Centre for Internet and Society

IRC 22 - Proposed Session - #ThisMightNotBeOnline

Admin — 2022-04-25T12:37:38Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - # Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Demonstration of Research Output and Methods

Session Plan

Over the past two years, we have been experimenting with developing self-hosted servers as a way to address ideas around agency, capacity and enablement within internet infrastructures. The outcomes of these processes have developed into three projects that we would like to share through this session.

home_for_a_while was a local area WiFi network that was installed as part of the exhibition real time tactics at IIC, Delhi in December 2019. It was openly accessible within and around the exhibition premises and hosted texts, news articles, how-to manuals, notes and other research developed through conversations around internet shutdowns. Three days into the exhibition, protests erupted in various parts of Delhi against the enactment of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The state responded with violence, but also with bandwidth throttling and internet shutdowns localised in neighbourhoods in and around Delhi. The experience of exhibiting home_for_a_while was almost a rehearsal for a process that would then break out of the white cube space and into inquilab network.

inquilab network was an open, portable, community run local area WiFi network that travelled to various public protests in a backpack during the anti-CAA movement of 2019-20 in Delhi, India. inq.net operated independently of the internet. It was designed to enable the sharing of information and resources between everybody in its local proximity. It hosted freely downloadable crowdsourced content like pamphlets, zines, articles, posters, infographics, memes, etc. It eventually found a home in a public park in Hauz Rani, until the pandemic and the hastily executed nationwide lockdown brought the protest movement to a halt in March 2020.

thismightnotbe.online is a self-hosted web server located in our home in Delhi, India. It was developed during the lockdown, and has been online (mostly) since October 2020. It is imagined as a publication platform, a pirate hub, a toolkit, a gathering site. It hosts a collaborative storage drive with books, music, shared lists of PhD programs and artist statement generators, notes on building pre-amplifiers for contact mics, games and workshop notes on language and computation. It also hosts an internet radio station and a museum from Shanghai.

thismightnotbe.online is unstable, precarious and always under construction. Its internal network consists of old laptops and single board computers that share messy tabletops with a happy meal toy, crochet needles and a money plant among other things. You can tell from the sound of its cooling fan that it has visitors, or perhaps just a botnet sniffing around. It heats up during the summer months and goes offline with the occasional power cut. To maintain thismightnotbe.online is to live with it - to share a home; to host friends and colleagues working across geographies and timezones; to inhabit the liminal space between platform and user.

It is curious to us that technical activities that go into enabling seamless communication - talking to people about connecting to an unknown WiFi network, getting the ISP to assign you a static IP address, securing an exposed web server - are often accompanied by faint discomfort, anxiety, clumsy and tentative interactions. Such instances urge us to think about some questions - How do our infrastructures produce conditions on agency, access and enablement? What affordances of scale, capacity and mobility do they allow for? How does communication as a technical activity affect the very desire to communicate itself? We would like to use the session to generate conversations around these ideas.

Session Team

Kaushal Sapre (b. 1990) is an artist based in Delhi, India. He studied physics and chemical engineering before completing his masters in visual art practice in 2017. His work addresses everyday experiences of living within contemporary technical systems, in an effort to think through conceptions of subjecthood, agency and community. His practice often gets articulated through traces of activity within precarious infrastructural arrangements. He is currently - participating in the curatorial fray of Powerlines Cicada Metal Drawl, supported by Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; contributing to conversations around the social experience of telecommunication with -out-of-line-; maintaining a web server infrastructure with thismightnotbe.online; facilitating courses around digital media and technology at Ambedkar University Delhi.

Aasma Tulika (b. 1992) is an artist currently based in Delhi. She is interested in moments that disturb belief systems, and how mechanisms of control operate in such encounters experienced in everyday life. She locates technological infrastructures as sites to unpack the ways in which power embodies and affects narrative making processes. Her practice engages with narratives that circulate on social networks and mass media, to record and draw out experiences of ideological disorientations and slips. She has been a fellow at the Home Workspace Program 2019-20, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, and is currently participating in Capture All: A Sonic Investigation with Liquid Architecture and Sarai. She is a member of the collective -out-of-line-, and collaboratively maintains a home server hosting thismightnotbe.online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline

IRC22 - Proposed Session - #TransActandWhatFollowed - Access to care for transgender persons during the COVID-19 pandemic

Admin — 2022-05-19T15:12:46Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Individual Presentation

Session Plan

This session will be an individual presentation by Brindaalakshmi.K. Transgender persons were among the most severely affected during COVID-19 pandemic. The government of India made no special efforts to address the concerns of the transgender community during the lockdowns. Further hampering the access to their rights, the Government of India issued the rules for the new law, Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 while the world was under a global lockdown. Transgender persons have had to go back to living in severely transphobic and abusive environments with their natal families. Access to healthcare and COVID-19 vaccination has also been a challenge for many transgender persons due to the lack of valid identification documents. Digitisation of the process to change the name and gender on identification documents has made the situation worse for a historically silenced population group. The digital process has widened the gap in accessing healthcare and other support systems during the pandemic.

