Centre for Internet and Society

The Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond

sneha-pp — 2016-01-28T08:25:18Z

Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.

The Zen of Pad.ma

Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.

Biographies

Sebastian Lütgert, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.

Jan Gerber, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma

P.P. Sneha - Mapping Digital Humanities in India

sneha-pp — 2016-12-31T05:56:49Z

It gives us great pleasure to publish the second title of the CIS Papers series. This report by P.P. Sneha comes out of an extended research project supported by the Kusuma Trust. The study undertook a detailed mapping of digital practices in arts and humanities scholarship, both emerging and established, in India. Beginning with an understanding of Digital Humanities as a 'found term' in the Indian context, the study explores the discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. Further it inquires about the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today; transformations in the objects and methods of study and practice in these spaces; and the shifts in the imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and its linkages with humanities practices.

Download: Mapping Digital Humanities in India (PDF)

Foreword

What different forms do digital humanities (DH) research and expertise take around the world? My colleagues and I investigated this question for our report on Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective. In some places, we struggled to find resources on local practices in DH, but fortunately in India we could draw upon the excellent work of P.P. Sneha and the Centre for Internet and Society. In a series of insightful blog posts, Sneha explored the implications of technology for humanities scholarship and surveyed digital humanities practices in India.

Now Sneha has brought this work together in “Mapping Digital Humanities in India.” Rather than falling into naive boosterism or superficial critique, this report plumbs deep questions about humanistic knowledge in a digital age: What do we make of textuality in a digital environment? How might digital tools and platforms contribute to conflicts about authority? How does digital infrastructure affect how humanities research can be practiced? Sneha probes the complexities of these questions, drawing from theorists such as Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault as well as digital humanities scholars such as Franco Moretti and Patrik Svensson.

From this strong theoretical foundation, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” explores specific challenges and possibilities for DH in India, synthesizing rich interviews with a range of Indian scholars. Sneha notes that digital humanities is in an “incipient stage” in India, given the persistence of the digital divide in much of the country, the association of the term with a specific history in the Anglo-American context, and concerns about the uncritical embrace of technology. The report highlights several Indian projects that demonstrate how technology can be used to create and disseminate humanistic knowledge. Creating online resources in Indic languages poses challenges, especially inputting languages and translating between them. To create an online variorum of Nobel prize-winning author Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra had to develop a Bangla character set. Bichitra enables readers to collate texts at the level of the chapter/canto, paragraph/stanza or word. In the realm of film and video, Indiancine.ma (which archives Indian films from the pre-copyright period) and Pad.ma (which houses found and deposited audio, video, and allied materials) offer powerful annotation tools and open up the archive into a space for interpretation and collaboration.

As digital humanities scholars attempt to move past a limited, Anglo-American perspective, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” provides a model for how we can understand local practices in DH and connect them to ongoing discussions about humanistic knowledge. Through this report, readers can navigate central issues in digital humanities, explore the Indian context, and critically examine culturally based assumptions about DH practices.

- Lisa Spiro, Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Rice University, Texas, USA

Executive Summary

In the short time span that the term ‘digital humanities’ (henceforth DH) has been around in the Indian academic landscape, it had generated much discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. What are the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today? How has it transformed objects and methods of study and practice in these spaces? What does it tell us about the relationship between the humanities and technology? Perhaps most importantly, what is our imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and how does it shape our humanities practices?

These are but a few of the questions that this study on mapping key conversations and actors around the term DH tries to explore in some detail. While the study began as an attempt to understand the growing interest around the term itself in India, its scope has extended to explore what specific contexts and conditions are in place in India that give it critical purchase. Five universities now offer various programmes in DH in India - ranging from a Master’s degree to certificate courses, and there have been several workshops, winter schools, seminars and one national level consultation over the last five years. Academic and applied practices focus on building of digital archives, film studies, game studies, textual studies, cultural heritage and critical making to name just a few. While these efforts have managed to create a growing interest in DH, there is still a lack of consensus on what exactly constitutes the field in India. Thus, questions around definition, ontology, and method remain pertinent, as does the need for recognition by the national academic bureaucracy.

Context is another important factor here - most global narratives of DH reiterate a predominantly Anglo-American narrative that draws from a history in the field of humanities computing, as well as a crisis in higher education, particularly in the humanities and liberal arts. The efforts to map different histories of DH in the last couple of years, seen in the emergence of fields such as postcolonial DH and feminist DH, then point to diverse locations, and more intersectional perspectives from which the discourse around the field is being shaped. This is an important opportunity to better contextualise the debates around the digital as well – where conditions and hierarchies of access and usage, transition from analogue to the digital, and the notion of ‘digitality’ itself need to be defined and understood better. In India, with initiatives such as the Digital India programme, and the increasing push for the adoption of digital technologies in every sphere from education to governance, and now a steady push towards a digital economy, there is already a tremendous amount of investment in the idea of the digital by a diverse group of stakeholders. These advancements, and the enthusiasm, must be read within the context of a rather chequered and uneven history of the growth of science and technology in India, the advent of the internet and adoption of ICT4D, and existence of digital divides at different levels. The changing higher education system in India, and criticism around a profit-driven model of education, along with the entry of a large number of private actors in the field in the form of MOOCs and other online platforms in the last few years also contribute to this growing interest in DH, as also much of its criticism. In fact, the global discourse on DH and its linkages with shifts in government funding has seen increasingly polarized positions, with many humanities scholars being uncertain about the political or critical stake of the field, and a concern about the its focus on certain kinds of methods and skill sets at the expense of more traditional ones.

In India, the discourse around DH has largely remained within an academic context so far, although emerging creative practices in art, design and media may have been asking questions of a similar nature for some time now. These include efforts to understand changes in objects of enquiry from analogue to digitised and born digital artifacts, and the need for new methods of work and study that are necessitated by these new digital objects. The process of ‘digitisation’ itself is one fraught with several challenges, and demands a closer look – what are tools, resources and skills available for digitisation or creation of new digital cultural artifacts, and the context that facilitates their creation and active use in humanities research and practice. The ‘text’ as the primary cultural artifact or object of enquiry in the humanities, has undergone several changes with digitisation. Working with digital texts that are fluid and networked, and most often in languages other than English bring forth several new questions that are not only technological but also conceptual. The emergence of new digital cultural archives and online repositories, owing to the (marginally) increased access to internet and digital technologies and the growth of a culture that facilitates collecting and sharing, has greatly expanded the scope of engagement with these questions. The archive in fact forms a significant part of the discourse around DH in India - the challenges and prospects offered by digital cultural artifacts are quite diverse, ranging from modes of documentation, preservation and curation to dissemination over online spaces, and there is a need to understand these in greater detail. Infrastructure emerges as an important political and conceptual question here – while an interest in technological advancement and innovation, and the growth of a culture of free and open access to knowledge to some extent has helped facilitate work in the humanities at large, the lack of access to funding, expertise, and of course adequate, and advanced physical and technological infrastructure , such as computational methods often limits the kind of work that can be done with digital artifacts.

The implications of these changes for the study and practice of humanities are several, particularly with respect to traditional methods of pedagogy and scholarship. The access to resources like Wikipedia and devices like the mobile phone have facilitated a move towards more distributed, non-hierarchical, and individualised models and practices of learning, which simultaneously are premised upon new kinds of centralisation, hierarchies, and aggregation of information. The need to develop new forms of digital pedagogy as well as creating more spaces for such conversations within and outside the academic context would be crucial here. This growth of digitally-engaged humanities practice raises pertinent questions about how exactly the “digital turn” is transforming the humanities, its practice and politics. DH being an interdisciplinary field also offers the possibilities to engage with creative, often alternative practices that exist at the margins of mainstream academia, thus trying to encourage collaborative work across different domains of expertise. The inherited separation of disciplines, or even humanities and technology as suggested by the term DH, may then be contentious here, as it creates the opportunity to explore a twinned history of humanities and technology.

While the field of DH in India continues to develop slowly but surely, and hopefully widely, as more institutions and individuals become engaged with DH and related works, these key questions around its history, methods, and scope will continue to remain pertinent over the next years. For us at the Centre for Internet and Society, studying DH at this historical juncture when the Indian state is rushing towards embracing the “digital” provides a critical lens to understand and engage with the reconfigurations in modes and practices of arts and humanities scholarship and pedagogy in particular, and digital economies of knowledge in general.

CIS Papers

The CIS Papers series publishes open access monographs and discussion pieces that critically contribute to the debates on digital technologies and society. It includes publication of new findings and observations, of work-in-progress, and of critical review of existing materials. These may be authored by researchers at or affiliated to CIS, by external researchers and practitioners, or by a group of discussants. CIS offers editorial support to the selected monographs and discussion pieces. The views expressed, however, are of the authors' alone.

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

January 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-02-26T17:02:23Z

Our newsletter for the month of January can be accessed below.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the first issue of the newsletter (January 2015). Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights

Forbes India in an article titled “Minds that (should) matter” names Sunil Abraham as one of the Thinkers who best explain a rapidly-changing India to the world (and the world to India).

Subhashish Panigrahi won the 2015 Opensource.com Community Awards under the category 'People's Choice Awards'.
Sumandro Chattapadhyay has joined CIS team as Research Director. Sumandro has replaces Nishant Shah who stepped down from the position.
Rishika on behalf of CIS prepared an analysis of the disability exceptions in Copyright Legislations . The blog post provides in detail the country-wise exceptions in copyright legislations.
NVDA team conducted a training programme on Malayalam eSpeak with NVDA in Thiruvananthapuram on January 24 and 25, 2015. Chakshumathi's main trainer Akhil M. took eSpeak Malayalam classes and Dr. Homiyar took classes on NVDA and accessible equipment.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Government of India invited comments on the First Draft of India's National IPR Policy. CIS made its submission.
As part of the Pervasive Technologies project, Nehaa Chaudhari has produced a research methodology document which maps the existing literature around questions of competition law intersecting with intellectual property law on the specific issue of enabling access to sub hundred dollar mobile devices .
Maggie Huang, an intern at CIS as part of the Pervasive Technologies project has written a blog entry which documents, synthesizes, and analyses learnings from attending various music industry trade conferences.

CIS-A2K team on December 28, 2014 organized a MediaWiki hackathon event for Telugu Wikimedia community members to enhance their skills and understanding of technical matters related to MediaWiki usage. The theme of the workshop was “Mediawiki, its extensions and tools to work around” and it aimed at allowing Wikipedians to use MediaWiki tools more effectively.

Subhashish Panigrahi authored an op-ed that highlights the need for taking Odia language to the international fora instead of keeping it confined in the books. The op-ed was published in the Samaja on January 30, 2015.

A journal article by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India along with a few suggestions was published by the Indian National Science Academy Journals.
The Supreme Court, in Sabu George v. Union of India and Ors. (WP (C) 341/2008), is looking into the presence of material regarding pre-natal sex determination on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo that has been falling foul of section 22 of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 as amended in 2002. Geeta Hariharan and Balaji Subramanian analyse this in their blog post.
As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of 'bodies of knowledge' which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. Tejas Pande wrote an abstract which examines the figure of the visual designer, and emerging practices of mapmaking.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The publication has been finalised and is being printed. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the project page. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Update

January 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; January 31, 2015).

Event Organized

Training of Malayalam eSpeak with NVDA (Co-organized by CIS, DAISY Forum of India and Chakshumathi Assistive Technology Centre; Thiruvananthapuram; January 24-25, 2015).

