Centre for Internet and Society

CIS Featured in 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' Report

sneha-pp — 2015-10-16T07:43:18Z

This report, authored by Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne, sheds light on the expertise required to support a robust and sustainable digital scholarship (DS) program. It focuses first on defining and describing the key domain knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets at some of the world’s most prominent digital scholarship programs. It then identifies the main strategies used to build this expertise, both formally and informally. The work is set in a global context, examining leading digital scholarship organizations in China, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The report team visited and spoke to us last year, as part of the study. Here are the Executive Summary and link to the final report.

Access the 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' report here.

Executive Summary

As new production, researchers scholarship analysis, pursue using digital or digital publishing scholarship or computational and dissemination (the creation, techniques), of they are often challenged to develop new skill sets. What skills, competencies, knowledge, and mindsets should digital scholars possess? How are such attributes—which we group under the term expertise—best cultivated? Does the shape of expertise vary around the world? Such questions are being asked by institutions establishing or reshaping digital scholarship organizations (DSOs), instructors developing educational and training programs in digital scholarship, experienced and aspiring digital scholars defining what expertise they need to acquire, and researchers exploring the global nature of digital scholarship.

Through our pilot study, we sought to answer these questions with the broader aims of identifying the workforce-related factors important to the success of digital scholarship, helping training and educational programs define key goals, and contributing to the conversation about the global dimensions of digital scholarship. We focused on “best in class” DSOs, highlighting the human dimensions behind their success in areas such as research output, winning grants, international reputation, and innovative teaching or training programs. We conducted interviews with a range of people involved with leading DSOs, including directors, research staff, faculty, librarians, graduate students, and university administrators. We conducted site visits with all but one of the 16 institutions participating in our study, which enabled us to get a richer sense of the facilities, organizational context, and local culture. While most of our interviews focused on digital humanities, we also included several digital social science organizations to identify areas of commonality and contrast. We explored a variety of organizational structures, including research centers and institutes, an academic department, labs, a network, a nonprofit organization, and a company; these organizations were sponsored by academic schools, libraries, and information technology departments. To understand the global dimensions of digital scholarship, we examined organizations from Mexico, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Since digital scholarship projects often require specific technical skills (such as expertise in text analysis or geographic information systems [GIS]), it was difficult to generalize about what particular skill sets organizations should offer; in many ways that depends on the goals and focus of the organization. In addition, different skill sets were expected depending on one’s position and degree of experience. However, our interviews revealed in particular the importance of collaborative competencies, reflecting the ways in which digital scholarship typically takes place in teams dependent on diverse expertise. Since digital scholarship often involves developing new methods, tools, and theoretical approaches, successful digital scholars usually exhibit creativity, curiosity, and an enthusiasm for learning, which we term learning mindsets. Some level of general domain knowledge is useful so that team members can understand the research questions they are pursuing, while researchers draw upon methodological competencies (such as data science and GIS) and technical skills (such as database design and programming) to carry out their research. Finally, managerial skills—particularly project management—are needed to ensure that projects are completed.

While self-education and learning by doing are the predominant ways that digital scholars have traditionally acquired expertise, they also appreciate being part of a community of practice, so that they can turn to colleagues for help solving a problem and learning something new. Many organizations host workshops and visiting speakers and enable faculty and staff to attend conferences, although it can be challenging for staff to secure travel funding. A couple of organizations provide dedicated research time to staff, so that they can experiment, stay abreast of the state of the art, and contribute their own research. Along with formal support for professional development, we noted the importance of a “learning culture” in fostering continuous learning. Organizations most successful at building expertise among faculty, students, and staff tended to share characteristics such as an open and collaborative interdisciplinary culture in which each team member contributes expertise and is respected for it; global engagement, which includes participating in multi-institutional research projects; an entrepreneurial culture in which experimentation is valued; and a focus on teaching and learning as well as research. We noted variation in the kind of facilities these organizations occupied; collaborative space seemed to be more important than top-notch hardware.

Since we were able to visit only a small number of organizations in each country or region included in the study, we don’t feel comfortable making broad generalizations about the state of digital scholarship around the world. However, we did note some common factors that influenced the shape of digital scholarship expertise. These factors included a tradition of digital scholarship, as more established organizations could both build on existing structures and could be limited by them; funding; the degree of involvement of the institution’s library; and variations in academic career structures, such as paths to promotion and the recognition of alternative academic careers.

Digital scholarship organizations face a number of challenges, particularly in securing adequate funding for their work. We want to draw particular attention to the challenge of recruitment and retention. Typically, DSOs cannot compete with the private sector in offering high salaries or extensive opportunities for advancement; rather, they provide more flexible environments and an academic or intellectual atmosphere in which staff are encouraged to experiment and learn. Unfortunately, some staff at many organizations are hired on temporary contracts because of limited funding, so they often leave for more stable positions. We also noted a tension between research and service at some organizations, wherein these organizations viewed producing new knowledge as central to their mission but may also be expected to provide services to local researchers or to maintain existing projects. At a few organizations, we observed status differences between faculty and staff, particularly in the ability to be principal investigators on grants or to receive travel funding. Researchers whose first language is not English must often choose between reaching a smaller audience with work published in their native language and devoting significant time to translating their work into English.

We provide an extensive list of recommendations aimed at digital scholars, leaders of DSOs, universities and host organizations, funders, and the broader digital scholarship community. To highlight some of the most salient: We recommend that digital scholars take responsibility for their own learning, nurture their own curiosity, and actively pursue learning opportunities, including by participating in communities of practice and team projects. We advise the leaders of DSOs to encourage both structured and unstructured opportunities for learning by including dedicated staff research time in job descriptions, enabling staff to train and mentor, and hosting workshops, outside speakers, and other events. Host institutions such as universities should create more stable staff positions with paths to promotion and facilitate more stable funding for DSOs, while funders should support global digital scholarship exchanges. As for the digital scholarship community, we recommend heightening awareness of digital scholarship around the world through conference programs, funding initiatives, publications, and communities of practice, and promoting greater linguistic diversity. We hope that this report helps raise awareness of the range of expertise required for digital scholarship, the importance of a learning culture and active communities of practice in nurturing it, the challenges digital scholarship staff often face in finding stable careers, and the diversity of models for digital scholarship around the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report

The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden

sneha-pp — 2017-10-04T11:02:10Z

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

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

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

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

The epistemological revolution of the digital document

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The social and political implications of DH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was translated by Desmond Schmidt.

Note

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author

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

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

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:06:46Z

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 second among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

The 'digital turn' has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. DH has emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technologies and the human being or subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. It has been variously called a phenomenon, field, discipline and a set of convergent practices – all of which are located at and/or try to understand the interaction between digital technologies and humanities practice and scholarship. DH in the Anglo-American context has seen several changes – from an early phase of vast archival initiatives and digitisation projects, to now exploring the role of big data and cultural analytics in literary criticism. Some of the early scholarship in the field illustrate the problems with defining and locating it within specific disciplinary formations, as the research objects, methods and locations of DH work cut across everything from the archive to the laboratory and social networking platforms. Largely interpreted as a way to explore the intersection of information technology and humanities, DH is grown to become an interdisciplinary field of research and practice today. However, DH is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.

The Problem of Definition

The question of what is DH has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of DH – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the 'digital' itself as integral to humanistic enquiry [1]. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions for the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s of digital humanities. Dave Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that "what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities." (Parry 2012)

Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in this report. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested threads or modes of thought, which will also inform larger concerns of the DH work at CIS:

The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the Nature of the book, "any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another" (Johns 1998:3). The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this 'technologised history' of the humanities. Can DH therefore be an attempt to uncover such a history and bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here?
The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with DH practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core DH concerns, they are not all 'digital humanists' or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not DH – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most DH research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in DH– where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno-social subject [2] as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.
Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and DH. This comes with the perception of DH being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities disciplines to reinvent themselves to remain relevant in the present context, and one way to do this is by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. DH has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not or even need not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching DH as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of DH in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying DH works with and tries to address this particular formulation of the field.

Locating these concerns in India, where the field of DH is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on DH still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says "Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others." (Latour 2002)

DH then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates DH from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of DH. There are several questions therefore for DH - in terms of what it means and what it could do for our understanding of the humanities and technology. However the questions of DH still need to be made explicit. This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of the above thoughts a little further. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and DH. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.

The Problem of the Discipline

Much has been said and written about DH as an emergent field or domain of enquiry; the plethora of departments being set up all across the world, well mostly the developed world is testimony to the claimed innovative and generative potential of the field. However as outlined in the introduction the problem of definition still persists and poses much difficulty in any attempts to engage with the field. While the predominant narrative seems to be in terms of defining what DH or to take it a step back, what the ‘digital’ allows you to do, with respect to enabling or facilitating certain kinds of research and pedagogy, a pertinent question still is that of what it allows you to ‘be’. DH has been alternatively called a method, practice and field of enquiry, but scholars and practitioners in many instances have stopped short of fully embracing it as a discipline. This is an interesting development given the rapid pace of its institutionalisation - from being located in existing Humanities or Computational Sciences and Media Studies departments it has now claimed functional institutional spaces of its own, with not just interdisciplinary research and teaching but also other creative and innovative knowledge-making practices. The field is slowly gaining credence in India as well, with several institutions pursuing research around core questions within the fold of DH.

So is the disciplinary lens inadequate to understand this phenomenon, or is it too early for a field still considered in some ways rather incipient. The growth of the academic discipline itself is something of a fraught endeavour; as debates around the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thought have established. To put it in a very simple manner, the story of academic disciplines is that of training in reason [3]. Andrew Cutrofello says "In academia, a discipline is defined by its methodological rigor and the clear boundaries of its field of inquiry. Methods or fields are criticized as being 'fuzzy' when they are suspected of lacking a discipline. In a more straightforwardly Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary power of academic disciplines can be located in their methods for producing docile bodies of different sorts" (Cutrofello 1994). The problem with defining DH may lie in it not conforming to precisely this notion of the academic discipline, and changing ideas of the function of critique when mediated by the digital, which is of primary concern for the humanities. DH has in many spaces also emerged as a manifestation of increasing interdisciplinarity and the blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplinary concerns.

However a prevalent mode of understanding DH has been in terms of the disciplinary concerns it raises for the humanities themselves; this works with the assumption that it is in fact a newer, improved version or extension of the humanities. The present mapping exercise too began with the disciplinary lens, but instead of enquiring about what DH is, it tried to explore what the ‘digital’ has brought to, changed or appropriated in terms of existing disciplinary concerns within the humanities and more broadly spaces and process of knowledge-making and dissemination. This thought stems from the premise that if we have to posit the digital itself as a state of being or existence, then we need to understand this new techno-social paradigm much better. Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University in Kolkata sees this as useful way of going about the problem of trying to arrive at a definition of the field – one is to understand the history of the term, from its inherited definition in the Anglo-American context, and distinguish it from what he calls the current state of ‘digitality’ – where all cultural objects are being now being conceived of as ‘digital’ objects. In the Indian context, the question of digitality also becomes important from the perspective of technological obsolescence - where there is a great resistance to discontinuing or phasing out the use of certain kinds of technology; either for lack of access to better ones or simply because one finds other uses for it. Prof. Dasgupta interestingly terms this a ‘culture of reuse’, one example of this being the typewriter which for all practical purposes has been displaced by the computer, but still finds favour with several people in their everyday lives. The question of livelihood is still connected to some of these technologies, so much so that they are very much a part of channels of cultural production and circulation, and even when they cease to become useful they have value as cultural artefacts. We therefore inhabit at the same time, different worlds, that of the analogue and digital, or as he calls it 'a multi-layered technological sphere'. The notion of the 'digital' is also multi-layered, with some objects being 'weakly digital', and others being so in a more pronounced manner. The variedness of this space, and the complexities or ‘degrees of use’ of certain technologies or technological objects is what further determines the nature of this space and makes it all the more difficult to define. DH itself has seen several phases in the West, but has seen no such movement or gradual evolution in India, where these phases exist simultaneously.

This is also true of most technology in underdeveloped world. This further complicates the questions of access to technology or the 'digital divide' which have been and still are some of the primary approaches concerning the pervasiveness of technology, particularly in the Global South. The need of the hour therefore is to be able to distinguish between this current state of digitality that we are in, and what is meant by the ‘Digital Humanities’. It may after all be a set of methodologies rather than a subject or discipline in itself– the question is how it would help us understand the ‘digital’ itself much better, and more critically, and the new kinds of enquiries it may then facilitate about this space we now inhabit. This, Prof. Dasgupta feels would go a long way in arriving at some definition of the field.