Under the theme of violence and care, this paper will explore the systemic violence faced by the transgender community during the COVID-19 pandemic and their struggles and challenges in accessing healthcare and other relief. The intent is to explore the role of technology in both enabling better access and also widening the access gap for transgender persons and also the data gap further perpetuating the erasure of transgender persons. The widening access gap will be understood by focusing on the digital process to change ID documents while the positive aspects of the use of technology will be explored by looking at some of the community driven online campaigns to raise funds and other support for transgender persons during the lockdowns.

This session will be based on the initial findings from the qualitative research study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Post-Trans Act 2019 by Brindaalakshmi.K for the Centre for Internet & Society as part of the Our Voices, Our Future project supported by Association for Progressive Communications. For the purpose of this study, qualitative interviews were conducted with NGOs, activists and lawyers to cover the rights related challenges faced by transgender persons. Apart from gender, different intersections of their identity such as caste, religion, urban/rural and disability were also covered in these interviews. Some of the findings will be shared during this presentation.

Presenter

Brindaalakshmi. K is Co-Lead, Queer & Digital at Point of View. They are authoring the study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Post-Trans Act 2019 for the Centre for Internet & Society, India as part of the Our Voices Our Future project supported by Association for Progressive Communications. They previously authored the study, Gendering of Development Data in India: Beyond the Binary for the Centre for Internet & Society, India as part of the Big Data for Development Network (2020). They are a queer rights activist and peer supporter working with the LGBTIQA+ community in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-transactandwhatfollowed

IRC22 - Proposed Session - #CovidConfessions: An internet art project

Admin — 2022-04-25T13:16:53Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Online Interactive Exhibit/Individual Presentation/Demonstration of research outputs and methods

Session Plan

Featuring anonymous stories of resilience, wisdom, and joy, in Kannada, Hindi, & English

Background: Over the past 2 years, digital infrastructures have played an intensified role in the meaning making of the home. As the internet offers up access to work, play, and social contact it also mediates our relationships with our own identities, our successes, and failures. In the anonymity of the online community (for those who are privileged enough to have access to the internet and personal hardware like a smartphone or laptop), physical markers of belonging, material signifiers of social status can become irrelevant. For many who don’t have stable home environments, online communities can become a home that their own physical dwellings cannot.
Questions: How can anonymity construct a stable and safe space? How can sharing anonymously via digital technologies help overcome mental health stresses caused by prolonged isolation? Can one find refuge and comfort in the stories and experiences of others? How can online safe spaces be curated as a tool for healing?
#CovidConfessions: This session is an internet art experiment. The goal is to create an archive of anonymous covid confessions to share in the form of illustrations, voice overs, and animation, with the world. Here is a reference to the art style. This is a long-form story, but I’m looking to create long-form, as well as single-slide bitesized multi-media pieces for social media. I know that there are similar confession style online spaces like this one but I’m looking to take these words one step further and create art that can be a healing.
Accessibility: In order to be accessible to non-English speakers, I’d like to gather and include stories in Hindi and Kannada: #कोविडकहानी #CovidKahani #ಕನ್ನಡಕಥೆ #CovidKatha
Gathering Stories: Stories will be collected through digital platforms like LinkedIn/Twitter/Instagram and personal networks like WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram, via a google sheet like this one. I will need this translated into Hindi and Kannada. I will reach Kannada speakers through Telegram and WhatsApp, English speakers through instagram, and Hindi speakers through Instagram and WhatsApp. Would love inputs on how to do this better.

Marginalised Voices: The internet is inherently a privileged space, and given that online confessions are given anonymously and without physical intervention, I don't see how I can reach out to non-internet users for stories at this point without compromising their anonymity — including them is out of the scope of this project. I acknowledge that it's very difficult to centre marginalised voices in this project — would love inputs on how to tackle that.

Session Type

An asynchronous online interactive exhibit, running from April 27 to May 27.
The internet is asynchronous, so we should make space for exhibit style projects which are not tied down to particular live “session.” This is an ongoing project that everyone can participate in. This project will be hosted on a microsite, linked to the IRC website, and shared on the instagram handle: @covid.confessions.project.
However, if I were hard pressed to choose one of the four formats, I would pick format 3 “Demonstration of research outputs and methods.” I can speak about what has been successful and what hasn’t worked with the project, what the reach and impact has been, and whether it answered any of the questions I began with.

