capitalism, a critique that stems from the Frankfurt School. The problems are several, as outlined here by Andrew Ross <strong>[12]</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>It may be too early to predict the ultimate fate of the paradigm. But sceptics have already prepared the way for its demise:: it will not generate jobs; it is a recipe for magnifying patterns of class polarisation; its function as a cover for the corporate intellectual property (IP) grab will become all too apparent; its urban development focus will price out the very creatives on whose labour it depends; its reliance on self-promoting rhetoric runs far in advance of its proven impact; its cookie-cutter approach to economic development does violence to regional specificity; its adoption of an instrumental value of creativity will cheapen the true worth of artistic creation.2 Still others are inclined simply to see the new policy rubric as ‘old wine in new bottles’ – a glib production of spin-happy New Labourites, hot for naked marketization but mindful of the need for socially acceptable dress. For those who take a longer, more orthodox Marxist view, the turn toward creative industries is surely a further symptom of an accumulation regime at the end of its effective rule, spent as a productive force, awash in financial speculation, and obsessed with imagery, rhetoric and display.</blockquote>
<p>Similar concerns may be highlighted in the Indian context as well, where the employability of many in creative fields of work, which often fall under the informal or unorganized sector, has always been fraught with uncertainty. The access to cultural and social capital also defines the discourse in a certain manner, as largely urban-centric and focused around a particular class. Education, training and capacity-building efforts in creative fields, and access to these are an important factor that requires further exploration. As reflected in the discussions above, the prevalent imagination of cultural and creative industries still focusses on IPR and socio-economic development of certain sectors of the knowledge economy, therefore making invisible other kinds of labour. The appropriation of the term itself to focus on innovation in certain sectors, at the cost of others, and streamlining and regulation of these in some way would be another aspect of concern. More importantly, the definition of creativity, as beyond skilling for certain kinds of work also needs to be emphasized in these discussions.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Key Questions</h3>
<p>Whether these are still pertinent criticisms now is a question, and more importantly, what would be new ways to frame the creative industries debate today would be a relevant starting point of engagement. The following are some questions that could be useful in mapping the creative industries discourse and how it could be thought about today, post the digital turn:</p>
<ol><li>What are digital creative industries? Is it possible to identify a smaller subset of industries that would come within the purview of this term, or is it another entry point into the creative industries discourse in India, where the digital is all pervasive? What are new kinds of creative industries that are heavily and/or purely reliant on the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Does the digital add a new perspective/dimension to how we theorise the notion of creative labour, because of the manner in which it affects, or determines creative expressions in the present, on the internet and more broadly in the digital? More importantly, do we need to critically think about a definition of creativity itself, today within the digital context? How do we then understand questions of precarity in working conditions, innovation and entrepreneurship in this space?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Who is the creative subject? Is it possible to understand such a subject outside of the very Eurocentric discourse around creativity and ‘creation’, which paints the creator as hegemonic in some sense? Another new way to reframe the livelihoods question is to understand the creative worker/knowledge worker, and how to think of these distinctions. What are the new ways to understand this debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>The discourse around creative industries has largely been framed within the context of the intellectual property rights, and as a method to ensure the stability of the IPR regime. Given the changes, and many nuances to the IPR debates in the last few years, and the growth of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement, it would be useful to understand the growth of creative digital industries in this context.<br /><br /></li>
<li>What does this tell us about a growing digital economy in India? Creative industries would raise interesting questions about the fostering of a digital economy in India, and the many ways in which it determines cultural production in the rest of the world.<br /><br /></li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,' 1944. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm">https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994">http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html">http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf">http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf">http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> For more on this see: 'Comments on the First Draft Of The National IPR Policy' submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society, 2015 <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf</a>, and 'SpicyIP Tidbit: New IPR Policy in 2 months' by Balaji Subramanian, SpicyIP, October 2015, <a href="http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html">http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1">http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> S. Ananth, 'Business of Culture in India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong>'When The Host Arrived: A Report on the Problems and Prospects for the Exchange of Popular Cultural Commodities with India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong>Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 'The Last Cultural Mile' (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011) <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old">http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Andrew Ross, 'Nice Work of You Can get it: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy,' in <em>MyCreativity Reader</em>. Eds. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions'>https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital EconomyDigital KnowledgeResearchCreative IndustriesResearchers at Work2016-03-18T13:55:56ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities and New Contexts of Digital Archival Practice in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-and-new-contexts-of-digital-archival-practice-in-india
<b>Puthiya Purayil Sneha attended and presented at a conference on 'The Arts, Knowledge, and Critique in the Digital Age in India: Addressing Challenges in the Digital Humanities' organised by Sahapedia and Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad on November 28-29, 2019.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Conference: <a class="external-link" href="https://www.digitalhumanities.in/">Website</a> (external)</h4>
<hr />
<h3><strong>Digital humanities and new contexts of digital archival practice in India</strong></h3>
<p><em>This is the abstract of Sneha's presentation on digital humanities in India and transitions in digitization and cultural archival practices in the postcolonial context. The presentation was part of a session titled 'Community and Knowledge.'</em></p>