One of the important points of departure, from the traditional humanities and later humanities computing as mentioned earlier, has been the blurring of boundaries between content, method and object/s of enquiry. The ‘process’ has become important, as illustrated by the iterative nature of most DH projects and the discourse itself which emphasises the 'making' and 'doing' aspects of the research as much as the content itself. Tool-building as a critical activity rather than as mere facilitation is an important part of the knowledge-making process in the field (Ramsay 2010). In conjunction with this, Dr. Moinak Biswas, at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, thinks that the biggest changes have been in terms of the collaborative nature of knowledge production, based on voluntarily sharing or creating new content through digital platforms and archives, and crucially the possibility of now imagining creative and analytical work as not separate practices, but located within a single space and time. He cites an example from film, where now with digital platforms and processes ‘image’ making and critical practice can both be combined on one platform, like the online archive Indiancine.ma [4] or the Vectors journal [5] for example, to produce new layers of meaning around existing texts. The aspect of critique is important here, given that the consistent criticism about the field has been the ambiguity of its social undertaking; its critical or political standpoint or challenge to existing theoretical paradigms. Most of the interest around the term has been in very instrumental terms, as a facilitator or enabler of certain kinds of digital practice. While the move away from computational analysis as a technique to facilitate humanities research is apparent, the disciplinary concerns here still seem to be latched onto those of the traditional humanities. Questions about the epistemological concerns of DH itself therefore remain unanswered.

While reiterating some of these core questions within DH, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee at the Department of English, Presidency University and Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, at the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, speak of the problem of locating the field in India, where work is presently only being done in a few small pockets. The lack of a precise definition, or location within an established disciplinary context are some reasons why a lot of work that could come within the ambit of DH is not being acknowledged as such; conversely it also leads to the problem of projects on digitisation or studies of digital cultures/cyber cultures being easily conflated with DH . Related to this is the absence of self-claimed ‘digital humanists’, which makes it all the more difficult to identify the boundaries of their research and practice. More importantly, the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise around questions of the digital is also an obstacle to understanding what the field entails and the many possibilities it may offer in the Indian context. This they feel is a problem not just of DH, but in general for modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities that have adopted Western theoretical constructs. One could also locate in some sense the present crisis in disciplines within this problem. Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru explicate this issue when they talk about the absence of 'experience as an important category of the act of theorising' because of the privileging of ideas in Western constructs of experience (Guru and Sarukkai 2012). This is also reflective of the bifurcation between theory and praxis in traditional social sciences or humanities epistemological frameworks which borrow heavily from the West. DH while still to arrive at a core disciplinary concern seems to point towards the problem of this very demarcation by addressing the aspect of practice as a very focal point of its discourse.

Dr. Indira Chowdhury, oral historian and director of the Centre for Public History, who is also a faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore sees this as a favourable way of understanding how the field as such has emerged and what its various possibilities could be in terms of different disciplinary perspectives. She is uncertain that of its emergence as a response to a ‘crisis’ in the humanities as such. She recalls an instance of one of her students who went on to work on hypertext in Canada, several years ago, which for her seemed to be the first instance of something close to DH. The IT revolution in the early 2000s was a significant change, and there were several things that it enabled people to do, in terms of concordance, cross-referencing and getting around texts in certain ways. However, whether key questions in the humanities really changed, whether they were taken any further, is something yet to be explored because it is still such a new field, and one can only be speculative about it, she feels. It perhaps pushes for a new level of interdisciplinarity, and a different kind of collaborative space that the digital enables. What is significant and exciting for her as a historian, however, is that if history has to survive as a discipline, in schools but in terms of public spaces and discourse, it should actively engage with the digital. This not only presents significant challenges, in terms how to represent the past in the digital space, (in short problems with method) but also opens up new possibilities, for example with oral history and the advent of digital sound. The definition of the field will also evolve, as people define it from different spaces of practice and research, which Dr. Chowdhury feels is crucial to keeping it open and accessible by all.

Even from diverse disciplinary perspectives, at present the understanding of DH is that it facilitates new modes of humanistic enquiry, or enables one to ask questions that could not be asked earlier. As Prof. Dasgupta reiterates, it is no longer possible to imagine humanities scholarship outside of the ‘digital’ as such, as that is the world we inhabit. However, while some of the key conceptual questions for the humanities may remain the same, it is the mode of questioning that has undergone a change – we need to re-learn questioning or question-making within this new digital sphere, which is in some sense also a critical and disciplinary challenge. While this does not resolve the problem of definition, it does provide a useful route into thinking of what would be questions of DH, particularly in the Indian context.

Notes

[1] For a more detailed overview of the different phases of DH, see Patrik Svensson in 'Landscape of Digital Humanities,' Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 4 Number 1, 2010, http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html.

[2] For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558.

[3] This is rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see Conflict of the Faculties (1798) by Immanuel Kant and Discipline and Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault.

[4] See: http://indiancine.ma/.

[5] See: http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php.

References

Cutrofello, Andrew, Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance, State University of New York Press, 1994.

Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012.

Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Latour, Bruno, 'Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,' Trans. Couze Venn, Theory Culture Society, 247-260, 2002.

Parry, Dave, 'The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism', Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24.

Ramsay, Stephen, 'On Building,' 2010, http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities

The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:07:06Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

In an article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly describing the emergence of the term cyberinfrastructure, Patrik Svensson speaks of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the humanities, pointing towards a seemingly new found interest and investment in resources and tools for humanities research, pedagogy and publication in many universities and other knowledge institutions (Svensson 2011). Though the term has not been significantly used otherwise, it is interesting to note the implications of such a statement in the context of other such important ‘turns’ in the history of ideas, such as the linguistic or cultural turn. Particularly in the predominant debates around digital humanities, which are largely Anglo-American, infrastructure is an important and inherent component of any thinking around this area, as it derives many of its theoretical and practical concerns from a history of humanities computing. A lot of early work in DH was done in in the area of digital archives and knowledge repositories, such as The Walt Whitman Archive, Rossetti and Blake archives (Gold and Groom 2011, Drucker 2011), where digitization and algorithmic querying were important developments in terms of imagining and opening up the archive. From there to seemingly complex projects on data mapping, visualization, distant reading and cultural analytics, which require parsing through a huge corpora of humanities data, the growth of infrastructure has been a key aspect of these developments, although this many not be emphasized in the early literature about the field. The use of computational methods and the move towards the use of big data in the humanities has been an important change in terms of objects of the enquiry and methodology, and infrastructure is an essential condition of both these changes.

Like with other disciplines the nature of infrastructure and resources available to the humanities – in the form of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and now online repositories, language laboratories, and bibliographic, writing and editing tools and software – have also in some manner influenced the nature or scope of questions that could be asked of an object or text. It is therefore useful to explore the influence of infrastructure at a very conceptual level, in terms of what new ways of enquiry have been made possible with digital technologies and the internet. Now with new tools that can parse many pages of text at a go, or an algorithm that can derive patterns from a data set of images, video or other cultural artifacts, the scope of the enquiry seems to have increased exponentially, as much literature around DH suggests (Berry 2011). Indeed this point is also a bone of contention for many traditional humanities scholars, as it not only seems to be a technologically deterministic notion, but also one that takes away from more conventional methods of humanities research, which are based on close reading and interpretation of texts. In the Indian context however, these possibilities still seem distant owing to several gaps in terms of requirements of infrastructure, resources and material. In many institutions, the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in the form of libraries, classroom teaching-learning resources and access to the internet and other digital tools for the humanities continues to remain a problem. Existing institutional infrastructure is lesser that what is required, and mostly outdated.

This conflict over whether new tools and resources for the humanities is taking away or adding to humanities research is better understood in the light of how the concept of infrastructure has been understood, and specifically in the context of communication and research. Brian Larkin (2008) describes infrastructures as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense”. He talks about both technical (such as transport, telecommunications, urban planning, energy and water) and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as the knowledge of a language, or cultural style and religious learnings. He therefore defines infrastructure as “this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” This definition opens out the understanding of the term a little more, for it brings within the ambit different kinds of goods – such as knowledge, and proposes that infrastructure has the power to bind people within collectivities, thus emphasizing both its limitations as well as potentialities.

The notion of infrastructure as not being neutral to culture is further emphasized when Larkin talks about its mediating capacities, brought about by a layering of new technologies over old ones. "Infrastructures…mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of infrastructures themselves" (Ibid.: 6). Thus the understanding of infrastructures as merely a means of the execution of ideas is one of the obstacles in terms of imagining them as more central to the work of the humanities. Often, the notion of infrastructure has been understood in terms of the institutional infrastructure in place, and not in terms of the smaller networks, tools or resources that build it, which are often located at the level of individuals. Ownership is a key aspect of the problem here, because the ownership of such infrastructure is largely with the state or large corporate entities, and not something within the ambit of small and private institutions or even individuals, and this often mandates the manner of their use. Indeed in the case of DH, there are certain kinds of technologies and resources that cannot be replicated easily at all, as such it is something that needs investment from the state and large knowledge institutions such as the university. Another problem, as rightly identified by Svensson is that the imagination of research infrastructures has been primarily in terms of the needs of the natural sciences, as a result of which resources, tools and materials for the humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment. Thus not only is there a challenge in terms of the availability of infrastructure, but also with respect to the optimum utilization of what is available.

Some of the practitioners and scholars interviewed as part of this mapping have also repeatedly brought up a number of concerns about (or the lack of) infrastructure they have had to use, modify and develop as part of their projects and research. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore finds it rather ironic that a city like Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal has such little thinking in the humanities. There are of course several reasons for this, she says, and in many places infrastructure development is restricted for certain reasons, like for example in Kashmir, where the use of internet and mobile phones is regulated strictly due to security concerns. The key question of course is to have more of a dialogue between places to ensure that they are not functioning in isolation. She also emphasizes that the problems are also at a more basic level, like with transcription for example [1]. The advent of the digital has brought with it several new possibilities, but she also talks about the many misconceptions that seem to be prevalent with regard to the digital, particularly in terms of preservation and storage capacity. The question of format is of great importance and a determining factor in much of research that mobilizes digital technologies. As part of her work on archiving oral histories, she has often had to emphasize that there are specific formats for a digital oral archive. As she says:

You should not switch to say MP3 just because it’s cheaper, more convenient and a lighter file. I often have people arguing that I just bought a recorder, it gives me a clear recording [in the MP3 format] etc. If you were to archive that file you would find that within a few years you begin to lose data on that file. The digital archive has also made people think a lot more about what they are preserving, in what format. These are things you then teach yourself, you do not archive in certain formats, or rely on an archive of MP3 files, because every time you copy them onto something it would have lost a little bit of its description. So these are things that make the historian more oriented, you think a lot more about what you are doing.

She therefore warns against these presumptions that a digital archive will resolve completely problems of space and preservation, as a change in format can easily render your data inaccessible and essentially useless. The idea of ‘loss of data’ and lack of space is something easily missed, as there a notion of the digital being an endless space, but that too comes at a cost. As Jonathan Sterne (2013) explains in his work on the MP3 as a cultural artifactiv, it is a format that works through compression and elimination of excess sound, which eventually greatly affects the quality of the sound object itself. The notion of the digital rendering a certain quality of sound, and by implication generating a ‘better’ digital artifact itself, is therefore highly debatable.

There are other considerations to bear in mind as well. As Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the CPH points out, the context of such work in the global south is very different, and lack of good infrastructure is definitely one of the major problems. There are issues of bandwidth, problems such as surveillance, and issues with regulation of internet access, now the issue of network neutrality and so on, all of which have implications for possible digital humanities work and specifically work on digital archives. A significant challenge she sees is that we don't have mechanisms to translate between/ from Indian languages. She says that:

It would be amazing to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages which at the moment is an impossibility. This is where a place like Bangalore comes into the picture... We need to pull on resources that are being pioneered in places like the IITs, or institutions here working with natural language processing...technologies that we cannot in a humanities context create, but pull those in to use them for humanities research. But the questions that we are asking are necessarily quite different, from what we have in the West.

The problem with Indian languages brings out the problems that are specific to the global south and therefore the infrastructure needs of humanities research work. Padmini Murray mentions Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University as an effective illustration of the challenges faced by researchers working in languages other than English. She explains “The very level of creating the code for Bichitra was different, because it had to be done from scratch. Finding a set of reliable Bangla characters is difficult because the ligatures get mixed up, so they created a character set from scratch to create Bichitra, and for Prabhed [the collation software] which works within it.” The problem of a lack of standardization for Indic language inputs is therefore an immediate practical concern for archival work in different languages in India [2].