Presenter

Indumathi Manohar came to a career in design via theatre, dance, and scuba diving. Currently Communications Designer at CIS, she works on making research publications, annual reports, podcasts, events, and op-eds, more accessible to a larger audience through visual design— whether it be through layout design, infographics, social media creatives or web banners. You can find her work here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covidconfessions

IRC22 - Proposed Session - #Involute - Jagged Seams of the Domestic and the Vocational

Admin — 2022-05-19T14:46:52Z

Details of a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home - Call for Sessions

Session Type: Presentation and Discussion of Papers

This session argues that the "new normal" of post-covid society hinges on the involution of modernity's separation of the domestic and the vocational. In this time of the pandemic, spaces of work (offices, factories, construction sites) and sites of public consumption (malls, theatres, markets) are marked by the sign of the virus. The virus as a symbol, is something that interrupts a form of sociality which has been dubbed "offline", "in-person", "face to face" and various other terms which indicate a distinction to screenally mediated sociality that unfolds in an imagined, digital space. Work-from-home then, emerges as a suture that allows for sociality to recommence, having been briefly interrupted in "physical" sites. And this movement is what has been dubbed the new normal. The seemingly contemporaneous cohabitation of the two spatialities that such a reality functionally necessitates is, however, far from seamless.

At the turn of the 20th century, Max Weber argued that modern rationality consisted in the separation of the domestic and the vocational, of home and office. The separation of business from the affairs of the household constituted for Weber, the condition of possibility of capitalist enterprise. This parallels the separation of bureaucratic office as a vocation distinct from private life, and the inhabiting of them as separate modalities of existence. Such a separation of the vocational and the domestic was primarily articulated with reference to the physicality of the spaces of work, and of dwelling.

We suggest that the normative force of the COViD-normal reimagines the Weberian separation not just physically but also ideationally. The office, then is not just a physically distinct space, its distinction can be imagined by practices such as constituting a certain zoom backdrop, or by wearing a blazer for the webcam as pyjama'd legs tucked away from view. In other words it reconstitutes the temporal habitation of these spaces as simultaneous. Reconstituting such a simultaneous habitation, however, calls for a return to an older and perhaps pre-modern conceptualization of interfaces between the domestic and the vocational as both physical and ideational spaces.

Session Plan

Introduction to the session problematique - 10 minutes

Section 1. The mise-en-scene of work - 15 minutes

How does the workplace emulate home and home emulate workplace - in a world where boundaries are increasingly non-existent? What can be the politics and aesthetics of choosing zoom backgrounds for a call attended from home? This section unpacks some of these tenuous questions regarding our labouring bodies and the spaces they inhabit. Using examples of lived life, zoom call backgrounds become the mise-en-scene at once fluidly dissolving between home and workplace. Further, erasing the markers of home and deliberately adding ones that emulate the workplace become the neoliberal acts of aesthetic correction that reconfigure home like the workplace. The session aims at illustrating the tensions of inhabiting home within workspace and workspace within home.

Section 2. The Other Side: Homeless and Worklessness of India’s Migrant Labor - 15 minutes

2020 has been the year of unprecedented crisis. While most of the organized sectors of the Indian economy ubiquitously could be seen occupying the digital spaces, the unorganized sector was still coming to terms with this catastrophe. This section explores the complexities of capitalist economies in the Covid 19 pandemic wherein the boundaries of the workplace and home are progressively blurred, but for 94 percent of the population involved in the unorganized sector and in migrant labour, ‘home’ and ‘work’ are both deferred, distant dreams. While digital spaces are meaningless to this demographic as a site of work, the pandemic has forced them to adapt and navigate digital spaces to connect with their household economies (oikonomos) through the transfer money.

Section 3. Inhabiting the Portal: Locking Down Spatialities of Advocacy and Justice - 15 minutes

What does it mean to hold space when faced with the impossibility of inhabiting of spaces? The global Covid-19 pandemic has no doubt changed the way we think of spatiality. One is faced with the odd conundrum of desiring community while inhabiting isolation. A major concern has been the creation of communities of care without the familiar comfort of physical proximity with fellow beings. This piece reflects on the impact that the pandemic has had on vocations of political advocacy for social justice that necessitate visibly occupying specific spaces, particularly in the contexts of movements such as the BLM or anti-CAA protests. This piece also considers questions of inclusivity in moving such vocations from physical to digital spaces.

Conclusion, or Why migrant laborers walk home, while school teachers teach to empty classrooms. - 10 minutes

We hope to keep our presentations under an hour so that we can have about 30 minutes of discussion.

Session Team

Akriti, Deepak and Misbah are assistant professors at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, GITAM (deemed to be) University, Hyderabad.

Akriti Rastogi teaches Film and Media Theory and is interested in mapping cinema effects across contexts. Entry-level film professionals and media industry gatekeeping are her other interests.