<p>The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors in India. In space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) in particular, there have been several initiatives undertaken by state institutions, along with individual and collaborative efforts to digitize and make cultural heritage and educational content available online. The growth of new areas of research and creative practice like digital humanities has also brought to the fore the need for digital corpora, including new technologies and methods of research as ways to engage with cultural content through the development of digital pedagogies and creative practice.</p>
<p>Many of these questions are located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. While digitization and archival practice form a significant aspect of the discourse on digital humanities, there still exist a number of anxieties around its practice. Especially in the case of community-led efforts, such as archiving oral histories or GLAM initiatives with collaborative knowledge platforms like Wikimedia, challenges of the digital divide are persistent, reflecting also a larger politics around the growth and sustenance of cultural heritage projects and the humanities and arts more broadly. Drawing upon excerpts from work on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in cultural archives, this presentation seeks to understand the practices and politics of digitization and archival work today, and how it continues to inform the growth of fields like digital humanities in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-and-new-contexts-of-digital-archival-practice-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-and-new-contexts-of-digital-archival-practice-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeResearchArchivesDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2019-12-18T10:32:07ZBlog EntryNew Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital (Paper)
https://cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper
<b>The ubiquitous presence of the ‘digital’ over the couple of decades has brought with it several important changes in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. Particularly in the arts and humanities, the role of digital technologies and internet has always been a rather contentious one, with more debate spurred now due to the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics. Even as these fields signal several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, portending a futuristic imagination of the role of technology in academia and practice on the one hand, they also reflect continuing challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines. A specific criticism within more recent debates around the origin story of DH in fact, has been its Anglo-American framing, drawing upon a history in humanities computing and textual studies, and located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. While this has been met with resistance from across different spaces, thus calling for more diversity and representation in the discourse, it is also reflective of the need to trace and contextualize more local forms of practice and pedagogy in the digital as efforts to address these global concerns. This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha draws upon excerpts from a study on the field of DH and related practices in India, to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice with the advent of the digital and explore the developing discourse around DH in the Indian context.</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This essay was published in <a href="http://iias.ac.in/ojs/index.php/summerhill/article/view/116" target="_blank">Vol 22 No 1 (2016): SummerHill</a>, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Edited by Dr. Bindu Menon. Download the essay <a href="http://iias.ac.in/ojs/index.php/summerhill/article/view/116/99" target="_blank">here</a> (PDF).</p>
<hr />
<h3><strong>Abstract</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The last couple of decades have seen an increasing prevalence of digital technologies and internet in the study and practice of arts and humanities. With the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics, there has been a renewed interest in the increasing role of the ‘digital’ in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. DH in particular has become a field of much interest and debate in different parts of the world, including in India. Globally, in the last two decades, there have been several efforts to organize the discourse around this field which seeks to explore various intersections between humanities and digital methods, spaces and tools1. But DH also continues to remain a bone of contention, with several perspectives on what exactly constitutes its methodology and scope, and most importantly its epistemological stake.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A specific criticism has been the Anglo-American framing of DH, located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and the higher education system at large. As a result, the connection of these two threads—a history of DH located in humanities computing and textual studies and its contextualization within the American university—is often represented as the history of DH. This has been met with resistance from several scholars and practitioners across the world calling for more global perspectives on the field. Drawing upon excerpts from a recently completed study on mapping the field of DH and related practices in India, this essay will attempt to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice emerging with the digital turn, along with a reading of some of the global debates around DH to understand the discourse around the field in the Indian context.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper'>https://cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeResearchFeaturedPublicationsDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2019-12-06T05:03:33ZBlog EntryCall for Papers: #CultureForAll Conference
https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-papers-culture-for-all-conference
<b>We are collaborating with Sahapedia, Azim Premji University, and University of Cape Town to invite papers on cultural mapping for the #CultureForAll conference scheduled to be held in March 2021. Cultural mapping is a set of activities and processes for exploring, discovering, documenting, examining, analysing, interpreting, presenting, and sharing information related to people, communities, societies, places, and the material products and practices associated with those people and places. All interested academicians, researchers, PhD students, and practitioners are invited to submit papers. The conference is supported by Tata Technologies and MapMyIndia.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Cross-posted from <a href="https://www.sahapedia.org/conferences" target="_blank">Sahapedia</a>.</h4>
<hr />
<h3>Background</h3>
<p>Sahapedia in collaboration with the Azim Premji University, The Centre for Internet and Society and the University of Cape Town is inviting papers in cultural mapping for the Culture For All conference scheduled to be held in March 2021.</p>
<p>Cultural mapping is a set of activities and processes for exploring, discovering, documenting, examining, analysing, interpreting, presenting, and sharing information related to people, communities, societies, places, and the material products and practices associated with those people and places. It was recognised by UNESCO more than a decade ago as a crucial tool in sustaining the tangible, intangible, and natural heritage of the world.</p>