Indiancine.ma [3], an online archive of Indian film, has similarly been experimenting with different ways of reading and annotating film text, with a focus right now on films that are out of copyright. It uses an open-source platform named Pandor/a [4] for media archives, which helps to organise and manage large, decentralized collections of video, to collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations, and to archive as a desktop-class web application. The editing tool enables a user to pause, cut and annotate a particular scene or sequence in the film according to a time code, thus creating enormous new possibilities in terms of how we engage with the film text at several levels. The different ways of organising content through different filters also helps map content in unique ways and read them. According to Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert, who are part of the team that developed the archive and its predecessor Pad.ma [5], Indiancine.ma is a work in progress, and it will always be, so as to allow new opportunities to present themselves with every change in the software and tools being used. They are particular about the archive being open to a variety of users and uses – that is, it is not only a tool or space of publication for humanities researchers, but is also a software project, a resource for a film fan club, and many other things as it is open to interpretation. It is meant for people to build together and have conversations across domains and disciplines. In their work with people from both the humanities and sciences, they do see a void or gap between domains, and reiterate that it is very difficult for people to have a conversation across their disciplinary moorings. Infrastructure development has also become divided across these lines, and suffers from a kind of tunnel vision which often prevents it from being developed in response to the needs of the communities it is meant to address. As Sebastian recollects the experience of creating Pad.ma, a similar online video archive using the same platform, Pandor/a, he speaks of collaborating with people from a non-technology background, at the artists collective CAMP in Mumbai [6], and how the lack of a hierarchy between technologists and non-technologists only contributed to making these projects better. A lot of the early software projects in India suffered due to this distance between people from technology and non-technology backgrounds, and the lack of a common language for them to communicate. Both Sebastian and Jan themselves come with training and experience in diverse areas, ranging from philosophy and visual arts to software development, and believe that their contribution to this archive is more conceptual than technological. They also see the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) culture, then a rather incipient movement in India when they had just begun work on these projects, as one that can foster more conversations and collaborative work in technology and research in India. When they had started out of course, it was very difficult to convince people to use free and open source software, or even get filmmakers to release their footage for an open access platform like Pad.ma. CAMP was one of the few spaces then that had this open source culture, and it encouraged people to collaborate extensively, across areas of expertise. As Sebastian says “You deal with a relatively complex informatics system, but you are fully aware that you can modify and change things, and deal with them in a transparent way, which is great.” Both claim that nobody owns Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma, but everybody looks after it in a way, because they all use it differently depending on their interests, and this nurtures and builds the platform in different ways. The availability of this somewhat outside/alternate space for collaboration, and working within the open source context has been instrumental in the growth of these two online open access archives.

The computational aspects of Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and even Bichitra to some extent is may be something to look forward to for researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of such research with these platforms. Given that both are essentially large corpora of material, introducing new algorithmic tools to work with them is not a distant possibility, something that has also been the core of a lot of DH work in the Anglo-American context. Jan and Sebastian have tried this already with one of their earlier projects, 0xdb [7], which is another online archive of cinema, by running a color recognition algorithm on it. There is an instance of face detection and speech recognition software that could be run on this platform, with interesting results. The existing filters on Indiacine.ma also make it possible to search for images or sequences based on colour and object recognition. For instance, an interesting experiment is to search for ‘telephone’ in the archive, which pulls up images containing telephones from across the entire corpus, outlining an interesting trajectory of the use of the instrument. While helpful in terms of querying and searching over a large corpus, they also emphasize the need to be able to make sense of it in a meaningful way. As Jan says “Most of this software is developed really as a means of control, in the area of surveillance etc., and not for exploring; it is more of a content identifying tool rather than to discover things. Clustering or referencing credits are other possibilities, but its more statistical analysis of the footage; are they really adding anything qualitative to cinema studies is still an open question”. Given this disjuncture in what these tools are developed for and how they are finally used, a point of concern is whether the research questions are also driven by the possibilities and limitations of the software itself. While that remains a broader question, Sebastian feels that more than a software, this is a new digital eco-system itself, and using these platforms in different ways, in fact even beyond what they were imagined for, will drive the technology in new directions. The limitation of computational tools as he sees now is really the speed, and given the expenses involved, they may not be feasible to implement and expect results anytime soon.

Both the above platforms demonstrate a certain ability to read texts both closely, as well as from a distance through the use of algorithmic tools, thus demonstrating the possibilities of analysis afforded by the infrastructure it has been built with. More importantly, they also highlight the limits of such tools and resources due to several challenges posed by the material itself. In the case of Bichitra, the problems of developing a code for Bengali characters has put forth a number of technological challenges; a pointer towards one among many problems for archiving materials in Indian languages. Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are more symptomatic of the context in which new technologies can develop today given the support and space for collaboration and conversations across domains of expertise. The problems of format and technological obsolescence brought up by scholars at CPH is an important one; while colluding with proprietary software is inevitable in some cases, as suggested by the practitioners and researchers behind these platforms, keeping back-ups of material and being able to migrate out of a digital platform at any given point is also extremely essential. Such flexibility of material, and immense interoperability – across domains, formats and social-cultural contexts including language is something that researchers in DH, or for that matter in any field that actively engages with the internet and digital technologies would look for in the infrastructure that they build for research, scholarship and pedagogy. Infrastructure continues to remain a critical aspect knowledge production and dissemination, and it is imperative now more than ever, that it is addressed at the conceptual level of any research intervention involving digital technologies and knowledge production.

Notes

[1] See section on Archives for a more detailed discussion on this issue: http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment.

[2] See the section on Reading from a Distance – Data as Text for more on this: http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text.

[3] See: http://indiancine.ma/

[4] See: https://pan.do/ra

[5] See: http://pad.ma/

[6] See: http://studio.camp/

[7] See: https://0xdb.org/

References

Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", Culture Machine. Vol 12, 2011. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440.

Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34.

Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5.

Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria. London: Duke University Press, 2008

Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' New Media and Society. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006

Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities

Living in the Archival Moment

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:08:22Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, Walter Benjamin (1968: 59-67) dwells upon the many nuances of the art of collecting (books in this particular case), on everything from the sometimes impulsive acquisition to the processes of careful selection and classification which go into creating a library. "Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects" (67) he says, and this becomes important given the many ways in which we can acquire books today, as well as the problems of copyright, authorship and authority over meaning and knowledge that become a bone of contention in the digital age. The collector defines the nature of the object here, because he lives in and through them. While describing the personal process that is collecting, Benjamin is also aware that it may not be a process that will last as it is - a foreboding of the age when the impulse to collect, hoard and categorise has only grown tremendously due to increased access to books owing to the internet, but also where the figure of the collector seems to have been slowly effaced, thus presenting a ‘chaos of memories’ (60) in unarranged collections spread over several hard disks instead of book shelves. The figure of the collector, and the idea of ‘ownership’ emerge as an important trope in understanding the notion of order, or rather disorder of the art of collecting in the digital space.

This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in DH - the archive - particularly as it occupies a predominant space in the imagination of the field in India, and processes of knowledge production and the history of disciplines in general. The influx of digital technologies into the archival space in the last decade has been an impetus for the large scale digitisation of material, but it has also thrown up several challenges for traditional archival practice, including the preservation of analogue material, the problems of categorising and interpreting large volumes of data, and the gradual disappearance or re-definition of the traditional figure of the collector – a concern echoed across several spaces extending from private online archival efforts to large collaborative knowledge repositories like the Wikipedia. With the questions that DH seems to have posed to traditional notions of authorship or subject expertise, the 'digital humanist', when we imagine such a person, can be seen as a reinvention of this figure of the collector - a curator of materials and traces, here of course, digital traces.

The concept of the archive has been important to knowledge production and particularly the development of academic disciplines; whether driven by concerns of the state or the impulses of the market, there have been different ways of defining and understanding the archive, not only as a documentary record of history, but as a metaphor for collective memory and remembrance which includes technology in its very imagination. One of the most elaborate formulations of the archive has been in the work of Jacques Derrida, where apart from proposing the death and preservation drives as primary to the archival impulse, he also highlights the process of archivisation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory (1995). Michel Foucault in his concept of the archive looks at it as "a system of discursivity which establishes the possibility of what can be said," [1] thus pointing to the archive as a space not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of knowledge creation. There is today a consensus, at least in its academic understanding that archives cannot be relegated to being self-contained linear spaces of objective historical record, but that archival practice itself has political implications in terms of how collective memory and history, or as indicated by Foucault, histories are preserved and retold through a process of careful selection. Disciplines themselves may therefore be seen as archives of knowledge, and one may stretch this analogy to say that they may also appear as self-contained spaces with restrictions on entry for different ways of remembering and reading. More importantly, the question of what constitutes the archive and what objects or materials may be archived reflects a larger debate about problems with the definition of disciplines and shifting disciplinary boundaries [2]. With the shift to the digital archive, new questions about access, sharing and collaboration have emerged, as illustrated by the number of new archival spaces that have emerged, and growth of expansive archives such at the Walt Whitman, Rossetti and Blake archives in the West (Drucker 2011). However, as is apparent, the conditions of access to such archives and their interpretation have not been problematised enough, if at all, particularly with respect to how they contribute to generating new kinds of knowledge or scholarship.

While DH debates in the West have focussed quite significantly on archives and the possibilities that digital collections have now opened up research and creative practice involving archival material, in the Indian context it is the 'incompleteness of the archive' that still seems to be a bone of contention. Some of the scholars and practitioners interviewed as part of this study see archive creation as one of the key questions of DH as it has emerged in India, and the possibilities and challenges that this brings to the fore, (particularly in terms of access to rare materials and extending these debates to regional languages) as something that the field will need to contend with at some point. The role of digital technologies in fostering this activity of archive-building is stressed in these debates. In an earlier monograph titled Archives and Access produced as part of CIS-RAW, Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto trace a material history of archival practice in India, specifically looking at conflicts and debates surrounding state and colonial archives, and the politics of access, preservation and digitisation (2011). The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to the now within the reach of the individual, engendered by increased access to technology, and the ‘publicness’ that the visual nature of the internet fosters. However they also talk of the possibility of continuing forms of state or market control over the archive precisely through the internet and digital technologies, with the nature of individual access and use again being mediated through digitisation. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer with the archives at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata who was also part of the Archives and Access project, and has been part of some early conversations on DH in India, speaks about this change [3]. Even twenty years ago, it was difficult to define the archive, as it was considered the prerogative of the state, and this defined the nature of archival practice and management as well. From there it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved some issues of preserving content and the problems of physically accessing archives to a large extent, it may not always be the best option, as the archival or analogue material needs to be in good condition so as to make for good digitised copies, thus emphasising the need for more effective methods and better training in preservation practices. Also, as he point out, digitisation may be able to capture and preserve the content of an artifact, but not its form, which is equally important. He therefore rues the fact that even with technological advancements, there is still a lack of interest in archival practice, and often institutional mandates determine the archival agenda which may not be in the interest of generating more research and scholarship around material, as this is the only way to keep the archive alive.

The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, has been an important shift here, with their focus on archiving the personal and the everyday, he says, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. While on the subject of private collections and personal narratives, Dr. C S Lakshmi, writer and academic who is director of the Mumbai-based Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) [4], has particular concerns about digitalisation making large amounts of information available for consumption online, particularly with respect to women. While digitisation is an effective tool for preservation and offers several possibilities for documentation, unmediated access is problematic and often a breach of privacy. There is so much information out there that the digital sphere makes available, sometimes this excessive communication also contributes to certain silences and obscures or makes invisible people and their stories. So very often its not a question of just making information available to people. What are you making available, how much are you making available and to whom, for what purpose - these are all important questions that contour the notion of access and need to be addressed according to Dr. Lakshmi. Curation therefore emerges as an important process. The publicness or hyper-visibility that the visual nature of the internet and digital technologies accords to the archive is seen tied to a narrative of loss here, and against the rhetoric of preservation which is still in many spaces deemed to be the primary function and imagination of the archive. What this sets up is also a conflict between the possibilities of open access and sharing of material, and concerns of privacy, and the need to find a space where both these seemingly contradictory ends meet.

The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies contributes to a 'problem of excess', and that is where curation and building new kinds of tools come in as a critical and creative exercise. Dr. Amlan Dasgupta reiterates this opinion. He talks about the internet as fostering an 'age of altruism', where the proliferation of technological gadgets has brought about a culture of voluntarily sharing materials online. This of course challenges notions of authority and brings forth the problems of the unarranged library which Benjamin’s essay also points towards, but the archive can be used as a metaphor to understand how notions of authorship and authority are being challenged as is apparent in the DH discourse. The theory-practice divide is also something that ails this particular domain like many others; not only is there an inadequate understanding of how to access and use the archive on the part of students and researchers alike, but there is a lack of standardisation of the practice of archive management and the science itself, in terms of metadata, problems of ownership and copyright, and most importantly inadequate infrastructure, training and expertise on preservation of analogue materials. While it may not be within the ambit of DH to address all of these questions, the renewed interest in archival practice and the diversification of its modes is something is that would continue to be an integral aspect of its practice. In fact what digitisation has also led to is diversity in the modes of documentation itself, and the larger process of archiving, which has important implications for the kinds of questions one may ask within certain disciplinary formations, history being an important example. The nature of material in the archive is never quite the same, so is the manner of working with and interpreting them. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, who has been engaged with archival practice herself, and is now working on setting up oral history archives through the Centre for Public History, speaks of the changes that digital technologies have produced in studying oral history, specifically in terms of recording and interpretation of interviews. The mode of documentation, particularly the digital, adds a new layer to the manner in which the voice, sounds or even silence is recorded or interpreted. She refers to Alessandro Portelli’s work on oral history, which talks about the nuances of the sound, such as tone, volume and speed of speaking which are all bearers of meaning and can tell you so much about what the person is trying to say, but can never be fully translated into the written word.(2006, 32-42) Although there are still some basic but crucial obstacles such as with transcription, the digital space may allow for tools that help with more nuanced interpretation of recorded material, and large volumes of it; a possibility that CPH is looking into at the moment. There are several institutions in India who want to set up their archives, most of their materials include many hours of interviews, with many people at a time and transcription is a problem, because it takes time, and there is still no software to aid or completely automate this process effectively. One of the approaches of DH may be to address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material using digital tools.