Deepak Prince teaches sociology and is interested in the anthropology of technology. Other interests include politic anthropology, sts and public art. Inhabiting the Portal: Locking Down Spatialities of Advocacy and Justice

Misbah Rashid teaches political science. Her research is on Gender in Islamic Jurisprudence, interpretation of Muslim Personal Law. She has worked in the past with developmental organizations that look at the impact

Satish Kumar has developed and taught courses in the literatures, histories and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, Ethnic American literatures, immigrant and migrant literatures and survey courses in World Literature. His research is on South Asian and African literatures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-involutejaggedseamsofthedomesticandthevocational

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 (IRC22) - Proposed Sessions

Admin — 2022-04-26T07:07:52Z

Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home - Call for Sessions

#DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome

#LetsMoveIn

#ThisMightNotBeOnline

#MetaverseInquilab

#IdentitesVulnerabilitiesOpportunitiesDissent

#LockdownsAndShutdowns

#ActFromHome

#COVID19VaccineDiscourse

#HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19

#HomeAndTheInternet

#SocialMediaActivism

#“Going Home”: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR

#WaitingForFood

#TransActandWhatFollowed - Access to care for transgender persons during the COVID-19 pandemic

#CovidConfessions: An internet art project

#Identifying the idea of labor in teaching – Negotiating pedagogy at home and inside classroom(s)

#Involute - Jagged Seams of the Domestic and the Vocational

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)

sumandro — 2015-11-15T07:48:17Z

With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.

Call for Sessions document: Download (PDF)

Call for Sessions poster: Download (PNG)

Internet Researchers’ Conference

The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

This conference series is founded on the following interests:

Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.
Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.
Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.
Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Studying Internet in India

The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (to be confirmed) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.

The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:

How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?
How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?
What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?
Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?

Sessions

The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.

Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.

In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.

In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but not speaking.

Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.

Writing Sprint

At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.

Final Round Table

This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.

IRC Reader

The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.

Proposing a Session

To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:

The name of the session: It should be created as a hashtag, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.
A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.
If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.
If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.
Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.
CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.

We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the researchers@cis-india.org mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to raw@cis-india.org.

All session proposals must be submitted by Sunday, November 22 (extended), 2015, via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Selection of Sessions

All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by November 30. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before December 15. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on December 31, 2015.

Venue, Accommodation, and Travel

The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on February 25-27, 2016. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by December 31, 2015.

The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.

Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by December 31, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16)

sumandro — 2016-02-27T06:19:33Z

The first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16) will be organised at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, on February 26-28, 2016. The focus of the Conference is on the experiences, adventures, and methods of 'studying internet in India.' We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), JNU, for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for the generous support. It is a free and open conference. Please use the form to register.

It is our great pleasure to announce the beginning of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), an annual conference series initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward.

This conference series is specifically driven by the following interests: 1) creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions, 2) foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, 3) accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and 4) exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Conference, IRC16, is engaging with the theme of 'studying internet in India.' The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

Dates and Venue

The IRC16 will take place during February 26-28, 2016, at the Convention Centre of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are grateful to Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for its generous support.

Registration and Programme

Conference programme: Download (PDF).

Programme booklet: Download (PDF).

[Important] Invitation letter to help you enter JNU campus: Download (PDF).

Please register for the Conference here: Form (Google).

We apologise for not being able to provide travel or accommodation support.

Etherpads

#Methods&ToolsForInternetResearch : https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-InternetResearch

#DigitalDesires: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-DigitalDesires.

#InternetMovements: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-InternetMovements.

#WebOfGenealogies: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-WebOfGenealogies.

#MinimalComputing: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-MinimalComputing.

#STSDebates: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-STSDebates.

#ArchiveAnarchy: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-ArchiveAnarchy.

#ManyPublicsOfInternet: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-ManyPublicsOfInternet.

#DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins.

#FutureBazaars: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-FutureBazaars.

#PoliticsOnSocialMedia: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-PoliticsOnSocialMedia.

#SpottingData: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-SpottingData.

#WikiShadows: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-WikiShadows.

#FollowTheMedium: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-FollowTheMedium.

#AFCinema2.0: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-AFCinema2.0.

#LiterarySpaces: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-LiterarySpaces.

Resources

Call for sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call.

Proposed sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-sessions.

Selected sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions.

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in pre- and post-conference conversations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17)

sumandro — 2018-07-02T18:29:55Z

With great pleasure we announce the second edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), an annual conference series initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward. The Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) will be held at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. It is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT-B and the CIS.

Registration is closed now.

Propose open sessions here.

Agenda (final): Download (PDF)

Programme: Download (PDF)

Poster (high resolution): Download (JPG)

IRC17: Key Provocations

Two critical questions that emerged from the conversations at the previous edition of the Conference (IRC16) were about the digital objects of research, and the digital/internet experiences in Indic languages. As we discussed various aspects and challenges of 'studying internet in India', it was noted that we have not sufficiently explored how ongoing research methods, assumptions, and analytical frames are being challenged (if at all) by the becoming-digital of the objects of research across disciplines: from various artifacts and traces of human and machinic interactions, to archival entries and sites of ethnography, to practices and necessities of collaboration.