Other

Blog Entries

Disability Exceptions in Copyright Legislations (Rishika; January 12, 2015).
Response to RTI Applications from Different States on Accessibility (Anandhi Viswanathan; January 31, 2015).

Access to Knowledge

As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Pervasive Technologies

As part of the Pervasive Technologies project, Maggie Huang conducted interviews with fabless semiconductor industry professionals in Taiwan. The findings from the samples are highlighted in four part series. The third and fourth parts have been published:

Blog Entries

Pervasive Technologies Project Working Document Series: Document 2 Literature Review on Competition Law + IPR + Access to < $100 Mobile Devices (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 1, 2015).
Relationship between App Developers and App Platforms: An Intellectual Property Perspective (Anubha Sinha; January 7, 2015).
Beyond Alcohol and Angel Investors: Building Business Models in an Age of Mobile Music Streaming (Conference Learnings) (Maggie Huang; January 20, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: The Development of the National IPR Policy (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 22, 2015).
RTI Responses - MHRD IP Chairs: Details of Funding & Expenditure (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 31, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: CIS Comments to the First Draft of the National IP Policy (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 31, 2015).

Participation in Events

Global Intellectual Property Convention (Organized by ITAG Solutions; Mumbai; January 15 - 17, 2015). Rohini Lakshané attended the event.
Library and Information Professionals Summit (LIPS) 2015 (Organized by Society for Library Professionals, National Law University Delhi with UN Information Centre for India & Bhutan and Special Library Association (USA), Asian Chapter; January 23 - 24, 2015; New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari was on a panel discussing Internet Technology and Challenges for Libraries in IPR Regime. She made a presentation on Technology (Internet?), Libraries and the Law (?).

Upcoming Event

Announcing the Institutional Partner for the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 2015 (Organized by the National Law School of India University; New Delhi; December 2015).

Wikipedia

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

Op-ed

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଅନ୍ତର୍ଜାତୀୟ ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ (Subhashish Panigrahi; The Samaja, January 31, 2015).

Blog Entries

Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014 (Rahmanuddin Shaik; January 31, 2015).

Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014 (Rahmanuddin Shaik; January 31, 2015). The event was conducted on December 28, 2014. However, the blog post was published in January 2015.

News and Media Coverage

CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Works of Veerasalingam Pantulu on web (Hans India; January 1, 2015).
Centre should partner local communities in 'Digital India': Expert (IANS and mirrored in Zee News; January 9, 2015).
Musician donates Gwalior Gharana songs to free e-library (Times of India; January 20, 2015).

Announcement

2015 Opensource.com Community Awards : Every year, Opensource.com awards people from our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about open source. Subhashish Panigrahi from the CIS-A2K team won the award under the category 'People's Choice Awards'.
CIS-A2K team also published the Telugu Wikipedia Stats tables. Most metrics have been collected from a partial dump (aka stub dump), which contains all revisions of every article, meta data, but no page content.

Participation in Event

Citizen Media Summit 2015 (Organized by Global Voices; January 24 - 25, 2015). Subhashish Panigrahi was a speaker.

Openness

Journal Article

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers (Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran; Indian National Science Academy Journals, Proc Indian Natn SciAcad 80 No. 5 December 2014 pp. 919-929).

Internet Governance

Articles and Blog Entries

Indians Plead for #NetNeutrality as Airtel Raises Data Charges (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; December 30, 2014). The article was published in the month of December but mirrored on CIS website in January.
Indian Netizens Criticize Online Censorship of 'Jihadi' Content (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; January 6, 2015).
Security and Surveillance - Optimizing Security while Safeguarding Human Rights (Elonnai Hickok; January 19, 2015).
Search Engine and Prenatal Sex Determination: Walking the Tight Rope of the Law (Geetha Hariharan and Balaji Subramanian; January 29, 2015).

Event Co-organized

Security, Governments, and Data: Technology and Policy (Organized by CIS and Observer Research Foundation; January 8, 2015, New Delhi). Sunil Abraham, Pranesh Prakash, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this event.

Participation in Events

Symposium on Human Rights and the Internet in India (Organized by the Center for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information at the University of Hamburg; New Delhi; January 17, 2015). Bhairav Acharya was a panelist.
Winter School on Privacy, Surveillance and Data Protection (Organized by the Centre for Communication Governance (CCG) in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information at the University of Hamburg and the Hans Bredow; Delhi; January 19 - 23, 2015). Bhairav Acharya was a facilitator.
ASSOCHAM National Council on IT / ITes (Organized by ASSOCHAM; New Delhi; January 30, 2015). Geetha Hariharan participated in the event.

Blog Entries

Overview of the Constitutional Challenges to the IT Act (Pranesh Prakash; December 15, 2014).
Reply to RTI filed with BSNL regarding Network Neutrality and Throttling (Tarun Krishnakumar; December 22, 2014).

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Government blocks 32 websites to check ISIS propaganda (Kim Arora; The Times of India; January 1, 2015).
Internet users fume as govt blocks 32 sites (Jaison Lewis; Mumbai Mirror; January 1, 2015).
India 'jihadi' web blocking causes anger (BBC; January 2, 2015). This was also mirrored in Puffington Post.
Govt cracks down on cyber jehad network, blocks access to 32 websites (India Today, January 1, 2015).
Indian Government still blocks 20+ websites - Indian Censorship on Internet (Times of Assam; January 2, 2015).
350% surge in Cyber crimes in last 3 years (Devanik Saha & Indiaspend.org; Hindustan Times; January 20, 2015).
TOI literary festival kicks off today (The Times of India; January 31, 2015).

Digital Humanities

CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

Staff Movement

Sumandro Chattapadhyay has joined CIS as Research Director. His academic interests span over topics of history and politics of informatics in India, new media and technology studies, and data infrastructures and economies. He is also keenly interested in questions and techniques of digital humanities. Recently, Sumandro has completed a study on policy and practices of open data in India as part of the Open Data Research Network managed by the World Wide Web Foundation. He is an involved member of DataMeet, a leading community of open data and data science enthusiasts from India. Sumandro studied economics in Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan, and in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has variously worked on topics of urban development, information technology in governance, data visualisation, and early electronic governance in India with MOD Institute, Azim Premji University and the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Blog Entry

Figures of Learning: The Visual Designer (Tejas Pande; January 30, 2015).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2015-bulletin

June 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-07-27T09:48:16Z

Our newsletter for the month of June 2013 can be accessed below.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the sixth issue of its newsletter for 2013. Hivos published a White Paper by Nishant Shah titled Whose Change is it Anyway?, which attempts to reflect critically on existing patterns of making change and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. The Access to Knowledge team carried out a quantitative analysis to identify trends and growth patterns in Indian Language Wikipedias from September 2012 to April 2013. CIS drafted the Privacy Protection Bill and amended it as per feedback gained from the New Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai Privacy Roundtable Events. CIS made closing statement on the Treaty for the Blind at the WIPO Diplomatic Conference which was concluded with the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or otherwise Print Disabled. In a research paper Nehaa Chaudhari gives an analysis of patent pools, Sameer Boray gives an analysis of video piracy and Pranav Menon gives an analysis of India-EU FTA and issues surrounding data protection and security. In this period we organised the Institute on Internet and Society with support from the Ford Foundation at Golden Palms, Bangalore from June 8 to 14, 2013.

Celebrating 5 Years of CIS
CIS is now 5 years old and we just celebrated this by holding an open exhibition in our offices in Bangalore and Delhi from May 20 to 23, showcasing our work and accomplishments over the period. We had about 170 visitors from the general public coming in to our office. Videos of the event are here.

Google Policy Fellowship
CIS has initiated processing of applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Shortlisted candidates would be informed about their interview. However, as of now there will be a 20 days delay in announcing the list for the interview.

Jobs
CIS is inviting applications for the posts of Developer (NVDA Screen Reader Project) and Editor/Content Developer. To apply for these posts, send in your resume to Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita@cis-india.org). CIS is also seeking applications for the post of Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org).

Accessibility

CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. One is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
CIS and the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR) are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapter on Jharkhand:

The Jharkhand Chapter (by CLPR, June 30, 2013).

Note: All the chapters published on the website are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

Award

Girls in ICT Day 2013 (organized by ITU-APT Foundation of India with support from CMAI - Association of India Communication and Infrastructure, FICCI Auditorium, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, May 7, 2013). Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan got a felicitation for her contribution and achievements in the field of Information and Communication Technology. The honour was conferred during the celebration of this event.

Media Coverage

A Treat for the Blind (by Chitra Narayanan, Business World, June 26, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Wikimedia Foundation has given a grant to CIS to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.

Access to Knowledge (Previously IP Reforms)

WIPO
Pranesh Prakash participated in the WIPO Diplomatic Conference to Conclude a Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities in Marrakesh, Morocco, June 17 to 28, 2013. The conference concluded with the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works by blind persons, persons with visual impairment, and other print disabled persons, by requiring mandatory exceptions in copyright law to enable conversions of books into accessible formats, and by enabling cross-border transfer of accessible format books. Click for:

CIS's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind (by Pranesh Prakash, June 28, 2013).
India's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind (June 29, 2013).

Pervasive Technologies

Pervasive Technologies: Patent Pools (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 27, 2013).

Other (FTA, Piracy)

The Right Way to Fight Video Piracy? (by Sameer Boray, June 6, 2013).
India-EU Proposed Free Trade Agreement: Issues Surrounding Data Protection and Security (by Pranav Menon, June 8, 2013).
India- EU FTA: A Note on the Copyright Issues (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 18, 2013).

Event Participated

Governance in the Age of the Internet and Free Trade Agreements (organized by Thai Netizen Network and co-hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication and the National Science and Technology Development Agency, Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, June 8, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia)

The A2K team consists of three members based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Subhashish Panigrahi and one team member Nitika Tandon who is working from Delhi office.

Statistical Report

Indian Language Wikipedia Statistics (by Nitika Tandon, June 30, September 2012 – April 2013).

Event Organised

A 'Kannada' Wikipedia Workshop for Bloggers (Suchitra, Bengaluru, June 23, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.

Event Co-organised

Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop (co-organised by A2K team and Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Golden Threshold, Nampally, Hyderabad, March 8, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan conducted the workshop.

Upcoming Event

Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education (co-organised by HEIRA-CSCS, Tumkur University, CILHE-TISS and CCS, Indian Institute of Science, July 13, 2013).

Blog Entries

My First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad (by T. Vishnu Vardhan, June 26, 2013). The workshop was conducted in March but the report was published only in June.
Wikipedia Visual Editor (by Nitika Tandon, June 27, 2013).

Press Coverage (including videos)

A Feature on Wikipedia and Telegu Wikipedians (HMTV, May 30-31, 2013). Watch the video.
Wikipedia Live Phone-in Programme (HMTV, June 1, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan took part in a one hour live phone-in programme on Wikipedia.
Wiki donors (by Akhila Seetharaman, TimeOut Bengaluru, June 21, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Dr. U.B. Pavanaja are quoted.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Prajavani, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Samyukta Karnataka, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Vijaya Karnataka, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.
Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion (Suvarna News, June 13, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in a panel discussion around Wikipedia in general and about Kannada Wikipedia in specific.

Openness

Column

Big Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, June 24, 2013).