<p>However, the exercise is either used inadequately or rarely highlighted in the Indian context thereby limiting accessibility to peer-reviewed work in this area. As part of the #CultureForAll festival and conference, an open call for research papers and action projects in cultural mapping is being made to consolidate knowledge created till date in India and regions with similar cultural history like Asia and Africa. Cultural mapping and documentation are intricate processes that attempt to solve complex questions of who, what, how, and for whom to map. We hope these papers will carve out a space to interrogate, discuss, and reflect upon the same.</p>
<p>Another central objective of reviewing work in this area is to develop a mapping toolkit/guide that can help make cultural documentation accessible to anyone interested. Without being prescriptive or lending itself to a homogenous practise, the toolkit/guide would be a way to bring together varied approaches, contexts, and innovations in the field. In a sector like culture where financial and non-financial resources are insubstantial, we believe this toolkit/guide will give organisations and individuals a clear roadmap for future mapping projects.</p>
<h3>Themes</h3>
<p>All interested academicians, researchers, PhD students, and practitioners are invited to submit their papers under any one of the following themes. All papers will be evaluated by a review committee and select papers in each theme will be awarded INR 10,000 and presented in the #CultureForAll conference. Papers will also get an opportunity to be published in respected peer-reviewed journals and Sahapedia's web platform.</p>
<p><strong>Cultural Mapping—Theory & Practise:</strong> There is no fixed way to map cultural resources and the approach can be multi-fold. Efforts can also vary in terms of community involvement and collaborative processes. Papers submitted under this topic should explore and elucidate the theoretical and methodological frameworks used in mapping, with an emphasis on issues and challenges faced, the extent of community engagement, and the impact of such projects in policymaking and society, if any.</p>
<p><strong>Technology for cultural mapping:</strong> Technology and digitisation have shifted approaches to culture and heritage and the recent pandemic has made it indispensable to the society at large. Papers are invited on issues related to techniques and technologies for preservation, management and dissemination of cultural heritage with a focus on innovation and social equity specifically for the Indian context.</p>
<p><strong>Evaluating impact of cultural mapping applications:</strong> Cultural mapping provides rich cultural data by creating resource inventories that helps address varied issues like sustainability, intergenerational conflict, alienation of youth, and the role of women in society. It can create opportunities for communities to affirm identity and pursue land rights. Cultural mapping can be an informative classroom activity for children, and a valuable methodology for academic research. As a policymaking tool, it can be used to enhance and conserve heritage sites while promoting new tourism development approaches. Papers submitted under this topic should illustrate how cultural mapping has been used in areas like education, tourism, placemaking, conservation, and skilling, the issues and challenges faced, how impacts are measured, and the metrics associated with such measurement.</p>
<h3>Important dates</h3>
<p>Call for papers: November 16, 2020</p>
<p>Last date for submission: January 31, 2021</p>
<p>Announcement of final selection: February 26, 2021</p>
<p>Presentation of select papers: March 1 to March 15, 2021</p>
<p>If you have any questions, please contact us at conference[at]sahapedia[dot]org</p>
<h3>Eligibility & Selection</h3>
<p>All interested academicians, researchers, PhD students, and practitioners are invited to participate in the call for papers. Papers should be submitted in English and will be reviewed for their originality, relevance, and clarity. Works that have been published earlier or are found to be plagiarised will not be accepted. The submission should include a paper of not more than 3,500 words along with a presentation for the same. Please email submissions to conference[at]sahapedia[dot]org with the subject "Paper Submission: [Theme] [Applicant’s Full Name]". Please find formatting instructions for the paper <a href="https://www.sahapedia.org/sites/default/files/pdf/Annexure-1-Submission-Requirements.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-papers-culture-for-all-conference'>https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-papers-culture-for-all-conference</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeEvent2020-12-23T13:34:23ZBlog EntryMapping Digital Humanities in India - Concluding Thoughts
https://cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts
<b>This final blog post on the mapping exercise undertaken by CIS-RAW summarises some of the key concepts and terms that have emerged as significant in the discourse around Digital Humanities in India. </b>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The present exercise in mapping Digital Humanities (henceforth DH) in India has brought to the fore several learnings, and challenges in trying to locate the domain of enquiry even as our understanding of what constitutes new objects, methods and forms of research and pedagogy constantly undergo change and redefinition. Even as we wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the 'field' as such is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world and the term itself is yet to find a resonance in many quarters, other than a few institutions and a number of individuals. However, what it does do for us immediately, is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the 'digital', and what may be the new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We began with the understanding that DH is a new space of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and practice with several possibilities for thinking about the nature of the intersection of the humanities and technology. The term was a little more than a found name of sorts, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The ubiquitous history of the term in humanities computing in the Anglo-American context has helped in locating and defining the field globally within the ambit of certain kinds of practices and scholarship in the contemporary moment. As most of the literature around DH even globally has pointed out, the problem with arriving at a definition is ontological, more than epistemological. The conditions of its emergence and existence are yet to be completely understood, although if one is to take into account the larger history of science and technology studies or even cyber/digital culture studies, these 'epistemic shifts' have been in the making for some time now. In India particularly, where a clear picture of the 'field' as such is still to emerge in the form of a theorisation of its key concerns, areas of focus or object of enquiry, it is only through a practice-mapping that one may locate what are at best certain discursive shifts in the way we understand content, structures and methods in the humanities, within the context of the digital. The fundamental premise of the nature of the digital and its relation to the human subject still lacks adequate exploration which would be required to define the contours of the field. The inherited separation of humanities and technology further makes this a complex space to negotiate, when the term may now actually indicate the need to decode the rather tenuous relationship between the two supposedly separate domains.