We found that the analyses of such digital objects of research often tend to assume either an aesthetic and functional uniqueness or sameness vis-à-vis the pre-/proto-digital objects of research, while neither of these positions are discussed in detail. Further, we tend to universalise the English-speaking user's/researcher's experience of working with such digital objects, without sufficiently considering their lives and functions in other (especially, Indic) languages.

These we take as the key provocations of the 2017 edition of IRC:

How does the becoming-digital of the research objects challenge our current research practices, concerns, and assumptions?
How do we appreciate, study, and theorise the functioning of and meaning-making by digital objects in Indic languages?
What research tools and infrastructures are needed to study, document, annotate, analyse, archive, cite, and work with (in general) digital objects, especially those in Indic languages?

This conference series is specifically driven by the following interests: 1) creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions, 2) foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, 3) accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and 4) exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Dates and Venue

The conference is being hosted by the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) during March 03-05, 2017.

Address: 26/C, Electronics City, Hosur Road, Bangalore, 560100, location on Google Map.

Session Details and Notes

Day 01, Friday, March 03

#DigitalIdentities: Details and Etherpad

#IndicLanguagesAndInternetCohabitation: Details and Etherpad

#SelfiesFromTheField: Details and Etherpad

#HookingUp: Details and Etherpad

Day 02, Saturday, March 04

#DotBharatAdoption: Details and Etherpad

#DigitalPedagogies: Details and Etherpad

#MaterializingWriting: Details and Etherpad

#RenarrationWeb: Details and Etherpad

Day 03, Sunday, March 05

#ArchivesForStorytelling: Details and Etherpad

#ObjectsOfDigitalGovernance: Details and Etherpad

#OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing: Details and Etherpad

Session Selection Process

Call for sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-call.

Selected sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selected-sessions.

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in pre- and post-conference conversations.

About the IRC Series

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) initiated the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) series to address these concerns, and to create an annual temporary space in India, for internet researchers to gather and share experiences.

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,
foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and
exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The Conference was constituted by eleven discussion sessions (majority of which were organised around presentation of several papers), four workshop sessions (which involved group discussions, activities, and learnings), a book sprint over three sessions to develop an outline of a (re)sourcebook for internet researchers in India, and a concluding round table. The audio recordings and notes from IRC16 are now being compiled into an online Reader. A detailed reflection note on IRC16 has been published.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selected Sessions

sumandro — 2017-01-20T13:28:24Z

With great pleasure we announce the eleven sessions selected for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) to be held at the IIIT Bangalore campus during March 03-05. The Conference is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT Bangalore and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Session Selection Process

A total of 23 session proposals were submitted for IRC17, which were published online. All the session teams, as well as any interested persons, were invited on November 16 to submit comments on the initial session proposals. We closed accepting comments on December 23, and the sessions teams had up to December 30 to re-submit their proposals. On January 01, we invited each team to nominate 10 sessions to be included in the final agenda of the Conference, and this nomination process ended on January 19.

We received 200 nominations from 20 teams. Two teams retracted their session proposals during the selection process - #CopyLeftRightLeft and #DigitalisingKnowledge. And one team proposed two sessions, and so it only submitted one set of nominations.

Selected Sessions

The following 11 sessions have received 10 or more nominations:

05. #ArchivesForStorytelling - 11 nominations
06. #SelfiesFromTheField - 10 nominations
07. #OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing - 11 nominations
08. #DigitalPedagogies - 10 nominations
10. #RenarrationWeb - 14 nominations
11. #IndicLanguagesAndInternetCoHabitation - 12 nominations
14. #ObjectsofDigitalGovernance - 10 nominations
15. #MaterializingWriting - 10 nominations
16. #DotBharatAdoption - 14 nominations
17. #HookingUp - 11 nominations
19. #DigitalIdentities - 13 nominations

Dates and Venue

The IRC17 will take place during March 03-05, 2017 at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus. It is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT-B and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Conference Programme

The IRC17 programme will be published in early February. Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to get updates about IRC17 and to take part in the pre-conference conversations.

Accommodation and Travel

Accommodation of all non-Bangalore-based team members of the selected sessions, during the days of the Conference, will be organised by CIS. We will write to the teams concerned directly regarding this.

Separately, CIS will offer 10 travel grants, up to Rs. 10,000 each, for within-India travel. Participants who are unemployed or semi-employed, including students, would be given priority.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selected-sessions

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #UnconfiedArchivesUnboundHistories

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:16:34Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Kausik Bandopadhyay and Sugata Nandi.