Event Hosted

RHoK Global Event (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, June 1 – 2, 2013). Yogesh Londhe shares with you a post-event report.

Internet Governance

CIS began two projects earlier this year. The first one on facilitating research and events on surveillance and freedom of expression is with Privacy International and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The second one on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia is with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada:

Cyber Stewards Project
Laird Brown, a strategic planner and writer with core competencies on brand analysis, public relations and resource management and Purba Sarkar who in the past worked as a strategic advisor in the field of SAP Retail are working in this project.

Video Interview

An Interview with Ram Mohan (June 30, 2013)

Event Organized

The Geopolitics of Information Controls: A Presentation by Masashi Crete-Nishihata (TERI, Bangalore, June 19, 2013). About 20 people participated in the event.

Privacy Research

Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 (With Amendments based on Public Feedback) (by Elonnai Hickok, June 30, 2013): CIS drafted the Bill. Based on feedback received from the New Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai Roundtables the Bill was amended.

Interviews

Interview with the Citizen Lab on Internet Filtering in India (June 24, 2013). Maria Xynou interviewed Masashi Crete-Nishihata and Jakub Dalek from the Citizen Lab on internet filtering in India.
Interview with Billy Hawkes (June 20, 2014). Maria Xynou interviewed Billy Hawkes, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on recommendations for data protection in India.

Columns

Indian Surveillance Laws & Practices Far Worse than US (by Pranesh Prakash, Economic Times, June 13, 2013).
World Wide Rule (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, June 14, 2013). Nishant Shah reviews Schmidt and Cohen's book “The New Digital Age”.
Way to Watch (by Chinmayi Arun, Indian Express, June 26, 2013).
The State is Snooping: Can You Escape? (by Snehashish Ghosh, India Together, June 26, 2013).

Blog Entries

India Subject to NSA Dragnet Surveillance! No Longer a Hypothesis — It is Now Officially Confirmed (by Maria Xynou, June 13, 2013).
SEBI and Communication Surveillance: New Rules, New Responsibilities? (by Kovey Coles, June 27, 2013).
Open Letter to "Not" Recognize India as Data Secure Nation till Enactment of Privacy Legislation (by Elonnai Hickok, June 19, 2013).
Open Letter to Prevent the Installation of RFID tags in Vehicles (by Maria Xynou, June 27, 2013).

Events Organised

Technology, Power, and Revolutions in the Arab Spring (CIS, July 2, 2013). Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan gave a talk.
Learn to Secure Your Online Communication! (CIS, Bangalore, June 30, 2013). A Crypto Party was organised.
Learn to Secure Your Online Communication! (IIC, Delhi University, South Campus, New Delhi, July 6, 2013). A Crypto Party was organised.

Event Co-organised

4^th Privacy Round Table Meeting (co-organised with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Data Security Council of India, Mumbai, June 15, 2013).

Upcoming / Ongoing Events

Digital Activism in Europe (The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, July 8, 2013). Bernadette Längle will give a talk.
Privacy Round Table, Kolkata (co-organised with the Federation for Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the Data Security Council of India, Lytton Hotel, Sudder Street, Kolkata, July 13, 2013).

Event Participated In

Biometrics or bust? India's Identity Crisis (organized by the Oxford Internet Institute, July 2, 2013). Malavika Jayaram was a speaker.

Video

Pranesh Prakash on the US snooping into Indian cyber space (by Tehelka, June 2013).

Media Coverage

Indian student in Cornell University hacks into ICSE, ISC database (by Kim Arora, Times of India, June 6, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
‘Hacking’ sparks row over exam evaluation (by Vasudha Venugopal and Karthik Subramanian, Hindu, June 7, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Internet firms deny existence of PRISM (by Javed Anwer and Ishan Srivastava, Times of India, June 8, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash are quoted.
Indian Government Quietly Brings In Its 'Central Monitoring System': Total Surveillance Of All Telecommunications (Tech Dirt, June 8, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Facebook, Google deny spying access (by Javed Anwer, Times of India, June 9, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Govt mulls advisory on privacy issues related to Google, Facebook (by Thomas K Thomas, Hindu Business Line, June 10, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Cyber experts suggest using open source software to protect privacy (by Kim Arora, Times of India, June 22, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Govt goes after porn, makes ISPs ban sites (by Javed Anwer, Times of India, June 26, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Indian govt blocks 40 smut sites, forgets to give reason (by Phil Muncaster, The Register, June 27, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Concerns over central snoop (by Aloke Tikku, Hindustan Times, June 28, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Internet users enraged over US online spying (by Maitreyee Boruah, Times of India, June 29, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Issue of duplication of identities of users under control: Nilekani (by Anirban Sen, Livemint, June 29, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips Under the Radar (by Anjan Trivedi, Time World, June 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access. It will also touch upon various policies and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation of policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules are being published in the Internet Institute website:

Event Organised

Institute on Internet and Society (supported by Ford Foundation, Golden Palms Resort, Bangalore, June 8 – 14, 2013). Pranesh Prakash, Bernadette Längle, Vir Kamal Chopra, AK Bhargava, Ananth Guruswamy, Archana Gulati, Chakshu Roy, Elonnai Hickok, Gaurab Raj Upadhaya, Helani Galpaya, Michael Ginguld, Dr. Nadeem Akhtar, C. Nandini, Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan, Dr. Nishant Shah, Parminder Jeet Singh, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Satyen Gupta, Dr. Subbiah Arunachalam, Sunil Abraham, Tulika Pandey and T. Vishnu Vardhan were speakers at the event. The presentations can be accessed here.

Telecom

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

Newspaper Column

Law & Order through Traffic Systems (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, June 5, 2013 and cross-posted in Organizing India Blogspot).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

White Paper

Whose Change is it Anyway? (by Nishant Shah, Hivos, June 18, 2013).

Digital Humanities

We are building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia.

Blog Entries

Mapping the Field of Digital Humanities (by Sara Morais, June 11, 2013).
A Suggested Set of Values for the Digital Humanities (by Sara Morais, June 12, 2013).
Archive Practice and Digital Humanities (by Sara Morais, June 24, 2013).

About CIS

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2013-bulletin

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 2 Live Blog: Deepak Menon on Water in India

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T05:14:53Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Deepak Menon welcomes us into his world by asking a very common question: Why is water in India of such bad quality?

He begins by pointing out that different groups with different ideologies have varying views on water in India, and very few of these multitudes of groups actually interact with one another to share their knowledge or work together. What is clear, though, is that water is integral to Indian life, and that the major problems associated with water are those surrounding drinking water and sanitation. Most of the drinking water in India is surface water, and most of the surface water is contaminated, which has spurned an interest in using groundwater. Fifteen years ago in Bangalore, apartment buildings were built close to groundwater reserves — now, even some of the most expensive housing is built without proximity to a water resource, so water must be brought in from other areas in large quantities. Groundwater is a large issue as well, as the deeper you drill into groundwater aquifers, the more contaminants are in the water — and they are dangerous to health. Doctors are constantly treating the symptoms of contaminated water without even knowing that the cause is bad water, and this lack of knowledge is widespread across India, except for those that work in the water industry.

The Ministry of Health is not connected or in regular dialogue with the ministry of water management — so no one but the water ministry touches water issues. This lack of knowledge sharing and co-operation is pervasive throughout many Indian spheres, which is why, for Deepak, the process of network creation becomes an important comprehension point. How do we create a network, especially one with the purpose of disseminating knowledge to multiple spheres of society? How do we coordinate multiple actors to mobilize these networks? How do we create both online and offline networks that engage multiple groups? Many associations or appropriate groups are uninterested in talking to one another, so how do we get these groups talking? If we are unable to connect groups within one sector, how will we do it between sectors or even regions?

Deepak is interested in a model of network existence and creation. It's hard to create a network if many basic questions (How much time does it take? How long will it last) have no answers. Issues of structure also complicate the inclusion or participation of particular actors into a network framework — some individuals and groups are not used to working in non-hierarchal environments. How do we form long-lasting networks between different groups? Does the process differ between online and offline networks?

One participant reflected on the over-drawing of water and its relation with corruption — does corruption enable over-use of water resources? Deepak responded that this happens in both industrial and private use of water, as well as many other spheres in Indian society. The participant also put forth the idea of using mobile technology to collectively map water resources. Deepak pointed out that again, this is an issue of the creation of networks — if we were able to create the collective interest in creating this mapping activity, then it would be very useful, but so far, attempts to create the needed networks have not been successful. Crowd mapping was also suggested, and it was pointed out that thinking about crowd-mapping groups is a good exercise in envisioning the kinds specifics of the networks that need to be created.

Another participant pointed out that much of the dialogue about and interaction with water exists within traditional knowledge systems, so we must be aware of these systems of consumption and understanding when dealing with water in India.

Deepak finishes by asking us to consider the following three questions:

When have you felt most networked in your life? When do you experience a network?
List networks that you are part of online and offline.
What are the few defining characteristics that you felt that these networks possessed?

While I do believe that networks often become apparent when you are excluded for them, as Nishant discussed on our first day, in my own experience, the identification of a network structure in an environment, I originally thought was hierarchical was when I felt the most networked. However, I have experienced my own belonging to networks before this point, but I believe that I viewed those networks that are relevant in my own life as being predominately social. I tend to see membership to most networks as being involuntary, but I believe that this stems from quite a narrow comprehension of network theory.

As for Deepak’s discussion, I believe that the search for a methodology for the creation of networks could be problematic. If it is true that the moment we see a network in its entirety is the moment that the network falls into crisis, what does this say about the essence of a network that was actively created with a specific goal in mind? Is it sustainable if the nature that connects the nodes of the network is not inherent or invisible, but constructed and clearly understood by all members? And what does this say about the orchestrator or architect of the network? When a tangible entity constructs a network, is this a hierarchical process? Can it result in a network, or is the structure created inherently hierarchical?

If you're interested in being part of this dialogue, please tweet your answers to these questions to #hol12!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-water-in-india

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 2 Live Blog: On Technology and Affective Indian Feminism(s)

alok — 2012-10-09T09:39:08Z

Saumya Pant from the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad begins the day with a controversial and important talk "For the Love of Child? The Economy of Desire in Cases of Transnational Surrogacy". Pant invites us into the taboo world of international couples travelling to India to receive a child from a surrogate mother. After Oprah featured a story on Indian commercial surrogacy mothers, India has seen a surfeit of foreign couples looking for a — comparatively inexpensive — surrogate mother. Surrogate mothers must be between 20 to 45 years old, married, and have at least one child. They stay in carefully regulated spaces and are provided with vitamins, extravagant meals, and access to a television. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, Pant is interested in privileging the narratives of the Indian surrogates themselves. What motivates them to participate in this emotional journal of ten months?

Inspired by transnational feminist analyses, Pant concedes that one’s privilege in the world system is always linked to another women’s oppression and exploitation. However Pant wants to push and tease out this analysis — asking us to re-imagine the agency and affectual relations that mediate these surrogacy interactions. Pant shows how emotions actually do things in these interactions. Emotions circulate and create relationships of attachment between child, surrogate mother, commercial parents. This affect is not permanent, rather it is ephemeral. Pant traces these circulations of economies of hope and love and shows how Indian surrogate mothers position themselves as a 'giver' — in the most non-capitalist sense of the idea — to construct and experience surrogacy as a legitimate choice.