The digital archive is one space where many of these questions about the process of archive-creation and the separation between preservation and production that is often made in the existing discourse come into conflict, thus inflating the definition of the term much more. New technologies of publishing, the proliferation of electronic databases and growth of networks that in turn encourage production and the increasing amount of born-digital materials then present new questions for the concept of the archive and scholarship.

The role of technology has been significant in the development of the concept of the archive; in fact the archive, in its very nature would be a technological object, or a space where one can trace a history of the disciplines in relation to technology. The introduction of the digital has added yet another dimension to this question. Dr. Ravi Sundaram, Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and one of the co-initiators of the Sarai programme at the Centre for Developing Societies (CSDS) [5], speaks of how the advent of the digital has brought about several shifts in the imagination of the archive, which he sees as two distinct phases. Sarai was one of the early models of a concept driven, networked archive, based on a culture of 'mailing lists' that built conversations around topics which in themselves constituted the archive. The shifts came with Web 2.0 with which archiving the everyday became a possibility, given the access to inexpensive gadgets and the pervasiveness of social media. While the model of the networked, curated and public archive still has valence today, a significant next step would be to see how one can extend these questions to thinking differently about the archive, by developing new protocols for entering, sharing and circulation of material, and producing new knowledge or concepts around these ideas. This would be crucial in terms of generating research and scholarship around the archive itself as a concept, and realising the full potential of network-generated information. Another pertinent question is that of information and technology infrastructure, which is a political question as well. The investment on infrastructure for the archive is determined by different kinds of interests and will play an important role in how archival efforts will ultimately develop. As Dr. Sundaram reiterates, the point to note is that new archival efforts are not only general repositories, but critical interventions in themselves. They foster new kinds of visibilities. The Pad.ma archive [6], for example, works with existing footage and reinvents or adds new layers of meaning to it through annotations and citations. This also opens up possibilities for new kinds of questions to be asked about existing material. Private archival efforts, many initiated by individuals are also becoming more niche and specific, driven by a specific research agenda, public interest in conservation or as critical and creative interventions in a particular area. Some examples of this are the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma [7], the Indian Memory Project [8], and Osianama [9]. In some of these examples, the archive may be used as more of a metaphor rather than a description or classificatory term, because of the layers of meaning that they generate around an existing object or 'trace'.

They are also reflective of a different milieu that came about with the digital turn in India. Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker who set up the artist’s studio and collective CAMP in Mumbai [10], and is also part of the team behind the Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma platforms, speaks of the various factors that contributed to the setting up these two online archival spaces. As artists for them the larger concern was the ever-changing electronic media or technological landscape, as seen in some of their earlier projects such as Russel TV, which involved creating content around media ecologies and intellectual property in a sort of pro-piracy, and access to knowledge framework. The focus for them was the ecology or the landscape, and within that the sharp point was where there were irregularities and inequalities and there was a need to redistribute things in a certain way. Pad.ma grew out of a larger idea of understanding this changing milieu around the early 2000s, where the digital had already become pervasive – filmmakers were editing on a laptop or desktop computer, they had access to the internet and DIY tools, resources were cheaper and more accessible as the internet was opening up a world of possibilities. Therefore, as the team realised, if there was to be an archive of the contemporary, it had to be digital or visual, or video specifically, and located online. This was also the time when the independent filmmaker had become a prominent figure and the challenges and advantages of sharing unused and raw footage became quite possible and apparent with a platform like Pad.ma. The archive was created as something contemporary, non-state and non-canonical, with a wide range of stakeholders and contributors ranging across NGOs, activists, independent filmmakers to individuals with an interest in film and video. There were however several difficulties as well, chiefly in getting people to share material, issues of privacy, and a resistance to the use of this platform as a pedagogic and academic resource, which over the years have come down with the people becoming more open to using material on the platform as primary texts, and the development of more tools for editing and annotations. Indiancine.ma that way is more of a traditional form of film studies, but with more possibilities now for working with the film text.

However, while entering the digital space may have enabled more sharing and dissemination of material, how much of these efforts also make their way into larger civil society and policy debates, scholarship and pedagogy is still a crucial question. Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been used by students, in media and film in particular but the efforts remain niche and restricted to certain disciplines only. Some part of this comes from a resistance to the film or a certain kind of text as academic, and therefore scholarly or relevant to a larger cross-section of research. This also stems from a predominant imagination of the archive as a static, linear repository. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha, film and cultural studies scholar, who was part of the team that created Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, points out, the distinction between the archive as a repository space and an interpretive space is one that needs to be made clearly, and archives are clearly a form of the later. In fact the idea of the digital as a permanent medium is false, and it should not be the solution to problems of storage and preservation. Further, in a lot of expansive archives, whether digital or physical, it is seen that only up to five percent of the material is used, and more often than not it is the same five percent! This is because most people do know about the existence of certain kinds of material which is buried deep within the archive, and therefore do not access it. The emphasis of archival practice, and particularly in the time of the digital archive where space is not seen as a constraint, yet, should be to enliven the archive to ensure that material from the 'dead space of the archive' is made more searchable and accessible for use.

Curation then comes back again as an important aspect of the archive, even in the time of the digital. Indira Chowdhury sees this as one of the main shifts from the traditional archive, where the curator or the archivist performed the role of a custodian or gatekeeper who grants restricted access to the archive only to researchers or scholars. Now with the advent of the internet and shift to the digital, it’s more about collaboration, and adding to the archive, and this has encouraged a diversity of users, and uses of the archive. This comes with its own problems however, such as with metadata standards for instance, and particularly questions of format which become important from the perspective of technological obsolescence (as discussed in the earlier chapter). The digital archive has made practitioners think about what they are archiving, for whom and what purpose, and in what formats, but these questions also go back to the traditional archive, and in fact are dependent on how we think about and defined the archive itself, then and now how we imagine the virtual archive. These are as she says, questions that may be routed through technology, but not necessarily about technology. Also, even with the traditional archive, making material accessible and usable was a concern, and this is where the archivist or custodian played an important role. She speaks about using pre-digital archives, where there are handwritten descriptions of material, all meticulously preserved, indexed and cross-referenced, and you know what material to look for because the archivist knew what was in the archive and how to find it. She speaks of her own experience of setting up the archives at TIFR, which was not digital then, but has been digitised now, and even though she has not been associated with them for a while now she still gets the occasional email requesting help to find something in the archive, because she knows the material. A lot of the new digital archives therefore, despite their huge collection which are also searchable, need archivists and assistants who oversee the organisation of material, because those cross-references and connections have just not been made (often it is not humanly possible because of the sheer volume of data), which is really what the historians will look for, and that is the challenge here.

Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the Centre for Public History, also sees this as a problem of not imagining the archive as a database, but as this legacy where content is being held together under this one overarching frame. She finds that there is a metanarrative that is created at the level of the database, because of the context in which the archive becomes a database – the historical / institutional questions, and what is being used to create the archive. A point of divergence however could be that it’s easier to lie with the archive, because with the database there is the empirical identifier, so the truth claim is better. This is something that Dr. Chowdhury agrees upon as well, as she finds that because archives have the potential of being multilayered, and are therefore complex, verification is difficult; it’s only another scholar who will check the materials referenced or used by one – and the interpretation would change, and this had implications for the way the archive generates scholarship. Another difference is pulling data from the archive in a way that it allows the making of computational hypotheses about other possibilities, which is the heart of DH – such as topic modelling and algorithmic shortcuts to crunch through data to posit some hypothetical claims. She feels that in India at the moment we are not doing in enough with the archive as database, which also restricts its many possibilities. Even in terms of access to the archive, which the digital archive is supposed to make easier, it comes with certain conditions, such as copyrights, privacy and even different kinds of Creative Commons licenses for open source content. It also depends on what Dr. Ray Murray describes as the ‘flavour of the archive’, something particularly relevant to a lot of new private archival spaces like the Indian Memory Project, or Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, which focussed on 'building the archive', as opposed to working with an existing archive of material. As such these are somewhat ephemeral archives, always in the making, and where the digital intersects clearly with the archival space is in terms of finding an audience for it; the internet creates these niche spaces of interest, so you find that people want to access such spaces, and do it differently from the traditional archive, as the varied nature and functionalities of these two examples demonstrate.

What the long discussion seems to illustrate then is the gradual shift of the archive to become something of a metaphor, as the way the archive has been previously imagined, and its functions have changed with the advent of the internet. As Wolfgang Ernst asks:

Does the archive become metaphorical in multimedia space? This is a plea for archiving the term archive itself for the description of multimedia storage processes. Digital archaeology, though, is not a case for future generations but has to be performed in the present already. In the age of digitalizability, that is, when we have the option of storing all kinds of information, a paradoxical phenomenon appears: cyberspace has no memory. (Ernst 2013: 138)

What Ernst suggests is that the Internet forms a different kind of multimedia archive, or anarchive, or is a phantasm, which differs from the printed of state archives because “the archive is a given, well-defined lot; the Internet, on the contrary, is a collection not just of unforeseen texts but of sound and images as well, an anarchive of sensory data for which no genuine archival culture has been developed so far in the occident” (139). The internet, in documenting the discontinuities and ‘disorder’ of the history of multimedia forms thus gives rise to a new memory culture, and this is important to the process of understanding how new archival spaces are being created, and theorised.

Archive-building has an impact on how knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated is a crucial aspect of meaning-making practices. Related to this is another issue in terms of the amount of data that is available in the archives by the sheer amount of material that it can now hold, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data; accessing or interpreting such large volumes of information would require critical tools and new kinds of architecture. These shifts also relocate the figure of the collector from traditional practices to new ways of visualising collections and the art of collecting itself, which are now beyond the scope of the human subject. As illustrated by practices such as distant reading, it is now humanly difficult to read, and process such large volumes of data that the digital archive now makes available to us. What this then throws up as questions for archival practice, and DH of course, is the new modes by which knowledge is produced through access to such corpora – for instance the impact such changes have on history, its reading and writing, the growth of public history and the role of the internet archive in fostering its growth. On a much broader level, it also points towards the implications of this shift for pedagogy and scholarship in the humanities, in the digital age, questions which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Notes

[1] Michel Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004: 18).

[2] Ibid.

[3] A session on 'Digital Humanities and the State of the Archives in South Asia' was conducted by Prof. Abhijit Bhattacharya and his team as part of a workshop on research methodology in Women's Studies, held at Tezpur University between April 6-7, 2010.See http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf

[4] See: http://www.sparrowonline.org/.

[5] See: http://sarai.net/.

[6] See: http://pad.ma/.

[7] See: http://indiancine.ma/.

[8] See: http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/.

[9] See: http://osianama.com/.

[10] See: http://studio.camp/.

References

Balachandran, Aparna, and Rochelle Pinto.Archives and Access. Bangalore: The Centre for Internet and Society, 2011

Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt.Translated by Harry Zohn, 59-67.New York: Schoken Books, 1968

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.Translated by Eric Prenowitz.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996

Drucker, Johanna. "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.Accessed December 11, 2015.http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34

Ernst, Wolfgang. "Discontinuities:Does the Archive become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?" In Digital Memory and the Archive, edited by Jussi Parikka, 113 - 140.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013

Manoff, M. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol.4, No.1 (2005): 9-25.Accessed December 10, 2015. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687

Portelli, Alessandro "What makes oral history different?”. In The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 32-42. London: Routledge, 2006.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment

7 Ways to Con/fuse the Internet with Analogy (Intergalactic Mix) - Talk by Surfatial

sneha-pp — 2018-07-02T18:33:42Z

Surfatial, a trans-local collective that works with text and sound will talk about their essay which was recently published. The talk will also address concerns on how the internet can be used in alternate contexts including presenting work in alternative formats and using the internet for synchronous collaborative cultural production.

The talk will be held at the Centre for Internet & Society's office in Bangalore on September 26 at 6.00 p.m.

Abstract

Surfatial will present their work as a trans-local collective that works with text and sound. They will talk about their essay which was recently published on the RAW blog, as well as concerns of how the internet can be used in alternate contexts. As a continuation from their essay 101 ways of Starting an ISP: No. 53- Conversation Content and Weird Fiction they are interested in exploring alternate formats of presenting the work they produce and in using the internet for synchronous collaborative cultural production.