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The question of methodology then comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. At present it looks like a combination and creative appropriation of methodologies drawn from different disciplines and creative practices. The change in the methodology of the humanities and social sciences itself as now longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH. The practice itself is still evolving, and while DH in the Anglo-American context can trace a history in humanities computing, with now an active interest in other spaces where the digital is an inherent part of the discourse, in India there has been little work in mainstream academic spaces such as universities or research centres, and some interest from the information and technology sector. As such the skills and infrastructure needed to work with large data sets and new technologised processes of interpretation and visualisation still remain outside the ambit of the mainstream humanities. This mapping exercise largely relied on interviews as part of its methodology, without any engagement with the actual practice, mainly because of a lack of consensus on what constitutes DH practice. However, through an exploration of allied fields such as media, archival practice, design and education technology, the study tries to locate how certain practices in these areas inform what we understand of DH today.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The archive, media and now to a certain extent art and design have become the sites for most of the discussions around DH in India, primarily because of the nature of institutions and people who have engaged with the question so far. Archival practice has seen a vast change with the onset of digitisation, and the growth of more public and collaborative archival spaces will also bring forth new questions and concepts around the nature of the archive and its imagination as a dynamic space of knowledge production. At a more abstract level, the nature of the text as an unstable object itself, now increasingly being mediated and negotiated in different ways through digital spaces, tools and methods would be one way of locating an object of enquiry in DH and tracing its connection to the humanities, which are essentially still seen as 'text-based disciplines'. What has been a definite shift is the emphasis on process which has become an important point of enquiry, and one of the many axes around which the discourse around DH is constructed. The rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, including traditional methods of teaching-learning, and the emergence of new tools and methods such as visualisation, data mapping, distant reading and design-thinking at a larger level would be some of the interesting prospects of enquiry in the field. The method of DH is however, necessarily collaborative and distributed at the same time, as evidenced by its practice in these various areas and disciplines.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While in the Anglo-American context the predominant narrative or <em>raison d'etre</em> of DH seems to be the so-called 'crisis' in the humanities, it may after all be just one of reasons, and not a primary cause, at least in the Indian context. Moreover, in a paradoxical sense the emergence of DH has been seen as endangering the future of the traditional humanities, in terms of a move away from certain conventional methods and forms of research and pedagogy. While this may be relevant to our understanding of the emergence of DH, understanding the emergence of the field as resolving a crisis also renders the discourse into a uni-dimensional, problem-solving approach, thus making invisible other factors, such as the technologised history of the humanities or several other factors that have contributed to these changes. The complex and somewhere problematic history of science and technology in India and the growth of the IT sector also forms part of this context, and will inform the manner in which DH grows as a concept, area of enquiry or even as a discipline. DH is yet another manifestation of changes that we have seen in the existing objects, processes, spaces and figures of learning, particularly the open, collaborative and participatory nature of knowledge production and dissemination that has come about with the advent of the internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what where earlier considered unifying notions for the university, namely that of reason and culture, which have now moved towards an idea of excellence based on a certain techno-bureaucratic impulse, as noted by Bill Readings in his work on the rise of the post-modern university<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If one may try to locate within this the debates around DH, the subject of this new discourse around the digital is also now rather unclear. One could explore the notion of the digital humanist, or in a more abstract manner the digital subject as one example of this lack of clarity or the distance between the practice and the subject, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, with English Department at the University of Jadavpur says, it is difficult to identify such a category of scholars, although a person who is able to situate his work in the digital space with the same kind of ease and confidence that people of a different generation could do in manuscripts and books would perhaps fit this description, and he is sure that such a person may be found. For example someone who knows Shakespeare well and can write a programme, and he is sure a day will come when this is a possibility. It is a familiarity in which the inherent distance between these two pursuits becomes lesser - DH is at that moment - a composite of these two approaches rather than the difference.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While many scholars concur with this explanation, others find the term misleading - humanities scholars do not call themselves 'humanists'. Also, by virtue of being a digital subject, anybody engaged with some form of digital practice is already a digital humanist of some sort. The problem also is in the rather unclear nature of the practice, all of which is not unanimously identified as DH, as a result of which not many scholars would want to identify with the term. As Patrik Svensson (2010) points out "The individual term digital humanist may be problematic because it may seem both too general in not relating to a specific discipline or competence (thus deemphasizing the discipline-specific or professional) and too specific in emphasizing the "digital" part of the scholarly identity (if you are scholar) or giving too much prominence to the humanities part of your professional identity (if you are a digital humanities programmer or a system architect). The more general and non-personal term digital humanities is more inclusive, but somewhat limited because of its lack of specificity and relatively weak disciplinary anchorage. For both variants, there is also a question of whether "the digital" needs to be specified at all, and it is not uncommon <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html#N10309">[9]</a> to encounter the argument that technology and the digital are part or will be part of any academic area, and hence the denotation "digital" is not required" <a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a>. Svensson further points out that since the term, like digital humanities, has proliferated so much in academic spaces, through publishing and funding initiatives that it has become a term of self-identification, but it could be a reference to the digital as 'tool' rather that the object of study itself. However, he also speculates that given digital humanists work across several disciplines, their understanding of humanities as a construct is stronger as the identity is linked to it at large. <a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This debate is importantly, symptomatic of a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, because of what seems to be a move away from the university to alternate spaces and modes of knowledge