Pant’s project raised serious issues of methodology for the participants. One participant felt that in the turn to affect theory, we neglect the very real experiences of pain and exploitation that are apparent in these interactions. All in attendance re-iterated the importance of understanding how women perceive their own bodies, versus the various theories that govern how they should see their bodies. Others discussed how this project presents a useful opportunity to tease out the ‘body’ from the ‘bodily.’

Indeed, it seems as if Pant has stumbled on a very compelling research project — one which raises serious questions of (post)colonialism, citizenship, tourism, ethics, among others. I’m particularly intrigued by exploring the possibility of the Indian surrogate mother as a Global South queer figure. Much theorising in Western queer scholarship (especially explorations in queer temporality) has positioned ‘queerness’ as opposed to ‘reproduction.’ The surrogate mother calls this framing into question – how is reproduction mapped differently on bodies of women of color in the Global South? How can we imagine queer ways of actually participating in reproductive economies?

Gita Chadha from Mumbai ended the day by sharing her perspective on Thinkathon themes from her background in Feminist Science Studies. Chadha begin with raising her concerns with the metaphor of surrogacy — what does it mean to use a metaphor that is derived from such a potentially traumatic and embodied situation of women? Chadha outlines a brief history of the development of South Asian Feminist Science studies and then follows this summary by asserting that there are three major relational cognitive-affects of modernity that we continue to produce in postmodern times: the self system, the truth system, and the community system. For Chadha, the wholeness of these categories is contested in contemporary times with the digital turn: the self becomes hyphenated, the truth becomes destabilised, and the community fractured.

Coming at this digital moment from a feminist background Chadha reminds us how feminist positions on technology have shifted from viewing women as victims of technology to women as active claimants of technology. She then highlighted the particular challenge of Indian feminists who discuss issues of technology in negotiating their relationship to Western scholarship, including Dona Harraway. After reviewing this genealogy, Chadha argues that currently the real and the virtual in a sense serve as surrogates for each other and deliver a sense of self, a notion of truth(iness), and experience of community.

Chadha concludes by applying this feminist epistemology to the Pink Chaddi Campaign — a recent expression of ‘collective rage’ put forth by Indian women tired of the State’s regulation of the public space. Chadha draws our attention to the way that digital media was central to this campaign. While some critical feminist voices felt that the use of the chaddi in this campaign undermined the seriousness of the issue of violence against women, Chadha asks us to see how truth and community shift and are mediated by technology in these campaign spaces.

Chadha’s framework allowed participants to talk about how what gets lost in science is the technology of science itself – how science valorises one scholar at the cost of collaborative processes. Once again questions of the efficacy of the visual domain arise. What does it mean to prioritise the visual within the affective turn? What also emerges is the ability to assert a truth with limited knowledge.

I find Chadha’s commitment toward feminism as a particular epistemological/theoretical perspective (versus simply a mode of activism) very important. Discussions in media/digital theory often assume a de-gendered subject and Chadha does good work in bringing in the critical question of gender difference within our discussion of theory and networks.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-technology-and-feminism

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Finding and Funding the Masses

alok — 2012-10-09T06:55:50Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multi-disciplinary scholars and practitioners. The aim of the workshop is to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and to produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Nishant Shah of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore began the final day of the THinkathon with his presentation “Citizen action in the time of the network: beyond spectacles of change.” Nishant begins by describing the climate of the current digital moment. We are dealing with unprecedented questions of territory. Democratic states are facing resistance with their promising notes for the future. With increasingly queer boundaries between ‘citizen’ and ‘State’ mediated by digital relations, we are looking at a radical re-imagining of the role of the State and its sovereignty.

These past few years – in the midst of the Arab Spring – we’ve heard a lot about the new era of digital activism. Shah is interested in pinpointing what is actually ‘new’ about this activism. He begins with a bold assertion: this newness is indicative of new forms of citizen action, but not necessarily new infrastructures of activism. Shah argues that what is actually ‘new’ about this activism is that these digital technologies present an imperative that (activist) events be rendered intelligible and accessible within their paradigms. These technologies presume that a legible and intelligible network exists, despite temporal and geographical differences. What becomes evident is that the system makes invisible those actions that cannot be interpreted by the system – they only recognise actions that can be accounted for by the system. The study of networks presents a problematic proposition because of its self-referential network – any phenomenon is explained only through its relationality with other phenomena. To illustrate this, Shah presents the provocative question: “If a tree falls in a lonely forest and nobody tweets about it, has it really fallen?” The very acts of witnessing have been replaced by tools of networking.

Shah roots his epistemology within a case study of the Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala in China. He shows how discourse around this event has marked it as a ‘failed’ event and representative of how there can be no citizen action within authoritarian contexts. Shah suggests that another way of looking at this event is a phenomenon which cannot be accounted for by the network – a radical critique presented by activists that cannot be rendered intelligible by the current system. This raises a larger anxiety for Shah and the participants: if events do not become accessible it always gets counted as a failure and gets lost in public memory.

Shah’s presentation raised vibrant discussion on the politics of visibility, knowing, and the avante-garde. Participants suggested that Nishant look into the work of artists and theorists like Ariella Azoulay who attempt to conceptualise actions outside of the paradigm of rights, citizenship, and propriety. What does it mean to do in action knowing that it will be shut down – a politics of despair, if you will. What also becomes apparent is the limits of revolution – there has not been a transformation of a system. Rather, the system has included more citizens into its fold. The conversation reveals that we need to find a more critical way to discuss networks – a language in which the network is not clichéd, but rather porous.

Renée Ridgway from NEWS Amsterdam follow’s Shah’s presentation with her presentation “Surrogacy: Bodies, States, Networks: Crowdfunding for funding the crowds, a new model for the distribution of wealth?” Ridgway takes a departure from other presentations by directly implicated the participants in one of her current art projects. Ridgway reviews one of her current research-art projects on documenting indigenous plants in Kochin Kerela – a location with histories of Dutch colonialism. Ridgway has visited and exhibited in Kerela in the past and is now interested in expanding on her work and developing a documentary about these issues. She asks the participants: how does she fund this project without the State?

In rooting questions of State reparation, (neo)colonialism, race, and other central political questions within a tangible project – Ridgway invites the crowd into critical discussion. Participants remain wary of the way in which technology can serve as a ‘trojan horse’ to build collaboration with communities. What becomes apparent is that Ridgway, as an artist, has become a surrogate for the State for the people she worked with on the project in India. Questions of collaboration remained central to this discussion – how do we imagine collaboration as a condition of care by the network, one that requires investment and material labour to perform a particular task. Also, questions of neoliberalism emerged. What is a collective process that relies on affective and material labour by diverse peoples becomes lost in the narrative of ‘individual’ artist.

I share participants concern that we complicate the role of an artist. What becomes apparent is that dynamics of class, race, and (neo)colonilism can manifest themselves in the technological realm. While I agree that technology can present a compelling platform to explore solidarities and collaborations across difference, it can simultaneously function as a site that reifies these oppressions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-finding-and-funding-the-masses

Digital Humanities in India- Mapping Changes at the Intersection of Youth, Technology and Higher Education

sneha — 2014-03-05T12:21:52Z

As part of the collaborative exercise on mapping the field of Digital Humanities in India, a series of short-term research projects were commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore in November 2013. A day-long workshop was organized at CIS on January 28, 2014 to discuss the learning from these projects and explore questions for further engagement with the field.

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS, in collaboration with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore has initiated a short-term project to map the nature of work being done in the field of Digital Humanities (DH) in India. The mapping exercise comprises of conversations with key people working in higher education, digital technology, media, digitization and archival practice and other allied fields, and an overview of institutions and research undertaken in DH in India. The project also includes a series of short-term commissioned research studies on emerging digital habits, socio-political participation, citizenship and identity politics and new modes of research and pedagogy in the humanities in India. A brief description of the studies is as follows:

LGBT Youth and Digital Citizenship – this study explores the concept of digital citizenship with a focus on how youth from the LGBT community engage with digital technologies such as social media, mobile phones and radio to negotiate questions of identity politics, activism and citizenship in cyberspace.
- Researcher: Ditilekha Sharma, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Mapping the nature of Content on Wikipedia - analyses the nature of content produced on Wikipedia, with a focus on the representation of women and gender-related topics to explore if online knowledge platforms contain and perpetuate a systemic gender-bias.
- Researcher: Sohnee Harshey, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Feminist Activism and Use of Social Media – an ethnographic exploration of social media platforms to explore how feminist activists have engaged with digital technology and if this has allowed for a redefinition of political organization and new forms of activism within the movement.
- Researcher: Sujatha Subramanian, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Confessions in the Digital Age – looks at the rising trend of ‘confession pages’ on social media, most of which are located in an educational context, and explores the manner in which the digital space and its assumed anonymity has reconfigured this practice and the interaction between youth and technology.
- Researcher: Rimi Nandy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Survey of Digitised Materials in Bengali – an extensive survey and report of printed digitized materials in Bengali across a few selected themes. The objective of this exercise is to map the nature of available digitized materials and explore possibilities of their use in the higher education classroom.
- Researcher: Saidul Haque, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Mapping the Digital Classroom - maps the changes in classroom teaching-learning practice with the advent of digital technology – how do students and teachers respond to the use of digital content and technology in the classroom, how are these resources/tools accessed, used and shared and what are the changes necessitated in curricula and pedagogy as a result.
- Researchers: Shrikanth BR, Jain University, Sushmitha Sridhara, independent researcher and Vijeta Kumar, St. Joseph’s College of Arts and Sciences, Bangalore

HEIRA-CSCS has engaged with some of the above questions as part a four-year project titled ‘Pathways to Higher Education (supported by the Ford Foundation), which looked at the problem of quality of access in higher education for students from disadvantaged sections of society. The present collaborative mapping exercise aims to build on some of the learnings from this project, particularly with respect to the linguistic and digital divide in higher education. The short-term research studies were commissioned by HEIRA as part of this initiative, to be conducted across multiple locations in India over a period of two-three months beginning from Nov/Dec 2013.

Workshop on Digital Humanities

With the objective of bringing together the above researchers, other stakeholders in DH and higher education, and the larger team at HEIRA-CSCS and CIS for a discussion on the projects and to explore future directions, a day-long workshop was organized at CIS on January 28, 2014. The workshop included detailed discussions and feedback on the research projects, as well as a larger group discussion on questions and themes pertinent to digital humanities research in the Indian context.

A key concern was that of defining the field itself, and the problems of conflating DH with the existing fields of research such as cyber culture or digital culture studies. The need to directly address the question of technology itself was also seen as pertinent to research in digital humanities, in terms of method and content. This brought up related questions such as how one imagines the internet or the larger digital space, what it enables and the modes of representation that are already available, and the new conceptions of the self, citizenship, activism and forms of identity that are generated in this space. More importantly, does technology change the way in which some of these questions are asked was a crucial point of discussion.

