Posts
Digital Native: Double Speak
- September 04, 2018
Aadhaar’s danger has always been that it opens up individuals to high levels of vulnerability without providing safeguards.
Read more →Call for Essays: Offline
- August 09, 2018
Who is offline, and is it a choice? The global project of bringing people online has spurred several commendable initiatives in expanding access to digital devices, networks, and content, and often contentious ones such as Free Basics / internet.org, which illustrate the intersectionalities of scale, privilege, and rights that we need to be mindful of when we imagine the offline. Further, the experience of the internet, for a large section of people is often mediated through prior and ongoing experiences of traditional media, and through cultural metaphors and cognitive frames that transcend more practical registers such as consumption and facilitation. How do we approach, study, and represent this disembodied internet – devoid of its hypertext, platforms, devices, it's nuts and bolts, but still tangible through engagement in myriad, personal and often indiscernible ways. The researchers@work programme invites abstracts for essays that explore dimensions of offline lives.
Read more →Digital Native: Hashtag Along With Me
- August 01, 2018
A hashtag that evolved with a movement.
Read more →Digital Native: How smart cities can make criminals out of denizens
- August 01, 2018
People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues.
Read more →Digital Native: The bigger picture
- August 01, 2018
For all our sleek machines, we are slaves to the much larger Internet of Things.
Read more →Digital Native: Cause an Effect
- June 26, 2018
Aadhaar is a self-contained safe system, its interaction with other data and information systems is also equally safe and benign.
Read more →Digital Humanities Alliance of India - Inagural Conference 2018 - Keynote by Puthiya Purayil Sneha
- June 26, 2018
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.
Read more →New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital (Paper)
- June 25, 2018
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.
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