production. As Immanuel Wallerstein (1996) suggests, such a conflict of authority has already been documented earlier, in terms of the displacement of theology first and then Newtonian mechanics as dominant sources of knowledge, and the now in the manner in which the separation of disciplines is being challenged. The potential of technology in general and the internet in particular in democratising knowledge has been explored in several cases, with many such online spaces now becoming a suitable 'alternate' to the university mode of teaching and learning. What they have also given rise to are questions about the authenticity of knowledge produced and disseminated and who are the stakeholders in the process. The debates over MOOC's and the Wikipedia, and at some level the criticism that DH and certain methods like distant reading have attracted from traditional humanities scholars are a case in point. However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. DH, with its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and different kinds of knowledge drawn from a diverse set of practices definitely opens up space for a new mode of questioning; whether all of these different modes of questioning can coalesce as a new discipline or interdisciplinary field in itself will remain to be seen.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>References</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Patrik, Svensson, "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>,4:1 <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a> 2010.</li>
<li>Readings, Bill, <em>The University in Ruins</em> Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.</li>
<li>Wallerstein, Immanuel, "The Structures of Knowledge, or How Many Ways May We Know?" Presentation at "Which Sciences for Tomorrow? Dialogue on the Gulbenkian Report: <em>Open the Social Sciences</em>," Stanford University, June 2-3, 1996 http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm </li></ol>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em> The author would like to thank the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore for support towards the fieldwork conducted as part of this mapping exercise, and colleagues at CIS and CSCS for their feedback and inputs<strong>. </strong> </em></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Concepts/Glossary of terms </strong></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;"> Ontology - A lot of the work being done to define DH is in fact to understand its ontological status, the nature of its being and existence. As pointed out in the part of this section, the difficulty in arriving at a consensus on a definition is largely due to a lack of clarity over the ontological basis of such a field, rather than its epistemological stake, which one may already be able to discern in a few years. There is a slippage due to a lack of connection between the history of the term and its practice, particularly in India, where DH is still a 'found term' of sorts. See <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities"> http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Humanities - The predominant discourse in the Anglo-American context on DH seems to have set it up in a conflict with or as a threat to the traditional humanities disciplines, the causal link here being the 'crisis' of the disciplines. While there is such a narrative of crisis in the Indian con text as well, anything 'digital' is understood in terms of a problem-solving approach, and at another level seeks to further existing concerns of the humanities themselves, such as around the text. The important shift that DH may open up here is in terms of thinking about the inherited separation of technology and the humanities, and if it indeed possible now to think of a technologised history of the humanities.See <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities"> http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Digital - the debate around and interest in DH has reinforced the need for a larger and more elaborate exploration of the 'digital' itself, and as mentioned in an earlier post, deciphering the nuances of the current state of digitality we inhabit will be key to understanding the field of DH much better. This is challenging because India is a mutli-layered technological landscape, which is also quite dynamic, ever-changing and in a period of transition to the digital. Taking this back to more fundamental questions of technology and its relation to the subject would also provide more insights into DH.See <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition"> http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Subject - DH is a manifestation of the relationship between technology and the human subject, and provides different ways to negotiate the same. The 'digital humanist' as the likely subject of this discourse has remained largely undefined in this series of explorations, partly because of the lack of resonance with the term among humanities scholars and the fact that everybody at some level is already a digital subject, and therefore a digital humanist. An exploration of how the digital constitutes or constructs a subject position is likely to reveal better the nuances of this term and the reason for its relation to or distance from the practice.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Method - the methodology of a discipline is the connection between theory and field of practice, and the method of DH is still being developed. Whether it is data mining, distant reading, cultural informatics, sentiment analysis or creative visualisations of data sets drawing from aspects of media, art and design, the methodology and interests of DH are necessarily diverse and interdisciplinary. In many a case the distinction among methods, content and forms do blur as newer modes or approaches to DH come into being. This becomes a particular problem in understanding DH in the context of pedagogy and curricular resources, and would therefore require a rethinking of the understanding of a singular methodology itself.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Archive - A large part of the DH work in India seems to be focussed around the archive - both as a concept and practice. With the digital becoming in a sense the default mode of documentation across the humanities disciplines, and the opening up of the archive due to more public and digital archival efforts, the concept of the archive and archival practice have undergone several changes in terms of becoming now more networked and accessible. As mentioned earlier, we are living in an archival moment where there is a transition from analogue to digital, and it is in this moment of transition that a lot of new questions around data and knowledge will emerge. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Text - the text has been one of significant aspects of the DH debate, given that the academic discourse on DH in the West and now in India is primarily located in English departments. The understanding of the text as object, method and practice as mediated through digital spaces and tools is an important part of the discourse around DH, and has implications for how we understand changes in the nature of the text, and reading and writing as technologised processes in the digital context. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Process: An important point of emphasis in DH has been that of process, perhaps even more than content or outcomes. Given that the method of DH is collaborative and peer-to-peer, the processes of doing, making or teaching-learning etc become increasingly visible and important to understanding the nature of the field and knowledge production itself. More importantly, it also seeks to bring in the practitioner's experience into the realm of research and pedagogy.