The possibilities of these modes of learning being introduced in the classroom and whether they can transform traditional teaching-learning practices were also discussed to some extent. This was particularly taken up in relation to Wikipedia as a collaborative knowledge repository, along with the larger debates around representation of knowledge and questions related to politics and activism around or generated by alternative knowledge practices. The importance of the ‘link’ as a deeper conceptual category (here in the context of the internet, say the hyperlink), and the possibility of it becoming a site of politics itself was a suggestion that came up in the discussion. The de-territorialisation of knowledge that a discursive space like Wikipedia allows is important in understanding and further problematising knowledge production practices, which would form a key aspect of DH research. The importance of distinguishing information from knowledge was also emphasized, and more pertinently, the problems of attribution of an authority to knowledge that has been collaboratively produced and with verification were other questions taken up for discussion. Wikipedia then could be seen as an incipient form of knowledge, wherein verification is inherent in the technology that is used in the process of knowledge production. The possibility of using the data that Wikipedia can generate to then reframe some of these questions were also discussed to some extent. The notion of data, or rather ‘big social data’ and how that can be used to now study cultural and social practices is a central premise in DH, and it was generally agreed that this needs to be addressed in a substantive manner in future engagement with these questions.

A related question was that of the archive, and more specifically the model of the collaborative and public archive that is becomingly increasingly prevalent given the proliferation of gadgets and new technologies of digitization. While this is a positive move with respect to preservation of materials, particularly in regional languages, accessibility to these materials online, and more importantly their use in scholarship still continues to be a problem, which needs to be urgently addressed. Digitisation needs to therefore make the material more flexible and active – our imagination of the archive also needs to follow an ‘outward logic’ of producing new layers of knowledge around material rather than an inward one of just preservation.

The workshop also addressed some very pragmatic concerns related to methodology and the manner in which one frames a research enquiry about the digital space - including sketching the domain of enquiry and formulating research questions that can adequately explore and capture the nuances of changing social-cultural practices in the digital realm. While the problem of defining DH as a new domain of enquiry still remains, the discussions helped bring to the fore what could be pertinent and substantive areas of further engagement in the field.

Click here to find the workshop schedule.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-in-india-mapping-changes-at-intersection-of-youth-technology-higher-education

Questions to Nishant Shah

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T08:54:21Z

Dr. Nishant Shah had a text interview with the Hybrid Publishing Lab around questions on Digital Humanities.

The interview was published on the website of Leuphana University in February 2014.

Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He researches at Leuphana and in The Netherlands. His topics are cyborgs and cyberspaces.

Why do you think we are all cyborgs?
Shah: Generally, when we think of cyborgs we think of futuristic beings – things that we want to become. But that imagination pretends that we don't have an intimate and intricate relationship with different technologies. When we look at the world that we live in, we can immediately recognize that we continually live with technologies that help us live and to live together. These technologies are so natural a part of our life that we have forgotten to think of them as technologies – like electricity or think of technological products – like clothes. It is good to remind ourselves, when we think of ourselves as 'already cyborgs', that our lives are intertwined with technologies of different kinds, and that we need to think of our human, social and political conditions as mediated by the technological.
What does this knowledge mean to our society?
Shah: Thinking of ourselves as cyborgs living in cyborg societies helps us look at the role of technologies differently. We come to realize that technologies are not just something that we use in order to achieve a task. Our usage of technologies changes who we are, individually and as a society. So we need to take the politics of technology infrastructure and regulation seriously. For example, the privatization of knowledge industries, closed and proprietary publishing of research that is produced through public funding, produces societies where only a privileged elite can access this knowledge. We will have to look at questions of open access, open source, open knowledge, etc. as a part of our larger social problems instead of thinking of them as 'technology' questions. Similarly, technologies of access define how different identities and groups are shaped and consumed and we need to now start looking at intersections of technology and society rather than imagining them as separated domains.
Does the Digital Change bring about advantages or disadvantages for our society?
Shah: I feel that this is a wrong question to ask. It presumes that we actually have only these two options, and that there is a normative, universal truth that determines what the advantages and disadvantages are. Every shift in technological development comes with a bunch of possibilities. Some of these possibilities might offer us the promise of a just, open, inclusive and fair society. Some of them might portent a compromise of our basic human and social rights. The processes used for both are the same. In that case, the questions of power, or ownership, of accountability and transparency will need to be built into the conversations around digital. So the question is not to ask whether the digital in itself is good or bad. However, the digital does provide us with alternatives to some of the most endemic problems around power imbalance, abuse and discrimination. And it remains for us to see, how we are going to shape our societies to fulfill these promises. If we don't take these questions seriously, we might end up amplifying our problems through the very technologies that can otherwise be used to achieve these dreams.
Which advantages do you see, especially for students?
Students, for me, are the people who are going to live the science fiction futures that we imagine in the present. So while we can make a list of all the different tools and practices that students can use right now, for education, for collaboration, for sharing and for research, what is more important is to realize what these technologies help students in thinking about their futures. One of the biggest things that the digital produces for students, or any young people, is that it makes them think of themselves as agents of change. With the digital, with the ability to mobilize and connect resources and people together, the young are often able to make strategic interventions to correct problems in their immediate environments. And that is the future of our societies – to build an active civil society that is going to contribute to sustainable, relevant and nuanced solutions for the worlds that we want to live in.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/questions-to-nishant-shah

Digital Humanities: The Ecto-Parasite

anirudh — 2014-03-12T13:04:28Z

This blog entry, exploring Jacques Derrida's Mochlos can be read in three ways. The numbers below refer to the cells which should be read in the specified order. A.) 1-3-4: This essay views knowledge and the University as a technology and asks whether the Digital Humanities under this framework is unnecessary and elitist. We analyze the elitism through Kants attempts to distinguish the University's duties of truth and action and then find out why Derrida thinks this distinction is impossible to make because of the nature language. B.) 1-2-4: This essay starts off the same way but goes into the devouring margins of the University, whether its possible to safeguard against intrusion if the University is viewed as a language act and flips the question to see if the University is a parasite on the outside world and uses the Digital Humanities in this negotiation of power. It goes further to see if this parasitism is inevitable where there is language. C.) 2-4: This is a subset of the previous essay but stands alone as a commentary on a different kind of effect of capitalism on the University from the one explored in the previous blog.

1.) As the breathing pod opens to show us a scarred skull being covered by a black helmet, we are for the first time in Star Wars reminded that Darth Vader is both human and machine, sick flesh and well metal, temporal visage and permanent facade. Now assume this melancholic disposition as a condition of the University and you immediately have many entry points into Jacques Derrida’s Mochlos which is his meditation on the remains of the University since Kant wrote his Conflict of the Faculties. If we were to begin at the beginning, then Kant’s pre-inaugural vantage point suggests a natural birth of the University. In the very opening of the Conflict of the Faculties, Kant says of the University,”this is not a bad idea”. Commenting on this seemingly flippant remark, Derrida says “And, with his well-known humor, abridging a more laborious and tortuous story, he pretends to treat this idea as a find, as a happy solution that would have passed through the head of a very imaginative person, as the invention, in sum, of a fairly rational device that some ingenious operator would have sent to the state for a patent”. Just as with Vader, though, there is nothing natural about the nature or origin of the university or its internal structures, which seem to be based on principles, but are actually the effect of non-university agencies, be it the Prussian bureaucracies in the time of Kant or the hyper capitalized society today. The nature of the synthetic origin story, however, goes to a more fundamental level than any social influences, to the technological birth of knowledge and the technology that runs on and runs for knowledge; the University. It is a permanent façade like a screen that has always been invisible to the movie-goer even when it was silver. On the essence and destination of the Western University, Derrida says it “tries to ponder its essence and its destination in terms of responsibility, with a stable reference to the one idea of knowledge, technology, the state and the nation, up to the very limit at which a memorial gathering of thought makes a sudden sign toward the entirely-other of a terrifying future.” This synthetic vision of the University is essential to achieve a resistant reading of Kant who viewed the University as a largely analytic and non-synthetic (in the chemical and the Kantian sense) entity in its essence and destination. The creation stories of knowledge, from the cave paintings to the printing press to the University are not just incomplete without technology but self-effacing. What do I mean by this? We look to one of Derrida’s modern University responsibilities for the answer. “In the ties of the university to society, in the production, structure, archivization and transmission of knowledges and technology (of knowledge as technologies), in the political stakes of knowledge, in the very idea of knowledge and truth, lies the advent of something entirely other.” (bold mine) We have to now begin to think of knowledge itself as a technology, as a tool to transmit thought efficiently by bundling it, chronologising it and indeed as a technology that re-organizes itself through other technology, sometimes in the form of a University, in order to make its transmission more efficient. Derrida, however, mistakenly proceeds to characterize the techno-political structure of knowledge as a modern condition as having evolved out of the industrial age and evolved past political and juridical ethics. “Given a certain techno-political structure of knowledge, the status, function and destination of the university would no longer stem from the juridical or ethico-political language of responsibility.” Here he makes the case for an observed change in the state-of-affairs so fundamental that the ‘what’ and the ‘to who’ of the University’s responsibility changes. When the archivization and the transmission of knowledge uniquely and radically changes as a result of a techno-politico-capital agency then the exigent pre-matter in the University attempts to form a discipline to countenance this, not unlike Digital Humanities. If our previous understanding of technology and knowledge remains true, then a discipline called Digital Humanities (which can only be formed by pre-supposing the latter proposition) remains pre-mature, if not misguided. This is a second entry point for the Digital Humanities after the one hypothesized in the last blog entry which involved a propitiation of the humanities to capitalism.	2.) The Conflict of Konigsberg explored the extent to which the modern university is plagued by the influence of capitalism. Although Kant’s writing is animated by external threats he perceives to the University, he refrains from referring to the industrial influences on the University as slurs or view them as a complete disaster. He did not, for instance, fear the influence of competing institutions, social structures, ideas of knowledge and education within the University. Today, however, “there can be very serious competition and border-conflicts between non-university centers of research and university faculties claiming at once to be doing research and transmitting knowledge, to be producing and reproducing knowledge.” These non-academic entities are often placed in the university because certain research styles and practices or even types of research are deemed by the politico-capitalist regime to escape the academic elements of the university. The regime calculates that data banks maybe the best forms of storage and non-scholars, albeit trained in the universities, that become government agents, diplomatic aides and other instruments of power are better users of the data. Suddenly, the scholar is no longer the ideal university researcher, the library is no longer the ideal type of archive and the university loses its centrality. “It feels menaced in certain places around its own body; menaced by the development of the sciences, or, a fortiori, by questions from science and on science; menaced by what it sees as a devouring margin. A singular and unjust menace, it being the constitutive faith of the university that the idea of science is at the basis itself of the university.” The scene in the breathing pod above is the first time we see Darth Vader in a position of vulnerability as the framing of the shot suggests a murky margin between a normal human and what he has become. He is a host to parasites on his body that perform functions of survival better than he, allowing the world to believe that he is the parasite and the machine is the soul. Kant, on the other hand, did not accept this and wanted the legitimate and legal power to exclude parasiting. To this, Derrida responds, “Now the possibility of such parasiting appears wherever there is language, which is also to say a public domain, publication, and publicity. Wishing to control parasiting, if not to exclude it, is to misunderstand, at a certain point, the structure of language acts. (If, therefore, as I note in passing, analyses of a deconstructive type have so often had the style of theories of ‘parasitism,’ it is that they too, directly or indirectly, involve university legitimation.)” Here, the University is a language act when he runs it through a hermeneutic treatment and renders it as a system of infinite negotiation and interpretation where the language exists in service of itself. When translated to the University, he explains the inevitability of parasitism by viewing the University itself as a self-serving system that is parasitical on the exteriority which it sanctimoniously claims to resolve. It is interested in self-organization and the curation of power similar to the behavior of language and knowledge itself, meaning that the University, at a philosophical level, occupies the same space as elements it saw as parasitic to it. This is applicable to the faculties and disciplines as well since they are also language acts. If faculties also acquire the same properties as language, then the Digital Humanities can be seen as merely a form of survivalist self-organization of faculties like the humanities whose margins are threatened in the techno-capitalist regime. It is also the digital curation of power that seeks to re-emerge as the ideal type of archive and, indeed, the ideal technology of knowledge.
3.) Prematurity and being misguided, even if excusable in a tradition that has phrenology and eugenics in its history, are followed by the elitism. Elitism is observable at an empirical a posteriori level in Kant’s lower faculties[1], especially of the humanities and philosophy, because of the commercial untranslatability and resulting class difference in enrollment. The digital humanities under this lens is therefore a discipline that sustains an even smaller cross-section of society not based on privilege of intellect which celebrates the ability to employ both hemispheres of the brain but the privilege of means. However, it travels deeper than that to a deontological level. The elitism is a necessary and even intentional part of the lower faculties based on Kant’s logic of the University’s duty. To understand this, you will have to recollect from the previous blog post that Kant thought that the lower faculties should act as opposition parties from the left side of the parliament of learning. In other words, “One would have to imagine today a control exercised by university competence (and, in the last instance, by philosophical competence) over every declaration coming from bureaucrats or subjects representing power directly or indirectly, the dominating forces of the country as well as the forces dominated, insofar as they aspire to power and contribute to political or ideological debate. Nothing would escape it — not a single position adopted in a newspaper or book, on radio or television, in the public pursuit of a career, in the technical administration of knowledge…” You will have to imagine a hypothetical world in which every usage of public knowledge will be subject to the ‘censorship of the faculties’ as Kant puts it. Though this conjures up the image of an almost celestial tyranny, the University in this world remains a force for good because the power of judging is in the ultimate service of truth and the University is stripped of all executive power and means of coercion. “In effect,” Derrida says, “its power is confined to a power-to-think-and-judge, a power-to-say, though not necessarily to say in public, since this would involve an action, an executive power denied the university.” Therefore, the contradiction in existing as the left side of the parliament of learning and not acting is resolved through elitism, through passing judgment in “a reserved, intra-university and quasi-private language, the discourse, precisely, of universal value which is that of philosophy.” When the lower faculties exist, in both a theoretical and consequential silo, in an exclusive and separated condition from the rest, I for one would be very cautious before further inductions.	4.) This brings us to a discussion of the second diagram in this blog, which is the written language itself. It is demonstrative of Derrida’s statement that Kant, in the Conflict of the Faculties, speaks only of language. Kant thinks of a language of “truth and one of action, between one of theoretical statements and one of performatives”. According to speech-act theory, there is an opposition of “performative” and “constative” language. While constatives describe the world, performatives do something in the world. The first aspect of the diagram is in the final sentence of the third cell which ends in a veiled warning about the Digital Humanities through the example of a performative utterance. The second aspect of the diagram is the last sentence of the second cell, which describes the Digital Humanities in a constative utterance. Although Kant needs these statements to be separate for the boundary between truth and action, power and reason to be clearly demarcated , Derrida is thoroughly unconvinced that this is the case. This takes us back to Saussure’s linguistic signifiers and the signified. Saussure was very influential on Derrida and expounded the theory that every word and sentence has a shape and an ideational element regardless of the structure. If we go back to examine the last sentence of the second stream, then even though it is merely explaining a state-of-affairs, it sends across a clear message that makes us think of the Digital Humanities in a certain way, making it as much a performative statement as the first. While Kant strenuously explains the distinction between truth and action by arguing for knowledge against the publication of knowledge, Derrida sweeps it aside and asks where the publication really begins. He says, “Language is an element common to both spheres of responsibility, and one that deprives us of any rigorous distinction between the two spaces that Kant at all costs wanted to dissociate. It is an element that opens a passage to all parasiting and simulacra.” Indeed, the Digital Humanities continue to be parasitic and unnecessary since the University is a language act and a technology.