Session

The archive as we know it today was an official invention of the nineteenth century. It was taken to be a repository of information which aided and validated the creation of a new specialized scientific knowledge called History. With the archive was born was official histories. Being constituted of official documents the archive served official objectives. The professional historian born with the archive was a practitioner of a new science of the state, who produced knowledge verifiable at the archive. In the nineteenth century the archive served imperialist objectives, from the mid twentieth century it catered to states which emerged from erstwhile colonies and continued to serve official interests while producing histories which often rendered the earlier histories into mere cultural artifacts of a bygone age devoid of scholarly value. Through this period historians remained bound to archives which granted them access and they were compelled to narrowly demarcate territories. i.e. states, provinces within them or even smaller areas like a city or a village, which were to become their subjects. With the coming of the Internet the archive is now taking on a new meaning altogether as it no longer confined spatially. With the easy availability of technology for creation and preservation of documents and their public accessibility , the archive is being constituted and re-constituted continuously. As it is no longer bound down by statist objectives alone the questions come up: a) are we in the threshold of the demise of official histories? And, b) has time come for de-territorialization of histories altogether?

Plan

Abstracts of three hundred words are invited which critically assess the archive today from this perspective and its implications for history writing taking into consideration three works on archives.

Readings

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (Part III, the Statement and the Archive), 1972

Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression", Diacritics, 25, 2, Summer 1995

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2009.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-unconfiedarchivesunboundhistories

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitaIndiaUnpacked

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:17:41Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Deniz Duru Aydin and Amrita Sengupta.

Session

According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU), four billion people from developing countries remain offline, which represents 2/3 of the total population of developing countries. As policymakers around the world are increasingly becoming aware of the impacts of connectivity for socio-economic development, bridging the digital divide and bringing access to the unconnected are seen as one of the most critical policy issues of our time. Most recently, the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set an ambitious goal of "significantly increasing access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.”

As a country with the third largest Internet user population - despite a low penetration rate of 24% - India has recently put its connectivity agenda to the forefront of national policy making with its Digital India campaign. At the same time, new business models put forward by global tech giants (with the partnership of local telecom providers) are also changing the ICT landscape (Facebook – Free basics, Google – internet Saathi). At the intersection of these two trends lies an increased focus on mobile broadband, which is today the most widely used substitute for computer-based internet access, not only in India but also elsewhere.

In this Workshop Session, we want to critically analyze the objectives of these policy proposals. We suggest the following themes, as starting points for discussion:

While mobile phones bridge certain kinds of social divide, it also a perpetrates a second level of digital divide where the user experience through a cheap mobile phone and a limited data package is different and more restricted than a PC / an advanced smart phone / tablet with high speed internet access.
The need for an effective database/measurement system which not only tracks the access but also the kind of access provided, its penetration into marginalized backward communities and how it is really impacting development as one sees it.

Plan

We will divide the participants into smaller groups and each group will be asked to engage in a series of topics and come back with 3 key recommendations in their proposed topic.

Series of questions / challenges / (subject to review as we work on the workshop materials):

How does the current digital India campaign perpetrate divides by not looking into the question of user experience?
Is it enough to look at the rural/Urban divide? Is there a need to look specifically at the Government defined backward classes / communities while one speaks of internet connectivity?
What is an effective measure of success for these programmes? How can we critically set up measures for this programme such that it looks not only at the user penetration but also look at things like user experience / digital literacy / specific penetration into backward communities, as well as opportunities for self-expression?

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaindiaunpacked

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ExperienceMapIntentMap

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:14:39Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Anand Jha and Ashima Mittal.

Session

The session is intended to present a toolkit to deconstruct websites through navigation, experience them analogous to lived space through an information architecture. Every deconstructed component is read through content, imagery and affordance to unpack it's Intent/ subtext. A reclustering of the website is done around major intent/ subtext buckets thus revealing a completely different structure than the one experienced.

Plan

Explanation of toolkit is done through examples. Two exercise sessions follow where participants use the toolkit to carry out the activities discussed above.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-experiencemapintentmap

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #SpottingData

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:11:12Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.

Session

The proposed workshop will focus on internet usage in India and the possibilities that the internet offers for representation of data. The workshop will be divided into two parts, the first, of a more general nature, and the second, will focus on one specific aspect of data—representation. While the first part will be more of a documentation exercise, the second part will be a hands-on exercise of some data representation tools that are available on the internet.

Plan

Part I: The Nature of Internet Usage in India

The workshop will engage the participants in trying to map the ways that they use the internet in their daily lives, such as circulating emails, using social networks, downloading software, online commerce, academic research, circulating audio and video, etc. This part of the workshop will try to study ‘the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the [internet] in India’. The study will try to distinguish between those who are consumers of data and systems and those who, in addition to consuming, also produce data and systems. Various types of production of data will also be looked at, such as crowdsourcing data (such as in Wikipedia, or restaurant review or hotel review websites).

The workshop will be conducted in an interactive manner, where the participants will enter their responses in an online collaborative platform (Google Sheets), which will be editable by all the participants. This brief documentation exercise will also be used to prepare a report at the end of the conference.

After completing this exercise of mapping the usage of the internet, the second segment of the workshop will try to explore various ways of representing data. This exercise will be done by using tools available online.