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Liminal : DH is a good example of a liminal space; which is a space that is on both sides of a threshold or boundary, and is therefore at some level undefined and transitional. The liminal space is often located at the margin of a body of knowledge or discipline, and it is at the margins of disciplines that new knowledge is produced. The discourse and even criticism around DH highlights the difficulties with defining the present nebulous nature of these liminal spaces and what they could transform into in the future. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Interdisciplinarity - Closely tied to the notion of liminal spaces is the notion of interdisciplinarity. DH by nature is interdisciplinary, given that it draws upon methods and concerns from the other disciplines, but instead of limiting the definition to just this, it also provides a space to understand the challenges of negotiating and using an interdisciplinary approach to the humanities and other disciplines and develop these questions further. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy. </li></ol>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="100%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> See Bill Readings, <em>The University in Ruins</em> Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> See Patrik Svensson. "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>,4:1 <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> <em> Ibid.</em></p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts'>https://cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:36:10ZBlog EntryP.P. Sneha - Mapping Digital Humanities in India
https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india
<b>It gives us great pleasure to publish the second title of the CIS Papers series. This report by P.P. Sneha comes out of an extended research project supported by the Kusuma Trust. The study undertook a detailed mapping of digital practices in arts and humanities scholarship, both emerging and established, in India. Beginning with an understanding of Digital Humanities as a 'found term' in the Indian context, the study explores the discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. Further it inquires about the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today; transformations in the objects and methods of study and practice in these spaces; and the shifts in the imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and its linkages with humanities practices. </b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Download: <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/docs/CIS_Papers_2016.02_PP-Sneha.pdf">Mapping Digital Humanities in India</a> (PDF)</h4>
<hr />
<h2>Foreword</h2>
<p>What different forms do digital humanities (DH) research and expertise take around the world? My colleagues and I investigated this question for our report on <a href="https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168" target="_blank"><em>Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective</em></a>. In some places, we struggled to find resources on local practices in DH, but fortunately in India we could draw upon the excellent work of P.P. Sneha and the Centre for Internet and Society. In a series of insightful blog posts, Sneha explored the implications of technology for humanities scholarship and surveyed digital humanities practices in India.</p>
<p>Now Sneha has brought this work together in “Mapping Digital Humanities in India.” Rather than falling into naive boosterism or superficial critique, this report plumbs deep questions about humanistic knowledge in a digital age: What do we make of textuality in a digital environment? How might digital tools and platforms contribute to conflicts about authority? How does digital infrastructure affect how humanities research can be practiced? Sneha probes the complexities of these questions, drawing from theorists such as Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault as well as digital humanities scholars such as Franco Moretti and Patrik Svensson.</p>
<p>From this strong theoretical foundation, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” explores specific challenges and possibilities for DH in India, synthesizing rich interviews with a range of Indian scholars. Sneha notes that digital humanities is in an “incipient stage” in India, given the persistence of the digital divide in much of the country, the association of the term with a specific history in the Anglo-American context, and concerns about the uncritical embrace of technology. The report highlights several Indian projects that demonstrate how technology can be used to create and disseminate humanistic knowledge. Creating online resources in Indic languages poses challenges, especially inputting languages and translating between them. To create an online variorum of Nobel prize-winning author Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra had to develop a Bangla character set. Bichitra enables readers to collate texts at the level of the chapter/canto, paragraph/stanza or word. In the realm of film and video, Indiancine.ma (which archives Indian films from the pre-copyright period) and Pad.ma (which houses found and deposited audio, video, and allied materials) offer powerful annotation tools and open up the archive into a space
for interpretation and collaboration.</p>
<p>As digital humanities scholars attempt to move past a limited, Anglo-American perspective, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” provides a model for how we can understand local practices in DH and connect them to ongoing discussions about humanistic knowledge. Through this report, readers can navigate central issues in digital humanities, explore the Indian context, and critically examine culturally based assumptions about DH practices.</p>
<p><em>- <strong>Lisa Spiro</strong>, Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Rice University, Texas, USA</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>In the short time span that the term ‘digital humanities’ (henceforth DH) has been around in the Indian academic landscape, it had generated much discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship
and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. What are the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today? How has it transformed objects and
methods of study and practice in these spaces? What does it tell us about the relationship between the humanities and technology? Perhaps most importantly, what is our imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and how does it shape
our humanities practices?</p>
<p>These are but a few of the questions that this study on mapping key conversations and actors around the term DH tries to explore in some detail. While the study began as an attempt to understand the growing interest
around the term itself in India, its scope has extended to explore what specific contexts and conditions are in place in India that give it critical purchase. Five universities now offer various programmes in DH in India - ranging from a Master’s degree to certificate courses, and there have been several workshops, winter schools, seminars and one national level consultation over the last five years. Academic and applied practices focus on building of digital archives, film studies, game studies, textual studies, cultural heritage and critical making
to name just a few. While these efforts have managed to create a growing interest in DH, there is still a lack of consensus on what exactly constitutes the field in India. Thus, questions around definition, ontology, and method
remain pertinent, as does the need for recognition by the national academic bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Context is another important factor here - most global narratives of DH reiterate a predominantly Anglo-American narrative that draws from a history in the field of humanities computing, as well as a crisis in higher education,