[1] According to Kant, the lower faculties were split among historical knowledge (history, geography, philology, the humanities and the empirical knowledge of the natural sciences) and pure rational knowledge (pure mathematics, pure philosophy and the sciences)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-the-ecto-parasite

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:47:27Z

The emergence of digital humanities as a new field of interdisciplinary research enquiry has also seen growth in literature around the problem of its definition. This blog-post lays out some of the conceptual frameworks for the mapping exercise taken up by CIS to look at digital humanities in India.

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. The digital humanities have emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technology and the human 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 digital humanities discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. However, digital humanities 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 question of what is digital humanities has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of digital humanities – 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. 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. David 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.’[1]

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 a series of posts over the next couple of weeks. 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 frameworks, which we hope will inform also larger concerns of the digital humanities programme 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”[2]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 the digital humanities therefore be an attempt to bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here.
The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with digital humanities practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core digital humanities 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 digital humanities – 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 digital humanities research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in digital humanities – 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[3] 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 digital humanities. This comes with the perception of digital humanities being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities to reinvent themselves by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. Digital humanities has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may 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 digital humanities 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 digital humanities 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 the digital humanities works with or tries to address this particular formulation of the digital humanities.

Locating these concerns in India, where the field of digital humanities 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 digital humanities 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.”[4]

The digital humanities 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 digital humanities 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 digital humanities.

This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of these thoughts a little further and with a focus on the Indian context. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and digital humanities. 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.

[1]. Dave Parry “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

[2]. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp.3

[3]. 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, Web, March 7, 2014.

[4]. Latour, Bruno . "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means." Trans. Couze Venn Theory Culture Society . (2002): 247-260. Sage. Web, March 4, 2014 URL> http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf

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

February 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-04-07T07:27:46Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the second issue of its newsletter (February) for the year 2014:

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Highlights
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We published revised chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, as part of our National Resource Kit project.
In the concluding blog post of a three-part study Ananth Padmanabhan looks at the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act, and concludes that both those laws restrain courts and private companies from ordering an ISP to block a website for copyright infringement.
Telugu Wikipedia celebrated its 10^th anniversary. An event was co-organized in Vijaywada to celebrate the same.
The second Institute on Internet and Society was held in Pune from February 11 to 17. The proceedings from the workshop are captured in a blog post.
CIS announced an Open Call for Comments for the latest draft of the Privacy Bill, 2013 prepared by Bhairav Acharya.
Forbes India published its “30 Under 30 List”. Pranesh Prakash is featured in the list.
As part of the Making Change Project, Denisse Albornoz wrote a blog post that compares the production behind a performance with the process of storytelling.
Beli gives an introduction to spectrum sharing. The post looks at GSM and CDMA, and touches upon LTE, and how they might share spectrum.

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Jobs
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CIS is seeking applications for the post of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge): http://bit.ly/1fnydB0. There are two vacancies for this post and it is full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org), Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 35 states.

Based upon discussion with the office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) the following chapters were revised:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Mizoram Chapter (by CLPR, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1eUSvxW
The Dadra & Nagar Haveli Chapter (by CLPR, February 6, 2014): http://bit.ly/1mv3YhJ
The Haryana Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 10, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dVOiKI
The Himachal Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 12, 2014): http://bit.ly/1jSk03x

► Other

# Participation in Events

National Consultation on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Development Process (organized by CBM India in collaboration with United Nations Solution Exchange for Gender Community, WHO Regional office for South-East Asia, New Delhi, February 12, 2014). Anandhi Viswanathan participated in a panel discussion. She made a presentation on the National Resource Kit project: http://bit.ly/OlkHVq.
Zero Project Conference on Accessibility: Innovative Policies and Practices for Persons with Disabilities (organized by Essl Foundation, the World Future Council and the European Foundation Centre, United Nations Office, Vienna, February 27 and 28, 2014). Pranesh Prakash spoke on Affordable Text-to-Speech Software from India: http://bit.ly/1czo32s. Nominations on e-speak were recognised as examples of innovative practices and policies from India. Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker on Copyright Exception for Accessible Formats: http://bit.ly/1l8HRth.

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Access to Knowledge
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The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software.

# Analyses

Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 2) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cddoKm. Analyses the law laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court on secondary and contributory copyright infringement.
Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 3) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g35mDg. Analyses the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act.

# Participation in Events

2nd International Conference on Managing Intellectual Property Rights and Strategy (MIPS 2014) (organized by Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay with support from the Ministry of Human Resources Development IPR Chair Project, Government of India): http://bit.ly/PsPEbq.
Consultation on Institutional Arrangements for IP management under MHRD (organized by the Planning Commission and Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi, February 21, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this consultation: http://bit.ly/1fTCoar.
National Conference on Use of Technology in Higher Education (organized by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development and Planning Commission in partnership with Microsoft Research and British Council, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/P6u78i. Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event as a panelist in the session on "Future of Content Creation".

# Media Coverage

Pranesh Prakash: Influencing India's IP Laws (by Samar Srivastava, Forbes India, February 15, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBzLMq.

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we organised 4 workshops in the month of January, published an article in DNA, and signed a memorandum of understanding with KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to further the development of Odia Wikipedia:

►Wikipedia

# Articles / Blog Entries

Odia Language's Presence in Digital Media and Wikipedia's Role (by Subhashish Panigrahi, The Samaja, March 2, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ieF3sC.
Indian Wikimedia community coordinates Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain and Jeph Paul, Wikimedia Foundation, March 6, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cyRfqf,

# Events Co-organized

Cinemathon2014 Bangalore (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CIS, Bangalore, February 8-9, 2014): http://bit.ly/MRRkZz.
Tewiki 10th Anniversary (organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, February 15, 2014): http://bit.ly/1iI2Pxs. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaikh were speakers at the event.
Cinemathon2014 Mumbai (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CAMP Studio, Mumbai, February 15-16, 2014): http://bit.ly/P5YGL8.
Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (organized by Roshini Nilaya and CIS-A2K, Mangalore, February 26, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave a presentation on Wikipedia with a special focus on students and women.

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

# Media Coverage

Father-son duo promote Punjabi online (by Jatinder Preet, Sunday Guardian, February 1, 2014): http://bit.ly/1l87b2h.
୧୦ ବର୍ଷରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ୱିକିପିଡିଆ (Rabibara Sambad (Sunday supplement of Odia newspaper The Sambad), February 9, 2014): http://bit.ly/1igMynn. This is a feature about Odia Wikipedia's 10th anniversary and the story of a dead volunteer community reviving after 8 years.
Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (Prajavani, February 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gVMG6f.

# Participation in Event

The Dynamics of Education to Employment Journey: Opportunities and Challenges (organized by KIIT School of Management, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, February 21-22, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk: http://bit.ly/1ePwqHc.

Event Organized

Wiki Women's Workshop (ICG – Dona Paula, Goa, March 9, 2014): http://bit.ly/MRRJLy. The event is being organized as part of the commemoration of the International Women's Day.

Openness

# Event Organised

Bitcoin & Open Source with Aaron Koenig (CIS, Bangalore, February 7, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fbN6mP.

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Internet Governance
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CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. Gautam Bhatia gives an analysis of the right to privacy from a constitutional perspective. Bhairav Acharya prepared an updated version of the Privacy Protection Bill which was published for comments.

# Call for Comments

The Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 (by Bhairav Acharya, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g3TwIX. CIS announced an Open Call for Comments to the latest version of the bill.