Part II: Representation of Data

This part of the workshop will deal with various kinds of data representation, of various kinds of data that users contribute to the internet through websites, such as social networks, blogs, etc. The workshop will try to look at the various existing ways in visualising and representing such data through the internet, such as chronology timelines, location mapping, network mapping, enhanced text representation such as through display of XML-Text Encoding Initiative (XML-TEI) files, etc. so as to enhance the data and open up other aspects of the data not usually evident in forms such as lists and spreadsheets.

The participants will be led through to the creation of small chronology timelines and location mapping in particular. Therefore participants will be requested to contribute data in the form of simple and small English texts which have either several markers of time, or several markers of location, so as to enable such visualisation. Examples of such texts include biographies, travel narratives, etc. The workshop will discuss how to filter ‘structured data’ from prose text to get desirable result from the softwares.

This part of the workshop will try to answer the question as to ‘how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?’ The workshop will use open-access tools and software so as to highlight the low-investment infrastructure that is often sufficient enough to represent and enhance data.

Readings

Participants are requested to look at two visualisation tools in particular (both of which were developed by the Knight Lab in Northwestern University, USA), one for creating a chronology timeline (https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/timelinejs) and the other for creating a location map (https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/storymapjs).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-spottingdata

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #FollowTheMedium

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:12:19Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Zeenab Aneez and Neha Mujumdar.

Session

It was media theorist Marshall McLuhan who popularised the phrase ‘the medium is the message’; to him, different kinds of media engage the senses in different ways, affecting how we process it and engage with its contents. Before situating research in the digital space, it is important to ask ourselves: what is the nature of the medium are we dealing with here? How do people interact with it? What are the opportunities it provides and the risks it poses? How can we study new digital objects, such as online-first news outlets, podcasts, etc in a way that recognises the medium’s newness?

The proposed session is an exploration of a methodology that is informed and defined by specific characteristics of the medium, with a special focus on digital news and journalism in India. Through this, it seeks to tackle the first of the four key focus areas of the conference: How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?

Keeping this key question in mind, we ask: how can digital methods research contribute to the study of news and journalism in the digital space? How can we use digital objects such as tags, Likes, and Comments to understand how user feedback works in the new information economy? What can the interface of a news creation platform tell us about the changing roles of Indian journalists in today’s media environment? How can we formulate a methodology for studying the metamorphosis of a news story by using Twitter and what skills are required to gather and process information for research of this nature?

In order to inform our responses to such questions, we borrow from Richard Rogers’ adage ‘Follow the medium’ (Rogers 2013), which argues that “natively digital”(Ibid. 19) objects like tags, links, Likes or Comments, which originate in digital networks, cannot be fully understood with methods, such as, say content analysis; an example of a non-digital method that does not recognise its digital nature. The proposed session will make use of the general philosophy embodied by Rogers’ approach and urge participants to acknowledge the specific properties of the Internet as a medium and look at news and journalism as part of the larger media ecology of the web. This calls for the use of new methods that are digital in nature; the discussion on contemporary news should expand from how the news industry is coping with the digital transition, to how we can better understand the specific elements of this transition and use this understanding to reflect upon the changing nature of journalism and news itself.

In order to channel the discussion, the session proposes using the framework from one particular field of digital research: platform studies. With the advent of Web 2.0 and the emergence of the ‘web as platform’ (O’Reilly 2007) and the strengthening relationship between the news industry and social media platforms(‘Reuters Institute Digital News Report’ 2015), traditional as well as digital-born news sites are increasingly adopting a platform model. Therefore, platform studies makes for a fitting framework within which to understand the workings of these platforms, their technological and formal structures, and the specific ways in which they allow users to interact with news content.

Plan

The session will begin with a brief introduction to digital methods (Rogers 2013) and the field of ‘platform studies’ (Bogost and Montfort 2009; Gillespie 2010; Dijck 2013), which will serve as a loose framework through which to study existing news platforms as well as perform analyses on social media platforms as sites for news and journalism. This will be supplemented by the works of Anne Helmond (2015) and Tarleton Gillespie (2010).

Following this, participants will be divided into groups of four-six, with each group anchored by a volunteer, with added support from the two co-leaders. They will then be given the task of formulating a research question that makes use of one or more of the digital methods presented and are also required to frame a methodology that makes allowances for the particularities of the Indian news environment. The session will conclude with a brief discussion based on their findings.

The goal of the workshop will be to explore how digital methods can be aligned with current concerns about news and journalism in India, and open up avenues for research that acknowledges that online news occupies a space that includes natively digital objects and information architectures and hence demands research methods specific to this environment. The workshop also aims at reflecting on potential collaborations between researchers in media studies, data scientists and technologists in developing a comprehensive methodology using which to study digital media in India.

Readings

Gillespie, Tarleton. "The Politics of 'Platforms'." New Media & Society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347-364.

Rogers, Richard. "The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods," Digital Methods. MIT press, 2013: 19-38.

Van Dijck, José. "Disassembling Platforms, Reassembling Sociality," The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press, 2013: 24-44

References

Anderson, Christopher W. "Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism." New Media & Society, 15, no. 7 (2013): 1005-1021.