They structure this talk as a storytelling session and will share stories of how the internet is used on other planets. Stories of the internet on seven planets will be shared. Each story will describe its specific conditions of operation. These stories are seven ways of doing so. How will an external search engine index these stories? Will they be fact or fiction? The external archive of the search engine will be ways to con/fuse the internet with our narratives.

Speakers

Surfatial is a trans-local collective that operates through the internet. They use conversations to aid learning outside established structures. They are concerned with enabling dis-inhibition through the internet, for expressing what may not be feasible in physical reality. They organise internet-based audio conferences called study-groups where they deal with philosophical questions and a self-reflective exchange of individual experiences. They have previously presented their work at Soundphile 2016, Delhi; play_book (in collaboration with Thukral & Tagra), Gurgaon; CONA, Mumbai, and Mumbai Art Room. Their upcoming engagement is with ZK/U, Berlin.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/surfatial
Website - http://www.museumofvestigialdesire.net/offices/surfatial
Twitter - https://twitter.com/surfatial

Surfatial is Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav and Satya Gummuluri.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/7-ways-to-con-fuse-the-internet-with-analogy-intergalactic-mix-talk-by-surfatial-september-26-6-pm

Digital Humanities in India?

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:05:29Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Background

It has only been a couple of years since I began hearing the term Digital Humanities (henceforth, DH) being uttered quite prominently, though mostly in academic circles. For the uninitiated, it almost sounds like an oxymoron. After all, for most practical purposes the digital and humanities have always been seen almost as contradictory terms, existing in distinct silos. A couple of workshops and conferences, one national-level consultation, three new centres, and two academic courses later the term still needs a definition in India, if not also in other parts of the world. But what was by then, and even now, is interesting is the emergence of pockets of work in India either claiming to be DH or even remotely related to it, and the interest in the term, either as one full of a seemingly diverse, innovative, and generative potential for interdisciplinary work in academia and practice, or as something that is just a reinvention of old questions that have been the focus of humanistic enquiry for several decades now.

The enquiry for this mapping began with the term itself, as a 'found' name for which I needed to excavate some meaning, context and location in India at the present moment. A consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education organised in Bangalore in July 2013 [1] and a proposed short course in ‘Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics’ [2] at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, were some of the early prominent instances of the use of the term. I later learnt from one of the people interviewed for this study that DH was already discussed in academic workshops as early as 2010 [3]. The general interest in the term has steadily picked up in the last couple of years however, albeit in specific pockets of the country, and it would be safe to say that it has been approached in markedly different ways by several institutions.

The source of the term itself is the history and body of literature around humanities computing in the UK and US, which essentially explores the use of computational methods in humanities research and practice. Roberto A. Busa (2010) describes it as “… precisely the automation of every possible analysis of human expression (therefore, it is exquisitely a "humanistic" activity), in the widest sense of the word, from music to the theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts”. However, locating such a history in India seems not only to be a difficult project, but largely a futile one. It seemed irrelevant to import a concept or discourse that in itself was (and still is to some extent) relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context, and then try to locate it here. Instead, what I chose to do was to take a few steps back - firstly to outline a couple of questions/conflicts that seemed to be troubling about this concept to begin with:

Are ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’ really two contradictory terms that are being bridged together? Is this a reiteration of the ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1990) debate?
What are the changes in the object(s) of enquiry in humanities disciplines due to the advent of the internet and digital technologies?
What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects? How are these affecting the traditional methods of the humanities?
Is DH a fringe academic phenomena, and can it be related to academic disciplines only? With several groups of practitioners engaging with questions and methods akin to DH outside universities, how do we define its institutional boundaries?
What are the new skills and tools emerging with, and in turn defining, DH practices in India?

Context

An immediate context for the growth of DH has been the steady debate around a ‘crisis’ of the disciplines, the humanities in particular, and how DH in a strange paradox, seemed to be both the phenomenon posing this question and offering an answer to it. Particularly in the Anglo-American context, while there has been a sustained decline in funding for the arts, especially post the global recession in the late 1990s, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and other disciplines in natural sciences still seem to be on a steady footing. The ‘crisis’ here exists here at several levels - budgetary cuts across universities for liberal arts and humanities programmes, a steep fall in gainful employment for graduates (whose numbers are much more than the jobs available in the market, the adjunct system that has become popular in the US, which has resulted in reduced full-time employment and poor compensation for faculty, and in general a lack of opportunities and resources for research in the arts and humanities. The problem however, of which these are only the symptoms, lies much deeper, at the heart of what is seen as the lack of interest due to the diminishing practical value of the humanities, which further makes them seem most dispensable in a moment of economic crisis. Martha Nussbaum calls this a ‘silent crisis’, spurred by the growth of a profit-driven model of education, which has led to an increased focus on science and technology programmes, and emphasized the fostering of certain specific skills in these domains much to the detriment of arts and humanities programmes at every level of formal education, thus also doing away with “cultivated capacities of critical thinking and reflection, which are crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake.”

Gary Gutting on the other hand sees this definition of crisis in terms of numbers itself as misleading, but proposes that this decline also as a result of a cultural and economic system that is inhospitable to the humanities in general, and the ‘cultural middle class’ in particular. He writes:

Our economic system works well for those who find meaning in economic competition and the material rewards it brings. To a lesser but still significant extent, our system provides meaningful work in service professions (like health and social work) for those fulfilled by helping people in great need. But for those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer. Or rather, it has a great deal to offer but only for a privileged elite (the cultural parallel to our economic upper class) who have had the ability and luck to reach the highest levels of humanistic achievement. If you have (in Pierre Bourdieu’s useful term) the “cultural capital” to gain a tenured professorship at a university, play regularly in a major symphony orchestra or write mega bestsellers, you can earn an excellent living doing what you love. Short of that, you must pursue your passion on the side. (Gutting 2013)

Paul Jay and Gerald Graff locate the problem within the notion of the humanities as being inherently averse to a market-driven, utilitarian form of education, which emphasises only credentials, thus rendering the field esoteric and lacking when it comes to solving problems in the ‘real world’. Instead they favour the approach of humanities students developing diverse skill sets, in addition to traditional skills of their disciplines, and being open to engage with opportunities in the larger marketplace outside of academy as well. As the essay states:

We believe it is time to stop the ritualized lamentation over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of making them relevant in the 21st century. Such lamentation only reveals the inability of many humanists to break free of a 19th-century vision of education that sees the humanities as an escape from the world of business and science. As Cathy Davidson has forcefully argued in her new book, Now You See It, this outmoded way of thinking about the humanities as a realm of high-minded cultivation and pleasure in which students contemplate the meaning of life is a relic of the industrial revolution with its crude dualism of lofty spiritual art vs. mechanized smoking factories, a way of thinking that will serve students poorly in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. (Jay and Duff 2002)

While many of the traditional humanities scholars may still look at this as the result of a certain techno capitalistic impulse - wherein a new research regime based on knowledge creation to fulfil corporate interests emerges – it is prudent to examine how and why fields like the digital humanities have now emerged around the time of such a crisis, as they seemingly fit well within this nebulous space, and what are their implications for the humanities, education and research at large.

In the India, the context is a rather chequered one – with most conversations around the internet and digital technologies located within the domain of the development of Information and Communication technologies for Development (ICT4D), in sectors ranging from education to governance. The introduction to the digital has been in multifarious ways for countries in the global south, largely through rhetoric about its potential to address and even resolve social and economic problems, so much so that, as several of the people interviewed in this study also mentioned, now anything digital automatically translates to ‘good’ and ‘beneficial’. Addressing the digital divide has been a mandate of all stakeholders, whether the state and policy-makers, private organisations, NGOs or academia. With around 300 million internet users and counting, India has the second largest internet user base in the world. However, the conditions and quality of access to the internet and other digital technologies, and who is using these and for what purposes continue to remain a bone of contention. The ambitious Digital India initiative of the current government is the latest in a slew of measures undertaken to address some of these concerns in the last several years, and it proposes to do so by tackling three key areas – digital infrastructure, governance and services on demand, and empowerment of citizens through increased digital literacy [4]. As such it seeks to resolve some of the challenges of last mile connectivity that have forever been an issue with many ICT4D initiatives, particularly with countries in the Global South. The advent of a techno-democracy or a model of governance that successfully integrates technology within a framework of rights and social development seems to be larger vision of these proposed initiatives.

The ICT-fication of education has been a major objective and challenge within this larger vision, specifically with respect to the problem of access, and more importantly quality of access which stands out as pertinent, again a problem attributed to the lack of last mile connectivity. In 2009, the MHRD launched the ambitious National Mission in Education and Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT) programme [5], which along with the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill [6] and the recommendations of the Yashpal Committee report [7], was expected to address some long-standing concerns in making higher education more accessible and hospitable to students, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2011) argues that the last-mile problem is a more of a conceptual or cultural problem than merely a technological one. This is illustrated in the manner of implementation of several projects under the NMEICT, particularly in the imagination, as Rajadhyaksha says, of technology as neutral and therefore capable of addressing issues of democratisation within higher education.

Following the NMEICT, several initiatives such as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) [8] programme, and the use of low-cost devices such as the Aakash tablets [9] were also field tested to get a better understanding of how digital technologies could be integrated seamlessly into classroom instruction. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) [10] and Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) [11], and more recently the National Knowledge Network (NKN) [12] are some of the more established efforts in distance education and open courseware. Digitisation initiatives were also launched on a large scale in the last decade, some notable ones being National Mission for Manuscripts [13], Digital Library of India [14], and National Library of India [15], among many others. There is also a growing number of closed/commercial archives, some examples being the South Asia Archive [16] and Asia Art Archive [17]. Digitisation, while being taken up in the interest of preservation and record, also brought with it a number of challenges, particularly with respect to the manner in which the projects were implemented. Whether with regard to preservation of the original material, problems with copyright or defining metadata standards, digitisation has never been an easy process. The Google Books library project is an example of this, where many books were damaged and had to be discarded in the process of digitisation, and the project itself came under criticism for several copyright violations, errors produced due to conversion of scanned texts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and incorrect or unavailable metadata.

The move towards digitisation also provided the much needed impetus for archival practice to make a transition to the digital space, this has been an inevitable but rather fraught endeavour to begin with, as some of the observations made in the later chapters will illustrate. The emergence of independent, private online archives, often seen as a fallout of the hegemony of state-funded archives is an important development of this time. An influx of funding from government and private donors, has led to a lot of work in media and communication technologies getting concentrated in so-called ‘alternative’ spaces outside the university. The growth of these in between spaces has been an interesting phenomenon, particularly with respect to the possibilities offered for different kinds of research and other creative practices that are often unable to find a space within the confines of a university or other large, established knowledge institutions.

In the last decade or so, DH seems to have become one of the most highly funded areas in humanities research and practice. While this has seemingly helped to either save and/or reinvent some the humanities programmes, a lot of traditional humanists also view the field and the term with scepticism – as a threat to more traditional forms of humanities pedagogy and practice. Whether such a context exists in India and is still a matter of question, and hinges largely on how we understand the digital itself - as an object, concept or space. For that seems to be where the questions about the field, its emergence and its epistemological concerns lie.

This report, therefore, takes a slightly broader look, somewhat like a scoping exercise to see what some present concerns are and what could be the possibilities of DH in India. The areas of focus are few – the notion of crisis, and disciplines, the archive and so forth which form the crux of the debate in India. It also looks at changes that have come about, and are imminent with the ‘digital turn’, from the perspective of selected disciplines, and practices of knowledge-making. More importantly, it tries to extrapolate, from the common issues and conflicts traced across several conversations, larger questions of a conflict of authority that disciplines in the humanities have come to undergo, and whether the digital has amplified of tried to resolve the same. The conflict is tied to questions of ownership/authorship and authenticity that emerge with new collaborative modes of knowledge production, and the politics of circulation. It is reflected in the shift from more traditional spaces of knowledge-making to newer methods, objects, figures and processes in the online world, which seem to at one level replace older ones. This perceived threat of irrelevance or obsolescence is one of the manifestations of this conflict of authority. The Wikipedia is one example of this conflict, wherein the authenticity and authority of its content and recognition as scholarship has been intensely debated owing to, among other things, the fact that it cannot be attributed to any single author. In the ways in which the digital now mediates such activities, what has become the space and understanding of the digital in our lives, in the ways we consume and produce information and knowledge, and increasingly become uneven stakeholders in a dynamic knowledge economy, are some of the questions explored therein.