# Articles

The Internet Way (by Nishant Shah, Biblio Vol. 19 No.8 (1&2), January – February 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBp9gJ. Dr. Nishant Shah's review of the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Bantam Press/Random House Group, London can be found on page 16.
Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 3: The Public/Private Distinction and the Supreme Court’s Wrong Turn (by Gautam Bhatia, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBosnw. This was originally published on Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog.
Big Democracy, Big Surveillance: India's Surveillance State (by Maria Xynou, Open Democracy, February 28, 2014): http://bit.ly/1nkg8Ho.
Will You be Paid to Post a Picture? (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, February 18, 2014): http://bit.ly/P65d8L.

# Blog Entries

February 11: The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance (by Divij Joshi, February 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/1e7drCV.
Calcutta High Court Strengthens Whistle Blower Protection (by Divij Joshi, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cG8v7t.
CIS Welcomes 52nd Report on Cyber Crime, Cyber Security, and Right to Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1oviMJ4.
UIDAI Practices and the Information Technology Act, Section 43A and Subsequent Rules (by Elonnai Hickok, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fbSfep.

# Events Organized

Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.
Counter Surveillance Panel: DiscoTech & Hackathon (co-organized by CIS, MIT Centre for Civic Media Co-Design Lab, Tactical Technology Collective, Hackteria.org, and Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, March 1, 2014): http://bit.ly/NCGMyH

# Participation in Events

First Meeting of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group for India Internet Governance Forum (organized by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, New Delhi, February 10, 2014). Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting: http://bit.ly/1fKu5xz.
Internet Intermediary Liability: Towards Evidence-based Policy and Regulatory Reform to Secure Human Rights on the internet (organized by Association for Progressive Communications, The Wedgewood, Melville, Johannesburg, February 10-11, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fMAEK2. Elonnai Hickok was a speaker.
Towards an Equitable and Just Internet (organized by IT for Change, New Delhi, February 14-15, 2014). Bhairav Acharya was a speaker: http://bit.ly/1cz9EDt.
Workshop on Media Law & Policy Curriculum Development (organized by the Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi and University of Oxford in support with the International Higher Education-Knowledge Economy Partnerships Programme of the British Council, February 16, 2014, National Law University, Delhi): http://bit.ly/1ovoT00. Bhairav Acharya was a speaker.
The Changing Role of the Media in India: Constitutional Perspectives (organized by School of Law, Christ University, February 28, 2014): http://bit.ly/1lB2nTO. Snehashish Ghosh moderated a session at this conference.

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News & Media Coverage
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CIS gave its inputs to the following recent media coverage:

The Dangers of Birdsong (by Namrata Joshi, Outlook, January 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kB8J7L.
A Tale of Two Internet Campaigns (by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, February 11, 2014): http://bit.ly/1lDdRZy.
Dark days for the creative class in India: Siddiqui (by Haroon Siddiqui, thestar.com, February 16, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gdtgbC.
The Forbes India 30 Under 30 List (by Abhilasha Khaitan, Forbes India, February 21, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ovnvKM. Pranesh Prakash features in the list.
India ‘tea parties’ enable politicians to woo urban youth with technology (by Avantika Chilkoti, Financial Times, February 26, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cGfOMm.

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Digital Humanities
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CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

# Blog Entries

Defending the Humanities in the Digital Age (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1czdZqg.
Digital Humanities in India- Mapping Changes at the Intersection of Youth, Technology and Higher Education (by Sneha PP, February 21, 2014): http://bit.ly/1qd6xo4.

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Digital Natives
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CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia:

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entries

Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 1 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1jX4qBb.
Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 2 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fKwQil.

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Telecom
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Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

# Newspaper Column

Centre- or State-Driven Development? (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, February 5, 2014, Observer India Blogspot, February 7, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ceuWFS.

# Blog Entry

An Introduction to Spectrum Sharing (by Beli, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/NZlknd.

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Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
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CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

►Event Organized

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fpTdDS. Bishakha Datta, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Kingsley John, Prof. G. Nagarjuna, Nisha Thompson, Prashant Naik, Nehaa Chaudhari, Bhairav Acharya, Manu Srivastav, Dr. Abhijeet Safai, Payal Malik, Nishant Shah, Laura Stein, Sunil Abraham, Madan Muthu and Chinmayi Arun taught at the institute.

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2014-bulletin

Confession in the Digital Age

sneha — 2014-04-14T07:06:11Z

The pervasive influence of digital technology, particularly the Internet in our lives today seems to have blurred the boundaries between the real and virtual, public and private. The perceived condition of anonymity made available by the digital sphere brings forth questions about identity and the self, and more importantly the conditions that have come together in creating a new notion of the private sphere. In this guest post Rimi Nandy reflects upon her research study on the trend of Facebook confessions in India, and its implications for questions of identity and self-representation.

The advent of the internet and the emergence of a new social sphere that is home to the present generation of digital natives has broadened the horizon of what we understand as being human. This space has been widened more with the introduction and proliferation of social networking sites, the most well known among them being Facebook. Facebook has changed the very way we perceive society, which in turn has led the present generation to act and react differently to the social conditions. The digital youth of the present generation create their self identity in synergy with the virtual platform provided by Facebook and other social networking sites. In this article I would like to focus on the recent trend of anonymous confessions made by various Indian college students on Facebook.

In the pre-digital age, the confessions were either carried out to oneself in seclusion or on a one to one basis. It was never performed in front of a gathering of people as that would be responsible for instilling a greater amount of fear in the confessor. There is one exception to this in the form of courtroom confessions. The courtroom confessions were a public affair, but the confession is initially made behind closed doors in the presence of law enforcing officers. A major problem with such confessions is understanding whether the confession is true or coerced. The word ‘confession’ seems to have acquired a new meaning in the digital age of Facebook. The term has become very popular in the present time among the youth. What is surprising is the fact that the act of confession on Facebook is being considered a form of entertainment. The act of confession was earlier a means to purge oneself of hidden guilt burdening the soul. It was an act carried out in the privacy of one’s own room or in the confines of a confession box. Once a confession was made, the confessor felt a cathartic effect, thereby unburdening their soul. In the present day and age, however confession is no more a personal act. The confession pages on Facebook have become a meeting place for various confessors who confess. But do they really confess to unburden their soul? That is food for thought. The trend of the Confession pages started in the Western countries and has slowly found its way into the lives of the Indian youth.

The most important aspect of this virtual space is the fact that it easily crosses boundaries and makes the world a very small place by bringing people across continents together. Another important factor and probably the driving force behind its popularity is the fact that the confessor can easily hide his/her identity and just present the self as a confessor before other confessors. It is almost like an anonymous support group, only on a larger scale. The members of the Confession pages can sit behind their screens in the comfort of their surroundings without having to travel and face unknown people and looking at their faces wondering how they would react to the confession to be placed before them. The cyberspace due to its fluid nature provides a better sense of security than the real world. In the virtual world every word typed and the ensuing comments are born digital and stay locked within the digital sphere. It becomes nothing more than a combination of binary digits, which if not found to be palatable can be easily deleted with a few clicks of the mouse and the ‘backspace’ key. In the real world it is impossible to undo confessions and comments made. The arrival of the digital confession pages has randomised the act and its effect. Further it has also changed the very essence of confession. A plethora of topics are discussed in these confession pages starting from confession of love and crushes to sexual escapades, hostel life, college life and a very tiny amount of academic discussions.

The Confession pages have also become a conglomeration of various digital technologies. Most pages do not restrict themselves to plain writing of posts. They also include links to other web pages, mainly YouTube, which can be considered to be an archive of various videos and audios. Some pages also include links to e-books, or use memes to bring forth their ideas and emotions. The internet has successfully become an irreplaceable aspect of the youth’s life across the globe. It has broken all boundaries making the world a very small place where a post uploaded in India can be seen anywhere in the world.

The language used in these confession pages refer to respective campus culture, thereby distinguishing themselves from other institutes. This in turn helps to create a specific identity through which the social networking world will know them.

Studying the confession pages has left me with some unsolved questions. It appears that the students engaging with the activities of the various confession pages do not really try to question what urges them forward to confess online. To the readers of the confessions it is nothing more than a mode of entertainment which is availed in moments of boredom. In spite of all its negativity this has been able to create a platform for building a bridge of kinship of like minded students. What lies in future for the confession pages is still to be seen. Whether the advancement in digital technology furthers the mushrooming of such pages is something that also has to be studied. At present in order to counter the loopholes of anonymity, a mobile application called ‘Whispers’, has been developed and is slowly becoming popular. This might substitute Facebook Confessions or run as a parallel alternative to it. Some pages are already falling into disuse. How long this trend survives and what will be its long term effect is still to be seen.

Rimi Nandy is Project Fellow, Social Networks, with the School of Media, Communication and Culture at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. This research study was part of a series of six projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See here for more on this initiative.

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

Animating the Archive – A Survey of Printed Digitized Materials in Bengali and their Use in Higher Education

sneha — 2014-04-14T07:12:32Z

With the advent of digital technologies and the internet, archival practice has seen much change in its imagination and function, such as to extend its scope beyond preservation to a collaborative, open source model which facilitates new modes of knowledge production. In this blog post, Saidul Haque reflects upon his research project on a survey of digitized materials in Bengali, and some of the impediments to their use in higher education and research.

At present a large collection of printed Bengali materials in the form of books, journals, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, etc., is scattered in various public libraries, institutions, and private collections in India and abroad.These endangered and hidden cultural resources in vernacular languages need to be digitized and shared to a networked community using an online platform not only for the sake of preservation but also for wider dissemination. A comprehensive survey of printed digitized materials in the field of Arts and Culture, Education, Politics/Economy was executed as part of a collaborative project with HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore. The survey was carried out at School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University and Centre for the Study of Social Sciences (CSSS), Kolkata. These are the pioneering institutions in Bengal to introduce digital preservation of cultural materials and they have ongoing digitization initiatives. Online archives/ digital repositories available in the public domain [like West Bengal Public Library Network, Society for Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR), Digital Library of India, E-Gyankosh of Indira Gandhi National Open University(IGNOU), Rare Bengali Book section in Internet Archive, Digital South Asia Library, various public blogs] also came under this survey. Observations were gathered through interviews with resource persons involved in digitization. Discussion with students, researchers and faculty members concentrated on the use of Bengali digitized materials in higher education.

School of Cultural Texts and Records(SCTR) has digitized popular street literature and a wide collection of rare and unique texts on Bengali drama of 19th century .The revolutionary Bichitra Project of the School provides a complete online resource of Rabindranath Tagore’s works in both English and Bengali. (http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php). Centre for Studies in Social Science, on the other hand started preserving rare documents in microfilm format from 1993 but later shifted to digitization mode. In 2008 the CSSSC and Savifa (University of Heidelberg) through a collaborative programme made available the collection of CSSSC (the early printed literature in Bengali from 1800-1950) online. The centre has also retrieved two major and endangered Bengali newspapers: Jugantar and Amrita Bazar Patrika from colonial and post–colonial Bengal. Amrita bazaar patrika is available online through the World Newspaper Archive Collection.

Online repositories like West Bengal Public Library Network and Digital Library of India also holds a large number of Bengali books but in most cases Indian language full-text contents are available in TIFF image format only.