Bogost, Ian, and Nick Montfort. 2009. "Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers." Digital Arts and Culture 2009 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf.

Helmond, Anne. 2015. Presentation by Anne Helmond - Becoming Data Point. Panel. Transmediale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smXLCAGafqs

Lovink, Geert. 2008. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York: Routledge.

O’Reilly, Tim. 2007. ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 1008839. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1008839.

Procter, Rob, Farida Vis, and Alex Voss. "Reading the Riots on Twitter: Methodological Innovation for the Analysis of Big Data." International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16, no. 3 (2013): 197-214.

Reuters Institute Digital News Report. 2015. Oxford, England: Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism, Oxford University. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Reuters%20Institute%20Digital%20News%20Report%202015_Full%20Report.pdf

Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. MIT press, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-followthemedium

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #STSDebates (Science, Technology, and State Debates)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:08:58Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.

Session

The proposed workshop session is motivated by an interest in historicising contemporary debates on the state's role in development of science and technology in India, and the adoption of both into the processes of government and statecraft. From the DNA Bill to the Digital India initiative, we are experiencing a state that takes science and technology seriously, perhaps a little too seriously.

The debate on state-led organisation of science and technology began in earnest in late-imperial India. The National Institute of Sciences of India met in Calcutta during WWII (1943) to discuss the following questions: “what should be the organisational model for science and technology adopted for post-war and independent India; and how should India benefit from the Commonwealth structure?” In his report at the end of the visit the following year, Archibald Vivian Hill, British physiologist and Secretary of the Royal Society, suggested centralised state-led organisation of science and engineering research as the way forward in India. The debate continues to date.

More recently, especially since 1991, the Indian state has entered into multiple forms of relationships with the science and technology establishments in the country, both public and private. Centralised support for science, technology, and innovation is distributed through various channels that range from regulated oligopolistic markets, to public-private partnerships in fundamental and applied research, to strict governmental control over primary means of communication.

This session is interested in situating present day controversies around the state and internet in India within a historiography of science, technology, and state in India.

Sources on these debates are not readily available in a structured format for direct analysis or visualisation. The session, therefore, plans to make use of the diverse group of participants at the Internet Researchers' Conference to start developing an open data set to understand the key topics, positions taken by the Indian state, institutions, persons, policy directives and statements, and objects involved across the science and technology debates in twentieth century India.

We hope to achieve two goals with this session: 1) to begin to address the challenge of conceptualising contemporary discussions about the internet in a historical frame, and equally, 2) to rethink methods of representing and mapping debates and its components, when the sources are not found readily in digital form.

Plan

The key methodological difficulty faced by this session is that lack of structured data and sources on the topic of science, technology, and state debates in India. Most, if not all, tools and methods of issue, debate, or controversy mapping have dealt with forms of discussions and materials that is either taking place over digital media (for example, social media platforms), or is already made available in a digital format (for example, digitised books). These tools have often developed to address the unique issue mapping challenges and opportunities emerging with the distributed, and often real-time, discussions taking place over the internet (See: http://www.issuemapping.net/Main/WebHome).

In this session, however, we are interested in debates both after and before internet became a commonplace technology in India. Our energies are focused on generating a data set on debates on topics of science, technology, and the state in twentieth century India, which is 1) structured, so that it can utilised for various kinds of analysis and visualisation, 2) expandable, so that we can continue to add information, and 3) open, so that it can be modified and used by other researchers.

The workshop will begin with a quick overview of science and technology projects by the Indian state in the last century. We will be attentive to the vocabulary of the imaginaries within which these projects were proposed.

The participants will be divided into groups, each focusing on one thematic area of science and technology debates (for example agriculture, space, and biotechnology)). Each group will use a spreadsheet software (say, Libre Calc or Microsoft Excel) to document the key aspects of the debates concerned along the following categories: 1) fundamental question of the debate, 2) position taken by the state, 3) institutions involved, 4) persons involved, and 5) objects involved.

This documentation will be done using a pre-designed schema so that the resultant data can be combined and visualised to test the robustness and feasibility of the project.

The final 30 minutes of the session will be kept for combining all collected data, visualising it, and doing some initial exploration of the linkages foregrounded by the gathered data.

We will use RAW, developed by Density Design, and possibly Google Charts library to create the preliminary visualisations.

All collected data, along with documentation of the data creation process, will be published under open standard and license with appropriate credit attribution.

Readings

Caroll, Patrick. 2006. “Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation: Theory and Analysis.” In Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. 11-27. http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10533.ch01.pdf.

Density Design. RAW. http://raw.densitydesign.org/.

Marres, Noortje. 2015. “Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. 40(5). 655-686. http://sth.sagepub.com/content/40/5/655.full.pdf+html.

Phalkey, Jahnavi. 2013. “Introduction: Science, History and Modern India.” Isis. 104. June. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-stsdebates