particularly in the humanities and liberal arts. The efforts to map different histories of DH in the last couple of years, seen in the emergence of fields such as postcolonial DH and feminist DH, then point to diverse locations, and more intersectional perspectives from which the discourse around the field is being shaped. This is an important opportunity to better contextualise the debates around the digital as well – where conditions and hierarchies of access and usage, transition from analogue to the digital, and the notion of ‘digitality’ itself
need to be defined and understood better. In India, with initiatives such as the Digital India programme, and the increasing push for the adoption of digital technologies in every sphere from education to governance, and now a steady push towards a digital economy, there is already a tremendous amount of investment in the idea of the digital by a diverse group of stakeholders. These advancements, and the enthusiasm, must be read within the context of a rather chequered and uneven history of the growth of science and technology in India, the advent of the internet and adoption of ICT4D, and existence of digital divides at different levels. The changing higher education system in India, and criticism around a profit-driven model of education, along with the entry of a large number of private actors in the field in the form of MOOCs and other online platforms in the last few years also contribute to this growing interest in DH, as also much of its criticism. In fact, the global discourse on DH and its
linkages with shifts in government funding has seen increasingly polarized positions, with many humanities scholars being uncertain about the political or critical stake of the field, and a concern about the its focus on certain kinds of methods and skill sets at the expense of more traditional ones.</p>
<p>In India, the discourse around DH has largely remained within an academic context so far, although emerging creative practices in art, design and media may have been asking questions of a similar nature for some time now. These include efforts to understand changes in objects of enquiry from analogue to digitised and born digital artifacts, and the need for new methods of work and study that are necessitated by these new digital objects. The process of ‘digitisation’ itself is one fraught with several challenges, and demands a closer look – what are tools, resources and skills available for digitisation or creation of new digital cultural artifacts, and the context that facilitates their creation and active use in humanities research and practice. The ‘text’ as the
primary cultural artifact or object of enquiry in the humanities, has undergone several changes with digitisation. Working with digital texts that are fluid and networked, and most often in languages other than English bring forth
several new questions that are not only technological but also conceptual. The emergence of new digital cultural archives and online repositories, owing to the (marginally) increased access to internet and digital technologies and the growth of a culture that facilitates collecting and sharing, has greatly expanded the scope of engagement with these questions. The archive in fact forms a significant part of the discourse around DH in India - the challenges and prospects offered by digital cultural artifacts are quite diverse, ranging from modes of documentation, preservation and curation to dissemination over online spaces, and there is a need to understand these in greater detail. Infrastructure emerges as an important political and conceptual question here – while an interest in technological advancement and innovation, and the growth of a culture of free and open access to knowledge to some extent has helped facilitate work in the humanities at large, the lack of access to funding, expertise, and of course adequate, and advanced physical and technological infrastructure , such as computational methods often limits the kind of work that can be done with digital artifacts.</p>
<p>The implications of these changes for the study and practice of humanities are several, particularly with respect to traditional methods of pedagogy and scholarship. The access to resources like Wikipedia and devices like the mobile phone have facilitated a move towards more distributed, non-hierarchical, and individualised models and practices of learning, which simultaneously are premised upon new kinds of centralisation, hierarchies, and aggregation of information. The need to develop new forms of digital pedagogy as well as creating more spaces for such conversations within and outside the academic context would be crucial here. This growth of digitally-engaged
humanities practice raises pertinent questions about how exactly the “digital turn” is transforming the humanities, its practice and politics. DH being an interdisciplinary field also offers the possibilities to engage with creative, often alternative practices that exist at the margins of mainstream academia, thus trying to encourage collaborative work across different domains of expertise. The inherited separation of disciplines, or even humanities and technology as suggested by the term DH, may then be contentious here, as it creates the
opportunity to explore a twinned history of humanities and technology.</p>
<p>While the field of DH in India continues to develop slowly but surely, and hopefully widely, as more institutions and individuals become engaged with DH and related works, these key questions around its history, methods, and scope will continue to remain pertinent over the next years. For us at the Centre for Internet and Society, studying DH at this historical juncture when the Indian state is rushing towards embracing the “digital” provides a critical lens to understand and engage with the reconfigurations in modes and practices of arts and humanities scholarship and pedagogy in particular, and digital economies of knowledge in general.</p>
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<h2>CIS Papers</h2>
<p>The CIS Papers series publishes open access monographs and discussion pieces that critically contribute to the debates on digital technologies and society. It includes publication of new findings and observations, of work-in-progress, and of critical review of existing materials. These may be authored by researchers at or affiliated to CIS, by external researchers and practitioners, or by a group of discussants. CIS offers editorial support to the selected monographs and discussion pieces. The views expressed, however, are of the authors' alone.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india</a>
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No publishersneha-ppHigher EducationDigital KnowledgeCIS PapersDigital HumanitiesEducation TechnologyMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaDigitisationDigital ScholarshipRAW ResearchResearchers at Work2016-12-31T05:56:49ZBlog EntryFigures of Learning: The Pornographer
https://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-pornographer
<b>As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of 'bodies of knowledge' which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by Namita Malhotra examines the figure of the pornographer, as a mixed media figure entrenched in various networks of knowledge production, circulation and consumption. </b>