Methodology

With few 'digital humanists' (a term many DH scholars in India have consciously chosen to stay away from) and DH centres around, and the discourse being far from stable in India, the best way to explore this supposedly new phenomenon then seemed to be to understand some of the immediate problems and questions with the notion of the ‘digital’ itself. This approach was not just the result of constraints of the immediate context, but also turned out to be a productive methodological gesture, as it widened the scope of this mapping exercise to include several proto/perhaps-DH initiatives that have come up around the same time, or been in existence for a while and have been trying to work around similar questions. The mapping did not begin with an assumption of a field called DH as being extant in India, and therefore as an examination of its challenges and possibilities, but rather to understand how DH-like practices have evolved and converged at the moment under what appears to be like a place-holder term, and the implications of this for research and learning. Being located in India, it also provided a good vantage point to reflect on some of the literature and discourse around the term being produced in the Anglo-American context. The consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education held in July 2013 was helpful in bringing together a number of people and key questions of what was then understood as something of a field. It is largely from the discussions at this consultation that this report approaches the term and what it may offer for humanities and related interdisciplinary research in India; somewhere it also hopes to serve as a point of departure. A major concern then was the lack of a proper definition of the field, and its instability, which continued to be a recurrent topic in my discussions with people as part of this exercise. However, the merits of embarking upon an exercise to ‘define DH in India’ were highly contentious, so the mapping took a more descriptive route, and did a discursive analysis of work in DH and allied fields and what people were saying about it in India. What I found were a range of views, some informed by practice and scholarship, others based on conjecture and some purely non-committal. As one of the people interviewed for this mapping pointed out, there is something provisional about which, if I may add, also inhibits us from saying anything definitive about it, just yet.

Given that the lack of a definition of the field remained one of the main issues, I went into conducting the mapping with a working definition/assumption that DH ‘is an interdisciplinary area of research, practice and pedagogy that looks at the interaction of digital tools, methods and spaces with core concerns of humanistic enquiry’. This definition was developed based on a review of existing literature in the Anglo-American context on DH, and deliberately made expansive enough to include within its fold, the different kinds of practices that had already chosen to adopt the term, and others which seemed to be inclined towards similar theoretical and practical concerns. Another useful definition, from the Digital Humanities Quarterly useful was the following:

Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. (Digital Humanities Quarterly 2010)

Deliberating on the interaction between humanities and technology, Susan Schreibman, in one the earliest books on DH describes the 'field' as follows:

The digital humanities, then, and their interdisciplinary core found in the field of humanities computing, have a long and dynamic history best illustrated by examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with computation. (Schreibman et al 2004)

One of the popular and most quoted definitions, however, is an early one that appeared in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Institute for the Future of the Book 2009). This describes DH as an array of convergent practices, and is also reproduced in the book Digital Humanities (Burdick et al 2012):

Digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication. Digital Humanities is less a unified field than an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. (Ibid., 122)

The notion that DH is a “less a unified field than an array of convergent practices” seems to be the most useful way to describe the observations and more so the conditions that led to this mapping exercise, which also seeks to outline some kind of a trajectory of practices that converge at this contemporary moment to engender new meanings of and around the digital, rather than produce a conceptual history of the term in the Indian context or even imagine an extant field of some sort. This notion of a convergence, as stated in the last definition, although not apparent or expressed by anyone in India, seems to be the best possible way to describe the manner in which certain practices and a discourse has grown around the intersection of humanities and digital technologies in India. This rather organic growth of DH projects, practices and coursework in the absence of a meta-theory that would drive its epistemological concerns is an important conceptual question for the field itself, and a challenge for the study. Thus while the broader conversation around DH spans everything from instructional technology, new media and art practices, integrated science education to cultural analytics, the core concerns often remain the same, that of the intersection of previously separate domains of knowledge that are now coming together, and the crucial role played by the internet and digital technologies in bringing them together.

Further, three immediate experiences in engaging with digital technologies and questions of knowledge production in India shaped the intellectual concerns of this study. The first of these is the series of monographs produced as part of the ‘Histories of Internets in India’ project at the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in CIS, during 2008-2011. A key point foregrounded in these monographs was the critical need to approach the internet, as a plural technology, available in and actualised through different forms, practices, and experiences. The second one was the collaborative project on the quality of access to higher education in undergraduate educational institutions at the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.The project was conducted in nine undergraduate institutions across three states in India, and included interaction with students and teachers through workshops and campus projects.The experience of working with students – who ranged from those who could barely use a computer to students proficient with the latest software, multimedia tools and internet applications – led to many insightful learnings about the teaching-learning environment, and prevalence of digital technologies and the internet in these spaces. The third one, of course, is the consultation on DH held in Bangalore, which provided an immediate set of questions and a network of people to begin the mapping with.

In this study, the fieldwork consisted of in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key people involved in the DH-like initiatives in India, and allied areas such as media, archives, art, and higher education. The sample size being small, the conversations were by no means exhaustive, but they were insightful in terms of the present nature of practice and the questions that they further pointed towards. The interviews were largely open-ended conversations focussing on, where possible, questions about DH: its emergence, theory, practice and pedagogy, but emphasising the notion of the ‘digital’ and is diverse perception and formulations. With respondents who were not from an academic space or not involved with DH directly, the questions were more related to the nature of changes that the digital has brought about in their practice, specifically the shifts in content and method. The crisis of disciplines and the move away from more traditional concerns of humanistic enquiry were also discussed. Issues of access, exclusivity and the move towards collaborative spaces of knowledge production and the democratic potential of the internet and digital technologies also came up quite prominently as points of discussion.

The fieldwork tried to cover not just a range of people from different disciplines and areas of practice, but also institutions: Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Purbasha Auddy, (School of Cultural Texts and Records and Dept. of English), Dr. Moinak Biswas and Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee (Media lab and Dept. of Film Studies); Dr. Abhijit Roy (School of Communication and Culture) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata; Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (Dept. of English) and Dr. Milinda Banerjee (Dept. of History) at Presidency University, Kolkata; Abhijit Bhattacharya (Media Archives) at Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; Dr. Ravi Sundaram (the Sarai Programme) at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Dr. Indira Chowdhury and Dr. Padmini Ray-Murray (Centre for Public History) at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore; Dr. C. S Lakshmi at the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women, Mumbai; Shaina Anand, Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lutgert and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who have all worked with CAMP, Mumbai and are part of the team behind Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma; Vikram Vincent at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and S.V. Srinivas, Azim Premji University, who was previously associated with the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. The individuals and institutions mentioned here have been engaged with these concerns within their respective fields of research and practice. Three institutions - Jadavpur University, Presidency University and the Centre for Public History – have actively adopted the term DH for some of the work they have been doing, whereas the remaining have been working with digital technologies as part of research, pedagogy, and practice. The report presents some part of these conversations and in doing so provides a snapshot of the operational context of the term ‘DH’ in India as well. The attempt was to understand the nature of existing and possible institutional investment in the term, as well as digital technologies (beyond tools, platforms and processes) and their stake in taking these questions further.

Notes

[1] This one-day event was organized by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, and other institutions. See: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education.

[2] See: https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/

[3] See: http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf.

[4] See: http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/.

[5] See: http://www.nmeict.ac.in/.

[6] See http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf.

[7] See: http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf

[8] See: http://nptel.ac.in/

[9] See: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578.

[10] See: http://www.ignou.ac.in/.

[11] See: http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/.

[12] See: http://nkn.in/.

[13] See: http://www.namami.org/.

[14] See: http://www.dli.ernet.in/.

[15] See: http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/.

[16] See: http://www.southasiaarchive.com/.

[17] See: http://www.aaa.org.hk/.

References

Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunefeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities.

Digital Humanities Quarterly, "About DHQ," 2010, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html

Gutting, Gary. "The Real Humanities Crisis," The New York Times, November 30, 2013, accessed July 14, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/.

Institute for the Future of the Book, "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0," 2009, http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/

Jay, Paul, and Gerald Duff, "The Fear of Being Useful," Inside Higher Ed. January 5. 2012. Accessed September 22, 2015. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities.

Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, "The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction," A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.

Snow, C.P. "The Two Cultures," Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s. 1990. Pp. 169-173.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers

sneha-pp — 2019-01-21T12:11:35Z

Here is the list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) - #List. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019. The conference announcement, along with the final agenda, will be published on Monday, January 7.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - List of Proposed Sessions

Selected Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty (9 votes)

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo (9 votes)

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal (9 votes)

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain (9 votes)

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti (9 votes)

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha (9 votes)

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince (7 votes)

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose (7 votes)

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana (10 votes)

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh (11 votes)

Selected Papers

Brindaalakshmi.K

Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature

In July 2009, the Delhi High Court legalised homosexual acts among consenting adults. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India held that homosexuality between two consenting adults was illegal and reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This section was reinstated under the pretext of the LGBTIQA+ community being a minuscule minority. The Supreme Court saw this as insufficient for declaring that Section 377 as going against Article 14, 15 and 21. However, on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India passed the historic verdict reading down Section 377 to decriminalise homosexuality in India. In the time between 2013 and 2018, the LGBTIQA+ community struggled to their presence and rights. Different groups and organisations have worked on this.

One such collectives has been Orinam, an all-volunteer unregistered Chennai-based collective. Started in 2003, Orinam among other things, has also been recording queer experiences on its website since Dec 2005. These experiences of queer people and their families have been recorded in Tamil and English on Orinam’s blog, Our Voices as poetry, fiction, news, views, podcasts and reviews. The website also archives queer events in India through The Orinam Photo archives. Orinam has also been archiving the legal developments with respect to the rights of LGBTIQA+ community. This included legal documents, landmark verdicts, letters written by the family of queer individuals in multiple Indian languages to the Supreme Court to read down Section 377, among others [1]. These listings along with others, in turn also contributed to building the case for the legal battle to eventually read down Section 377.

This paper looks specifically at the functioning of Orinam based in Chennai that uses lists in a way to support a marginalised community acknowledging their realities and also keeping them alive in different ways. This is being done through its support resources, peer support, activism or archiving queer experiences in the form of literature and other media, both online and offline. This paper will trace Orinam’s work through the fifteen years of its existence as a listing and archiving platform supporting the LGBTIQA+ community.

[1] Orinam@15: talk delivered at 15th Anniversary Celebrations. Dec 23, 2018

Brindaalakshmi is a member/volunteer of the Chennai based queer collective, Orinam; and is currently working with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, on a study on 'Gendering of Development Data in India'.

Gayas Eapen

De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods

Natural disasters can be crucial time for making lists: of people in need of assistance, rescue, support, relief and other similar disaster-related operations. In lists concerning rescue, being on the list and not being on it could mean the difference of life and death. In which case it is important to consider: how do the processes which make such lists possible come about? How do they ensure that people are not left out of these lists? How they do they sort out redundancies? I study the lists made during the Kerala floods of 2018 to attempt to answer some of these questions.

As rescue requests started piling up on social media, a group of volunteers set up the web portal, keralarerscue.in, which later became the central database of all the rescue requests. The portal was unique in two fronts. First, the developers building the portal were volunteers from the community instead of being the state employees, but, nonetheless, worked in coordination with the the government and rescue agencies along with the feedback they were getting from people. Second, the rescue requests were being crowdsourced from people directly. This led to the duplication of requests, it wasn’t until much later that it was realized that crowdsourced information was not coming directly from the victims, but from people who were placing requests on their behalf.

In this paper I argue how feedback from the community, coupled with the personal investment of the programmers lead to improvements in the structuring and use of the database. I will delineate the concerns of de-duplication (process of removing redundancies) which posed a serious dilemma, of either deleting crucial information hence posing danger to people’s lives, or incurring loss of precious resources in chasing repeated rescue requests.

I argue that the streamlining of programming operations by developing methods such as ticketing system (of labelling the urgency or marking completion of rescue requests by telephonically confirming them) were made possible because of a participatory model of building lists. Those involved in the technical creation of the lists identified closely with the experiences of the people stuck in the flood. The solution, which involved not deleting names of people but instead undertaking another painstaking scrutinizing operation even in a time sensitive environment, can be placed in stark contrast to how lists have been created by state or corporate agencies in similar crucial situations.

Gayas is an assistant professor of English and Journalism (as part of the Resident Expert Panel, 2018-19) at Dayapuram Arts and Science College, Kozhikode, University of Calicut.

Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC

This paper focuses on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a case study to discuss legal and administrative challenges in categorizing Assamese residents as citizens of India. At a fundamental level, lists manifest a binary of categories: people who are on the list and others who are not. However, the process of achieving this binary distinction, especially in the exercise of updating NRC, has required bureaucratic accounting of a wide variety of Assameseresidents who neither are completely on the list nor completely off it. This paper specifically focuses on instances of inclusion and exclusion of three categories of Assamese residents in the process of updating the NRC: (i) Original Inhabitants (OI), (ii) Doubtful Voters (D-Voters), and (ii) Women applicants who have been excluded from the list because of the lack of appropriate bureaucratic documents. As an administrative exercise, the NRC as a citizen identification project is a moment where temporalities of NRC as a classification system does not map onto the individual biographies of a variety of Assamese residents as outlined above. In such moments of ‘torque’ (Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting things out: Classifications and its consequences, 2000), listing (or the process of making a list) is not simply bureaucratic accounting; it is also a lived experience of mismatch and the struggle that follows in efforts to secure representation through listing. We show that while the NRC update in Assam may itself be driven by anxieties around illegal immigration, the attempts to technologically, legally, and politically categorize the ‘other’ using the information infrastructure of NRC have profound consequences on the ‘self’ of India as a nation state.