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<p>Making Methods for Digital Humanities (2M4DH) project seeks to make specific interventions around methods in the larger debates and practices of Digital Humanities, which includes producing content within the field, building a living repository of knowledge content by developing methods as well as interfaces, platforms and knowledge infrastructure, and bringing together a range of practitioners, performers and researchers from different disciplines who are not necessarily only working on the digital. As part of this project two consultations were held in Bangalore, around figures of learning in the digital context. The following is a series of abstracts for a proposed journal issue, that perform multi-media writing, bringing in artistic practice, video, sound and theoretical concepts to describe a particular practice of learning and knowledge in India and focus on a specific body, figure or person that is at the centre of that knowledge practice.</p>
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<h2>The Pornographer</h2>
<h3>Namita A. Malhotra</h3>
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<p>The figure of the pornographer is deeply embedded in a network, and this allows for a rhizomatic appearance of other figures. Like the figure within the pornographic video, image or text, which is usually a woman since there is most global circulation of heterosexual pornography (as deduced from statistics from Youporn). This feminized figure in the pornographic video is vulnerable to our intrusive gaze, receptive to our desires, subject of urban legends; s/he is a fictionalized character in a Bollywood film (Devdas, Love Sex Dhoka, Ragini MMS) or a celebrity with a cloud account like Jennifer Lawrence. In the Indian and broadly Asian context where there is wide circulation of amateur porn, s/he could be anybody, an ordinary person whose semi-nudity or nudity is what makes the video extraordinary and watchable.</p>
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<p>The pornographer also inevitably leads us to figure of the police and the judge, those who often invisibilize the pornographer. Pornography is a phenomenon that engulfs and occasionally excuses the particular crime of the pornographer, even as it exposes how treacherously pornographic we all are. The pornographer on the network is a slippery figure, their transactions are unfixable and their actions are often transferred to the next node on the network (Nishant Shah, Subject to Technologies <a name="_ednref1" href="#_edn1">[i]</a>). Other figures also appear around whom the regulation of the internet is configured - such as the child whose innocence must be protected and whose curiosity is the market, or the adulterer whose affairs and online sex addiction threaten the institution of marriage.</p>
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<p>Ontology in the digitalscape is also about the object that is being looked at, whether video or image or text. Can we know what this object looks back at even as it is lusted for by the pornographer, hunted down by the police and examined by the judge? Can we understand the experience of the object since it moves, feels, responds much like we do (Barker, The Tactile Eye <a name="_ednref2" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a>) Other intriguing non-human figures also populate the pornographic scape, like the humanized yet robotic Gif caught in a repetitive loop that regardless of the imagery produces a delight and frisson, like a surprisingly responsive toy. Which perhaps would remind us of similar figures like the Bot that behaves and acts as a human, consumes bandwidth, promotes websites, rollseyes and follows and unfollows. Both figures and objects occupy the field that we want to understand.</p>
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<p>Returning to the figure of the pornographer, they have the habits of a knowledge seeker though different from that of the scholar in an archive that is looking for history, narrative and depth. The pornographer skim reads, rapidly going from one link to the next, rejecting, choosing, enjoying fragmented pleasures and moving on. The relationship is tactile but brief, a surface encounter. The pornographer is a creator, consumer and distributor; sometimes contributing stories from their personal history to websites like Savita Bhabhi so that they can be inspiration for new comics, making amateur porn videos with cell phones and uploading them, commenting and linking to content, selling phones preloaded with pornography. The pornographer is a pirate, caught in the same discourse of criminalization, and often if the crimes of one are not convincing then one stands in for the other in legal and public discourse.</p>
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<p>The pornographer can also be likened to the parasite as a figure that produces disorder and generates a new order (Michel Serres, The Parasite <a name="_ednref3" href="#_edn3">[iii]</a>), or that it stores (sucks) energy and then redirects it (Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons <a name="_ednref4" href="#_edn4">[iv]</a>). A vivid description of how pornographers are the points of conversion is as follows - "Netporn converts libidinal flows into money and daily siphons a huge bandwidth on a global scale. Netporn transforms libido into pure electricity: exactly as file-sharing networks are reincarnated as an army of MP3 players, Free Software helps to sell more IBM hardware and Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as the average Brazilian." (Pasquinelli)</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The pornographer is self-taught, exiled, ashamed, an inveterate collector, insatiable, a bundle of shame and energy, all wires within lit and chasing. The pornographer is a criminal, a voyeur, a seducer and con artist. The pornographer is a godman caught in the act, a shaman of conversions in the digital, a gluttonous leader of digital consumption.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Figures can offer insight into a social formation, but also do figures dominate the scape and erase the particular and the subjective? The pornographer leads to an array of other figures and these offer insights into networks of illegality and exchange, into legal and technological mechanisms of control. As easily as these pornographic objects float to the surface of the digital scape, the pornographer (and also others like the pirate) are spectral presences who can only be deduced and whose trails can be followed. The pornographer is then a sort of mixed-media figure, an amalgamate of different assumptions and readings in public discourse, in the law, in networks of the circulation of pornography, in movies that are about their imagined back-stories, and in the ways in which children are warned about risks online.</p>
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<p><a name="_edn1" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> Nishant Shah, 'Subject to Technology: Internet Pornography, Cyber-terrorism and the Indian State', Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8:3, 2007, pp.349 - 366.</p>
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<p><a name="_edn2" href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> Jennifer Marilyn Barker, <em>The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience</em>, University of California Press, 2009.</p>
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<p><a name="_edn3" href="#_ednref3">[iii]</a> Michel Serres, <em>The Parasite: Posthumanities</em>, University of Minnesota Press, 2007.</p>
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<p><a name="_edn4" href="#_ednref4">[iv]</a> Matteo Pasquinelli, <em>Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons</em> (Series Editor: Geert Lovink), NAi Publishers, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-pornographer'>https://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-pornographer</a>
</p>
No publishernamitaResearchResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeFigures of Learning2015-11-13T05:32:58ZBlog Entry