Monish is a Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, India; and Ranjit is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Notes

The sessions have been selected based on the votes submitted by all the session teams (that proposed a session for IRC19). Please find details of this process in the Call for Sessions page. The papers have been selected by the researchers@work team.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List, Jan 30 - Feb 1, Lamakaan

sneha-pp — 2019-01-31T06:41:38Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions. IRC19 will be organised in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, during January 30 - February 1, 2019.

Venue: Lamakaan, Off Road 1, Near GVK Mall, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500034

Location: Google Maps

Conference Programme: Read (SlideShare) and Download (PDF)

Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy: Download (PDF)

Poster: Download (JPG)

Registration: Directly at the venue, it is a free and open conference

IRC19: #List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh

Papers

Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature - Brindaalakshmi.K

De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods - Gayas Eapen

Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC - Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

About the IRC Series

Researchers and practitioners 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, conceptualisations, and boundaries.

The researchers@work 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 second Internet Researchers' Conference was organised in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. The third Internet Researchers' Conference was organised at the Sambhaavnaa Institute, Kandbari (Himachal Pradesh) during February 22-24, 2018, and the theme of the conference was *offline*.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list

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

sneha-pp — 2017-11-29T12:30:13Z

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

IRC18: Offline

Call for Sessions

Proposed Sessions (Conference Website)

Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (External Link)

IRC18: Offline

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Sessions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Session selection process:

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

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

Call for Essays: Offline

sneha-pp — 2018-08-20T06:58:05Z

Offline

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the "offline". Please submit the abstracts by Sunday, September 02.

We will select 10 abstracts and announce them on Wednesday, September 05. The selected authors are expected to submit the first draft of the essay (2000-4000 words) by Friday, October 05. We will share editorial suggestions with the authors, and the final versions of the essays will be published on the researchers@work blog from November onwards. We will offer Rs. 5,000 as honourarium to all selected authors.

Please submit the abstracts (300-500 words) as a text file via email sent to raw@cis-india.org, with the subject line of "Offline".

The essays, for example, may explore one or more of the following themes:

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

Please note that the scope of essays need not be limited to the topics mentioned above but may address other dimensions of offline lives.

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

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

sneha-pp — 2018-09-06T14:14:47Z

In response to a recent call for essays that explore various dimensions of offline lives, we received 22 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 10 pieces to be published as part of a series titled 'Offline' on the upcoming r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts.

1. Chinar Mehta

2. Cole Flor

3. Elishia Vaz

4. Karandeep Mehra

5. Preeti Mudliar

6. Rianka Roy

7. Simiran Lalvani

8. Srikanth Lakshmanan

9. Titiksha Vashist

10. Dr. Yenn Lee

Chinar Mehta

In September 2017, a student of Banaras Hindu University was allegedly sexually harassed by two persons on a motorcycle while she was walking back to her hostel. Taking the discourse around this event as the starting point, the essay argues that the solutions offered for the safety of women align with the patriarchal notions of surveillance of women. The victim is twice violated; once during the act of sexual harassment, and twice when bodily privacy is exchanged for safety (exemplified by security cameras across the BHU campus). In fact, the ubiquitous presence of security cameras in order to control crime rates makes the safety of the woman’s body contingent to her adherence to social rules.

The moral panic around the safety of women encourages ways to offer a technological solution to a sociological problem. The body is granted safety insofar as the body is not ‘deviant’. There is a fusion of a ‘synoptic-panoptic’ vision, where not only a few watch the many, but the many also watch the few. Additionally, the essay then engages with the politics of mobile applications like Harassmap or Safetipin, and how offline spaces become online entities with crowdsourced data about how safe it is. Mapping events like sexual harassment on an online map is inscribed with perceptions about class and caste. The caste-patriarchal ideas of the protection of upper-caste women is maintained within these applications. The location and the people who visit or reside in them often collapse as the same; as being perpetrators of sexual crimes, while decontextualising incidents. Instead of a focus on how to make areas safer for all women, the discourse becomes about the avoidance of certain spaces, which may not be an option for the majority of women, especially those belonging to certain castes and classes. Features in mobile applications, specifically to do with location mapping, like Google Maps or Uber, become vehicles for the narratives about gendered security.

In defining the ‘offline’, the ‘online’ already exists, and the dichotomy is strangely maintained by the use of interactive maps on personal devices. The essay argues for a more nuanced understanding of internalised constructions of safety, and proposes the idea that institutional surveillance has been a way to discipline gendered bodies historically, and that it is continued with the use of technologies. This may be due to state machinery, or even cultural consent, which would then show up the way that features of mobile applications are marketed.

Cole Flor

Deactivating: An Escape From the Realities of the Online World

A friend posts travels, unboxing the latest gadget, trying out makeup products even before theyÕre out in the market, and the audience hit ÔlikeÕ but deep inside suddenly feel inadequate about their own lives and ask, "What am I doing wrong? Why am I not happy like them?"

The year was 2012 when the earliest of studies on how Social Media contributes to Anxiety went viral.

Even with the complicated nature of mental illnesses the taboo of it all that kept people tiptoeing around the topic - the news was able to crack the glossy facade of online spaces. Back then, it was ridiculous to think that online content the very representation of freedom of expression, information-sharing, open communities caused users some level of distress that affects their mental state. However, with every story that comes out these days of or relating to mental illnesses and social media, people are no longer in denial that being online has become the worldÕs default state. With that primary connection comes a full spectrum of emotions and perspectives that shifted how society views the self, their community, and their roles in being a ÔnetizenÕ. The blurring of lines of whatÕs considered appropriate content, the multiple performances of everyday life, and the imagery that constitutes "happiness", "satisfaction", "significance", "purpose", and "validation" can be described as overwhelming, disconcerting, and stressful to an extent. For borderline Millennials like myself the generation Digital Natives being offline is now an escape from the harsh realities of the online society.

These studies shed light on new narratives that recognized how curating the perfect and seamless life online not only affects the users viewing the content but even the content producers themselves, cracking under pressure and giving into the expectation of "Keeping the Image Alive", whatever it takes. Online life gave "peer pressure" a new meaning.

But users can only deal with so much pressure without sacrificing a part of themselves. During the emergence of social media in early 2000s, users felt the need to go online to escape their personal problems and live in another world where everything seemed easy and possible; where anonymity was powerful and so was virtually traveling in a borderless space where a link opens doors for personal, professional, political, and socio-economic transformation. A quick turn of events, users now wish to escape from the clamor of Twitter threads, Instagram stories, Snaps, and political rants and fake news on Facebook. More and more users deactivate and hibernate, get on board a "social media detox" to rid of the "poison" online content and their [e]nvironments has caused them, all in search for a new something to be called "real".

This narrative essay explores several dimensions why users choose to deactivate, and how that very choice is more of a symptom of a societal anomaly rather than a simple "break" from the chaotic world of social media. It is written in the perspective of a Digital Native - a person who has an inextricable affinity to digital devices but at the same time, is in touch with the analog way of life. The choice of going offline is not only to focus on what used to be real (a life away from the Internet), but it is to gather wits together, stay away from perfectly curated lives to keep sane, and ultimately, to chase life's curiosities and ambitions without having the need to validate achievements with a Like.

Elishia Vaz

Dynamics of the ‘offline’ self-diagnosis, exploration of the corporeal and the politics of information

The corpus of information on health and related topics in the online sphere has caused much concern in relation to self-diagnosis. Concepts like cyberchondria have emerged with the medicalisation of behaviour that uses online health information to explore the corporeal disabilities of the body. While literature has largely concentrated on individual susceptibilities to Cyberchondria and corresponding negative and positive results of the behaviour, there is little that explores the politics of information that characterises this trope. The behaviours of self-diagnosis and exploration of the corporeal often challenge the symptomatology of the offline allopathic physician. The physician often deals with an informed patient. Yet, the questions remain. If online information drives such offline corporeal exploration, who is left out? Are behaviours analogous to cyberchondria a privilege when viewed from a lens of digital marginalization? Are only those who have access to and can make sense of the online health discourse afforded simultaneous access to their offline corporeal bodies in ways that the digitally marginalized are not? This article uses semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews with doctors to explore the dynamics of exploring the offline corporeal in the presence of online health information.

Karandeep Mehra

The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality

In William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the protagonist ‘Case’ ‘jacks in’ and ‘jacks out’ of ‘cyberspace’. Yet when ostracized from cyberspace, when there is no more a possibility of jacking in, Case suffers a withdrawal from the ‘SimStim’ – simulated stimulations of cyberspace – and he crumbles in the hollow ache of this isolation “as the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.”

Neuromancer has already been deemed prophetic by critics and theorists, yet in beginning with Gibson, this paper seeks to throw into relief a problem that has now begun to receive scholarly and academic attention. Namely, the legitimacy of drawing a line between the online and offline, or the virtual and the real. With Case, the real or the offline only becomes possible within the capacity to access or enter the virtual or online. To think of an offline without this capacity, but after it has become possible, is to confront a detritus, a second offline – a hapless clawing dexterity, with dreams that overrun an articulated, identificatory imagination. Anthropologists like Boellstorff, and media theorists like Yuk Hui, have resolved this problem though they have left unexplained this detritus. Instead they resolve the problem through a tight coupling of the online and offline, and rightly so, dismiss any attempts to think of the real in any way unaffected by the virtual.

The purpose of this paper, though in agreement with the work of Hui and Boellstorff, and drawing from them, is to restage the problem to incorporate the unexplained detritus. That to understand how our conceptions of the subject must be recast to apprehend the transformations that the internet has wrought, must not resolve the opposition between offline and online. We must, instead, attend to the way the two offlines emerge, and the conceptualization of the threshold that oscillates to constitute them.

The paper understands these two offlines as emerging in what are called “shitstorms”, or moments of frenzy across social media that incite a whorl of discourse, where the speaking body becomes a medium for the propagation for viral forms. The threshold that constitutes them is the relation of the technical extension that makes this propagation possible. This relation leaves the body in a perpetual state of information entropy – that is as a disordered source of data - which must be ordered to be communicated successfully. This threshold that marks out the phase shift between disorder to order to make possible propagation, makes possible also the shadow of an incommunicable that it casts behind – an incommunicable that when understood through Walter Benjamin’s idea of “the torso of a symbol” can help us recast the subject of a network society, as a subject grounded on this shadow.

Preeti Mudliar

In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women

In telecom policy imaginations that seek to bridge India’s digital divides, public WiFi hotspots are a particular favourite to ensure last mile Internet connectivity in rural areas. As infrastructures, WiFi networks are thought to privilege democratic notions of freedom and connectivity by rendering space salient as networked areas that only require users to have a WiFi enabled device to get online. However, the kind of spaces that WiFi networks occupy are not always accessible by women even though they are ostensibly public in nature. Social norms that restrict and confine women’s mobilities to certain sanctioned areas do not allow their Internet and digital literacies to be visible in the same way as men who are more easily recognized as active Internet and technology users.

The invisibility of women thus struggles to create a presence as desirable subjects of the Internet that WiFi infrastructures should also address. In a community where WiFi networks was hosted in public spaces, women reported hearing about WiFi and seeing men using WiFi, but had never used it themselves even though they were also active users of the Internet. With its inaccessibility, the WiFi infrastructure was a contradictory presence in the community for the women who found themselves confined to using the Internet with spotty prepaid mobile data plans. Their use and experience of the Internet was thus in many ways diminished and limited and they reported experiencing a state of offlineness in contrast to the men in their community who could frequent the WiFi hotspots and avail of high speed Internet leading to more expansive repertoires of use.

This essay proposes a reflection on how the offline can be relational and constituted by the way infrastructures compose certain user subjectivities even while they exile others from being a part of their networks. It expands on Brian Larkin’s contention that in addition to their technical affordances, infrastructures are also equally semiotic and aesthetic forms that are oriented towards creating and addressing certain subjects. It thus asks, how do public WiFi deployments unwittingly create and constitute, what Bardzell and Bardzell call, as ‘subject positions’ of WiFi Internet users and non-users? How do these subject positions inform subjectivities of felt experience of the WiFi that translate to experiencing the offline even while being online?

Rianka Roy

Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance and Activism in the Indian IT&ITES Industry

In India the public availability of the internet in the nineties coincided with the beginning of liberalisation. Online connectivity brought the aura of globalization to this country. The internet was a privilege of the few. The Information Technology sector (along with the IT-enabled service industry) had an elite status. Its employees visited, and immigrated to western countries. In fact, India still remains one the major suppliers of cheap labour in the global IT sector.

Over the years the aura of the internet waned. In Digital India the State now projects the internet as a necessity. However, IT&ITES companies still identify the labour of their ‘white collar’ employees as a superior vocation. This vague claim to sophistication strips the digitally-connected workforce of various labour rights. Long hours, working from home, and surveillance on personal social media are normative practices in this industry. I conducted a case study on Indian IT&ITES employees for my doctoral research (2013-2018). It showed that protocols of online conduct influence these employees’ offline behaviour. For example, even without digital intervention, employees engage in manual self-surveillance and peer-surveillance to complement the digital surveillance of their organisations. They defend this naturalised practice as employers’ prerogative. Offline attributes like reflective glass walls in the office interior and exterior, reinforce this organisational culture.

Online connectivity is so deeply entrenched in this industry that even dissent seeks digital representation. Activist groups like the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) and the Union for IT & ITES (UNITES) run online campaigns parallel to their offline activism—adopting a hybrid method of protest. They have not abandoned the networks that ensnare them. Paradoxically they embody the same principle of exclusivity that their employers enforce on them. In their interviews, some activists have condemned militant trade unionism prevalent in other industries. For them, their online access sets them apart, and above their industrial couterparts. The “salaried bourgeoisie” (Zizek, p.12) refuse to align themselves with other labour unions.

My paper examines the impact of the near-absence of offline parameters in this industry. On the basis of company policies and interviews of IT&ITES employees, it examines if employees can stand up to digital dominance and secure their rights without conventional modes of offline protests.

Simiran Lalvani

The Offline as a Place of Work: Examining Food Discovery and Delivery by Digital Platforms

Digital platforms for food discovery and delivery are generally viewed as convenient, efficient, allowing discovery of choices beyond the familiar and as reliable sources of information regarding credibility through ratings, comments and photographs.

The digital divide after demonetisation became more stark as those with access to the online abandoned the offline service providers for their digital counterparts. The adverse impact of this digital divide on offline, informal goods and service providers like local kirana stores, autorickshaw drivers, hawkers has been highlighted and the paradox of formalising the financial system while informalising labour has been pointed out too. In a similar vein, this essay examines continuities and changes in the practices of food discovery and delivery in the context of new digital platforms. How do practices of offline food discovery and delivery respond to the introduction of digital platforms?

Recently, the Food Safety and Standards Association of India (FSSAI) found that nearly 40 percent of listings on 10 digital platforms like Swiggy and Zomato were of unlicensed food operators. The FSSAI directed these digital platforms to delist these unlicensed entities and also commented that some of the platforms themselves did not have required licenses.

This essay therefore turns attention away from the impact of digital platforms on offline, informal food operators and towards the digital platforms themselves and the large swathes of informal labour employed in the offline by such platforms. It focuses on location-based gig work4 like delivery to highlight the role of these workers in running the online. It does so in order to avoid obfuscating the role of such workers in making the online seem formal, efficient and reliable. Finally, it asks how working for the online in the offline allows a denial of their status as employees and invisibilisation of such work and workers.

Srikanth Lakshmanan

The Cash Merchant

The paper explores the various reasons for merchants remaining offline and using cash over digital payments, both willingly and without a choice, various factors leading to it, the rationale for their choices, policy responses by the state and industry in furthering promotion of digital payments. Demonetisation not only made everyone including merchants seek alternatives to cash in order to continue the business but also provided a policy window for digital payments industry to get a faster regulatory, policy clearances, get the government to invest in incentivising digital payments. Despite these, the cash to digital shift has not taken place and the demonetisation trends in increased digital payments across modes reversed after cash was back in the system.

The paper attempts to document infrastructural, commercial, social issues preventing the adoption and the responses of merchants, industry to various policy prescription/enablement to increase adoption whose outcomes are unclear and have not been evaluated.

Infrastructural issues include technology, policy, regulatory, industry challenges in expanding the existing infrastructure. The lack of physical, regulatory, legal infrastructure prevents growth and merchants from adopting digital payments. Commercial issues include economics of direct and indirect costs to the merchant incurred in owning, accepting digital payments, commercial considerations of various ecosystem players including banks, payment processors that inhibit adoption. Social issues include awareness, literacy including digital, financial literacy, trust, behaviour shift, convenience, exercising choice towards cash.

Ever since the demonetisation, there is a heightened activity from industry and various arms of the government has been active in promoting digital payments. Industry-led by banks and fintech ecosystem has built a range of mobile-enabled digital payment platforms/products such wallets, BHIM-UPI, BHIM-Aadhaar, BharatQR to enable asset light merchant acceptance infrastructure, expanded merchant base in addition to catering to the surge in demand of card-accepting PoS machines. The government had undertaken a massive awareness program Digidhan soon after demonetisation and had also set up National Digital Payments Mission to promote, oversee the sustainable growth of digital payments. Various ministries are also adopting digital payments in their functioning. It also aided behavioural shift through cashback, incentivisation schemes, some specifically targeted at merchants, reimbursement of card processing charges for smaller merchants and even has in principle proposed a 20% discount on the GST. It has remained light touch on the regulation by not setting up the regulator even after 18 months of announcing the same.

The paper will analyse how the efforts of industry and government have been met by the merchant and look at factors which can and cannot be changed with policy interventions and real scope of digital payments in the merchant ecosystem.

Titiksha Vashist

Byung-Chul Han in his celebrated book “In the Swarm” warns us of the dangers of the mob that is increasingly replacing the ‘crowd’ or collective which constituted the mass of politics. He states that no true politics is possible in the digital era, where online communities lack a sense of spirit, a “we” that is now a swarm of individuals. Despite his theoretical brilliance, Han forgets that he cannot talk of the digital, the online without the offline. Politics has occurred, and continues to exist in the offline space, using the internet to spread its wings. It is not the online as-is, which has become the subject of philosophy, politics, art and aesthetics that characterises itself alone, sealed off as a space where events occur, identities formed and movements created. It is in fact, the offline that brings the online into being and gives it a myriad of meaning. While access, priviledge, commerce and capital are major themes while discussing internet access, we must not forget that the online is not merely a question of choice or access- but one that is often carefully disabled on purpose to control the offline. In India as well as other parts of the world, the internet has been interrupted for long durations to exercise political control and power, often crippling populations. According to a report by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), an organisation that keeps a track on internet shutdowns in the country, India has seen 244 shutdowns in 2012, of which 108 have been enforced on 2018 alone. These have been concentrated in areas such as Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East, and in instances of violence and resistance as well.

An internet shutdown is the digital equivalent of a curfew, and its application raises questions regarding its cause, uses and political intent. The internet as means, as an enabler of political action is seen as threatening, given the shift in the way people today communicate with one another. Internet bans and shutdowns are not only matters of commerce, but also pose the question of politics to understand when and how power is exercised. An offline created out of a shutdown is different- it is curated on purpose and calls for alternative means by which functionalities of daily life, resistance, capital and media occur. This essay aims to explore how the political image of the “sovereign” also enters the digital space to carefully construct, cut- off and marginalized voices, all in the name of state security, and law and order. According to philosopher Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is he who decides on the exception, and the offline is increasingly becoming a space of exception where those who control the digital can influence the political in real time. In this context, how do we understand the relationship of power and digital access? This essay focuses on three broad questions: (a) Is there a community online capable of political action that is facilitated by the internet? (b) How does power function in internet shutdowns and are they threats to democratic freedom of expression? And finally, (c) How do we begin to unpack the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ in such a context?

Dr. Yenn Lee

Online consequences of being offline: A gendered tale from South Korea

We hear numerous anecdotes of people facing the consequences of their online activity when offline. Some have lost jobs, have been disciplined in school, or have wound up in court for what they have posted online. However, in comparison, there has been somewhat limited discussion of the reverse scenario, where going about one's day-to-day life offline leads to violations of one's online self.

This essay is concerned with a new and unparalleled phenomenon in South Korea, locally termed molka. Literally meaning 'hidden camera', molka refers to the genre of women being filmed in the least expected of situations, including cubicles in public restrooms and in the midst of car accidents, and the footage being traded and consumed as entertainment. This is distinct from revenge porn or cyber-stalking where the perpetrators usually target a known or pre-determined individual with the intention of humiliating them or to exercise control. The subjects of molka are victimised for merely existing offline and are mostly unaware that their privacy has been violated until they are recognised by someone who knows them and informs them (or inflicts further harm). In response to the rising trend of molka, tens of thousands of frustrated and infuriated women have staged monthly protest rallies in central Seoul since May 2018, urging government intervention. Ironically, women gathered offline to protest against molka have been subjected to further molka crimes with unconsented photos of themselves at the rallies surfacing online and many have been the target of misogynous attacks.

Informed by the author's multi-year ethnographic study of technologically mediated and heightened tensions in contemporary South Korean society, this essay provides a succinct yet contextualised account of the molka phenomenon. With particular attention to the ways in which the phenomenon has developed while shifting between offline and online realms, the essay demonstrates the gendered nature of digital privacy and harassment, and the broader implications of this Korean phenomenon for women in other parts of the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-offline-selected-abstracts

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): List - Call for Sessions

sneha-pp — 2018-11-05T09:15:35Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite sessions that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*.

IRC19: List

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite sessions that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the list - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Call for Sessions

We invite teams of two or more members to propose sessions for IRC19. All sessions will be one and half hours long, and will be fully designed and facilitated by the team concerned, including moderation (if any). Please remember this when planning the session. Everything happening during the session, except for logistical support, will be led and managed by the session team.

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

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

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

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

The deadline for submission of sessions proposals for IRC19 is Sunday, November 18 (extended).

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

Session Title: The session should be named in the form of a hashtag (check the sessions proposed for IRC18 for example).
Session Plan: This should describe the objectives of the session (the motivations and expectations driving it), what will be done and discussed during the session, and who among the people organising the session will be responsible for what. This note need not be more than 500 words long. If your session involves inviting others to present their work (say papers), then please provide a description and timeline of the process through which these people will be identified.
Session Team Details: Please share brief biographical notes of each member of the session team, and their email addresses.

IRC19 will be organised in Hyderabad during January 31 - February 2, 2019. We will announce the venue of the conference in December 2018.

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

Session selection process:

November 18, 2018 (extended): Deadline of submission of session proposals. All submitted sessions will be posted on the CIS website, along with the names of the session team members.
November 23 - December 07: Session selection process. All session teams will select 10 sessions to be included in the IRC19 programme. The votes will be anonymous, that is no session team will know which other session teams have voted for their session. The sessions with most votes will be selected for the final programme of IRC19.
December 14: Announcement of selected sessions, and of travel grants available for members of selected session teams.
January 31 - February 2, 2019: IRC19 in Hyderabad!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Call for Papers

sneha-pp — 2018-12-06T07:00:30Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*.

Call for Papers

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the list - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Paper abstracts (of not more than 500 words) are to be submitted by Sunday, December 23 via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Authors of selected paper abstracts will be informed by Monday, December 31, and will be expected to present the full paper (either in person, or remotely) at the IRC19 - #List, to be held in Hyderabad during Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2019.

Selected paper authors, who are unemployed or underemployed, will be offered support to cover travel expenses fully/partially.

The only eligibility criteria for submitting papers is that they must engage with the thematic of the conference - *list*.

IRC19: List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers

Silicon Plateau: Volume Two

sneha-pp — 2019-03-13T01:01:27Z

Silicon Plateau is an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian city of Bangalore. Each volume of the series is a themed repository for research, artworks, essays and interviews that observe the ways technology permeates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. This project is an attempt at creating collaborative research into art and technology, beginning by inviting an interdisciplinary group of contributors (from artists, designers and writers, to researchers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs) to participate in the making of each volume.

Download the book: Epub and PDF

Silicon Plateau Volume 2 explores the ecosystem of mobile apps and their on-demand services. The book investigates how apps and their infrastructure are impacting our relationship with the urban environment; the way we relate and communicate with each other; and the way labour is changing. It also explores our trust in these technologies, and their supposed capacity to organise things for us and make them straightforward—while, in exchange, we relentlessly feed global corporations with our GPS data and online behaviours.

The sixteen book contributors responded to a main question: what does it mean to be an app user today—as a worker, a client, or simply an observer?

The result is a collection of stories about contemporary life in Bangalore; of conversations and deliberations on how we behave, what we sense, and what we might think about when we use the services that are offered to us on demand, through just a tap on our mobile screens.

Website: siliconplateau.info

Contributors

Sunil Abraham and Aasavri Rai, Yogesh Barve, Deepa Bhasthi, Carla Duffett, Furqan Jawed, Vir Kashyap, Saudha Kasim, Qusai Kathawala, Clay Kelton, Tara Kelton, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Sruthi Krishnan, Vandana Menon, Lucy Pawlak, Nicole Rigillo, Yashas Shetty, Mariam Suhail

Editors

Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

Publisher

Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, 2018. ISBN: 978-94-92302-29-8

Book and Cover Design

Furqan Jawed and Tara Kelton

Copyediting

Aditya Pandya

Supported by

Jitu Pasricha, Bangalore; Aarti Sonawala, Singapore; and the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Cross-posted from Institute of Network Cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-volume-two