The issue of using digitized Bengali materials in higher education sheds light on various problems related to free access, copyright issue, technological adversity, and metadata. Most of the materials available in digital domain are popular story books and hence scarcity of scholarly materials in Bengali for higher education is evident. Most of the students do not know where to search and how to search and they prefer to visit libraries. There are almost 17,000 entries in the domain of Bengali Wikipedia. But either students are unaware of their existence or don’t rely on these materials as these are not updated. Most of them are even unaware of the fact that they can edit these pages. Recently a few scholars started uploading essays in Bengali on Academia.edu. But teachers are doubtful about the quality of these materials as anyone can upload papers here. E-thesis depository spaces like Shodhganga and Vidyanidhi contain materials in English and a few in regional languages like Hindi but not in Bengali. In the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), there are only two bi-lingual journals ( Barnolipi and Pratidhwani) which publish articles in Bengali. Teachers are unanimous in the belief that online publication of Bengali research articles will bring more research citations and also decrease the rate of duplicity of same research topic. But scarcity of open access Bengali materials (digitized and born digital) online is a great hindrance in doing research in Bengali.

Researchers in Bengali language and literature may also come forward to participate actively in digitizing rare materials. Of course funding and technical equipment are great hindrance but institutions like SCTR, Jadavpur University are eager to provide scanners and other support to those who want to digitize important cultural resources. Presently the concept of online Bengali bookshops has emerged. The numbers of online e-magazines and e-newspapers in Bengali is growing day by day. What we need is to make people aware of the existence of these resources. It is a positive step on the part of people who are using social networking sites in Bengali and often bringing out creative magazines online to reach a greater audience.

Metadata of Bengali digitized materials is mostly in transliterated form and not in Bengali. Hence searching in Bengali fonts often brings no result. People engaged in digitization should be experts in handling Bengali standard key board like Avro. It would also be good if people engaged in digitization of Indic languages join in workshops and build a common standard of Metadata. Rather than following Western forms like Dublin code it may be thought of an indigenous code of metadata in Bengali. Issue of Free Access and the question of copyright go hand in hand. A large bulk of digitized Bengali materials is available in the archive room of SCTR and CSSS. These cannot be uploaded online for free access due to copyright issues or the unwillingness of the contributors of original materials. Most donors are not willing to give their works to these institutions as often they think that it will diminish their own authority and researchers will go to the University directly and not to them. Often the donors can’t trust the institutes and ask to digitize materials in their own home and return the original materials as soon as possible before they are stolen or lost. Regarding problem of digitization it is observed that most materials are fragile and digitization tasks with scanners and other technological instruments often led to the destruction of the original material.

We also need to think of preserving the large terabytes of data on one hand and original copies on the other hand. Institutional collaboration can be one way of bringing all digital materials in one single platform. In this regard, the role of C-DAC, Kolkata and SNLTR in digitization of vernacular language materials is praiseworthy.

Saidul Haque is a student of the PG course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. This research study was part of a series of projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See here for more on this initiative.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/animating-the-archive

Binary Code Invades the Universal Problematic

anirudh — 2014-05-27T05:35:03Z

This essay looks at language as an archive and posits, through a reading of Foucault, Derrida, Saussure and Jakobson that the means of perceiving language in the digital has changed. Communication requires community and the large networks made possible by the binary code, an added layer of linguistic units, changes the way we are able to communicate online. Big Data has further changed the way we interact with language and the world. The way the machine perceives language, through selection rather than combination with access to the “complete” archive allows it to make predictions and decisions through mere correlation rather than the causational mode of science hitherto conducted by human beings.

The above is a familiar image to everyone reading this blog. In fact, I’m willing to wager my internet connection that anyone reading this must have come across this image and that they all would assume the same for anyone else cohabitating the digital world. The Google search, for many is the internet or at least one of the first images that come to mind when one mentions internet though I will not presume solitariness or principality in good faith to the impending argument. Before the digital era, if I had read the words “the-order-of-things” in a book by a French philosopher, I would have read it in a manner completely different to the way I read things or the order of things in the digital on Google search, for example. The implications of this rupture, I contend, redouble the way in which we interact with the world from perceiving data online to analytical operations on an astronomical scale such as big data but they have their beginnings with the humble binary code that poor Leibniz thought would preserve his Christianity.

In this blog I will look at binary code as a hidden architecture that has decentered the centrality of deconstructed language. I will explicate the proposition by exploring the structuralist linguists like Saussure and Jakobson, find a resolution in Foucault’s Order of Things and continue to view the conflict through Derrida’s Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. We have been exploring in my previous blogs about what Derrida meant when he said that language has invaded the universal problematic and the transcendental signifiers (God, Man) of yore have been ousted by the successive, contaminating, perpetually replicating influence of language. We will now explore language, for the purpose of this blog through the antiquated view as a first order code and as the archive or a self-imagined whole.

If we want to pose the problem of structural language before deconstruction with an added layer of code, then we will quickly end up with a number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to the status of discourse in post-structural language. Therefore we must begin where Foucault began and work our way to the world we live in now, which was probably still in the conception in 1966, forming and gestating as the unnamable was proclaiming itself as it is again now, while the birth was in the offing, only under a species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity that has become the digital. I don’t look upon it with fear or anguish, but it is needless to say that Foucault would have been caught off guard by the alien integer outside the natural set that was complete and contained, wreaking havoc upon our vision of everything that could neatly sit within a category.

Failing to avoid the cliché of mentioning Borghes’s Chinese Encyclopedia in the analysis of the Order of Things, I will enumerate the mnemonic list at the centre of his raucous laughter. The list of all animals that exist: [1]

a) Those that belong to the emperor

b) Embalmed ones

c) Those that are trained

d) Suckling pigs e) Mermaids (or Sirens)

f) Fabulous ones

g) Stray dogs

h) Those that are included in this classification

i) Those that tremble as if they were mad

j) Innumerable ones

k) Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

l) Et cetera

m) Those that have just broken the flower vase

n) Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

Central to his flummoxed observance of this completely alien list is the paradox in the letter (h): those that are included in this classification.

“The central category of animals 'included in the present classification', with its explicit reference to paradoxes we are familiar with, is indication enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of con-tained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all: if all the animals divided up here can be placed without exception in one of the divisions of this list, then aren't all the other divisions to be found in that one division too? And then again, in what space would that single, inclusive division have its existence? Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up. Borges adds no figure to the atlas of the impossible; nowhere does he strike the spark of poetic con-frontation; he simply dispenses with the least obvious, but most com-pelling, of necessities; he does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed.” [2]

This seems, at a surface level to be an epigrammatic rendering of Russel’s paradox in set theory, but when applied to the notions of reified knowledge structures that are presented to us, it leads us to question the notions of everything and difference. That is to say, history, language or the archive are imperially established upon us as a totality of information rather than a unit or a part of a whole that cannot be known or escapes comprehension. Within this notion of everything, that actually is only a part, the archive sets divisive rules for itself, creating taxonomies of things that allow containment and comprehension. There is a moment when we move from the culturally imposed orders to the scientific or philosophical modes of order that reflect upon order itself when we escape the membrane of order and experience it in its pure form. This moment of anagnorisis when Neo awakens outside of the Matrix is when the order is destabilized and relegated to its rightful position in letter (h) and rules of experience and decision making are no longer applicable, or at least necessary. That is to say, if we construct the archive with this imagination, to endure the ordeal of this consciousness, we can have a space that has everything with everything without these artificial taxonomical boundaries.

Language, as Foucault understands it, is a system of exchange predicated on the notion of difference. [3] It is something that burst onto the scene of human evolution in one fell swoop as Levi-Strauss puts it, as an event.[4]

If the notion of attaching meaning to objects by assigning an unnatural or artificial sign that has no inherent connection to the former was arrived at, it automatically forms the whole matrix of language, a spontaneous tabula is formed where everything meets and “the spark of poetic confrontation is met”. Thus, language makes science possible by the artificial separation of things, which allows for the study of causation. Tracing a trajectory of eras of the role of language in this way, Foucault says:

“In this way, analysis has been able to show the coherence that existed, throughout the Classical age, between the theory of representation and the theories of language, of the natural orders, and of wealth and value. It is this configuration that, from the nineteenth century onward, changes entirely; the theory of representation disappears as the universal founda-tion of all possible orders; language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed in its turn; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time;” [5]

After characterizing language in a structuralist notion, he claims that it is eclipsed for something else. This is the locus of conflict between Foucault and Derrida’s conception of language. Derrida teasingly says

“It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence… transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.” [6]

(italics mine)

He suggests that the enlightenment center or centrality of the conception of Man can be or has been replaced, only to later suggest that language has invaded the universal problematic, but is different from God and Man in that it is imbricated within the fabric of life, perpetually manifest in speech and hence subject to its influence. Foucault agrees with the assumption of the substitutable transcendentality of man when he says

“It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” [7]

However, he believes language, at least in its structural form disappears or is eclipsed with an event.

In order to fully participate in this disagreement, we must formulize what the structuralist understanding of language really is.

-Language is a first order code where the addresser encodes and the addressee decodes. A first order code implies that there can be second order codes. Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked says “Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes (the first-order codes being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft of a third-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths” [8]

and so on. -In the process of encoding (combination of linguistic units), there is an ascending scale of freedom. I have to combine c o m b i n e to form the prior word for it to have meaning but I have more leeway to combine words to form sentences and so on in different contexts.

Decoding involves

a) combination: a message involves constituent signs that are combined with others. “This means that any linguistic unit at one and the same time serves as a context in a more complex linguistic unit.” Therefore, “combination and contexture are two faces of the same operation.” Insights of Ferdinand de Saussure: combination “in in presentia: it is based on two or several terms jointly present in an actual series” [9]

b) selection: “a selection between alternatives implies the possibility of substituting one for the other, equivalent in one respect and different in another. Actually, selection and substitution are two faces of the same operation” Insights of Ferdinand de Saussure: selection “connects terms in absentia as members of a virtual mnemonic series”. [10]

Selection involves signs that are conjoined in the archive of things, the language repository itself but not a direct relation to the message at hand whereas combination involves signs connected through the message. We can therefore imagine the addressee as perceiving a message as a combination of constituent signs in the context of the larger sign and selected from the repository or all possible constituent parts, which Jakobson calls the code and Foucault calls the archive.

Although, theoretically, this is how language still works, something untoward has happened to it. Let us take the proposition that freedom follows in the trajectory of larger composite linguistic units.

The movement of freedom occurs because of the tabula of context that one can create or define for the more complex units resting on the fixity of the previous layer in the “community”. If the meaning of the letter “b” is uncertain, then I cannot create the word bust and if the meaning of the word “bust” is uncertain, then I cannot combine as I please with other words. Jakobson says that the receiver and originator must have the same background and that communication relies on community/ commonality and subsequently influences what the community has in common.

If we were to create another space where the basic unit of communication is not the letter but a simple binary code, then it only follows that the freedom of linguistic combination increases automatically. The binary code, currently is the fundamental linguistic unit of the digital language. Its combinations can represent signs of all languages and all systems of totality in the same final tabula. The massive networks that the internet creates and the subsequent archivization of the data into 0’s and 1’s allows for a form of cultural and communitarian unification of the past “other” categories of totality into one that is not possible otherwise.

By all means, I could have said lol for laugh out loud or made sentences like ‘ima bust yo ass papi’ or written sentences in Spanish on Facebook that are punctuated with smh and omg but it would have been a private code between me and a small community of people to whom I have to communicate the vast cultural data of acronymity, parlance, foreign language etc embedded in each of those messages. You must imagine a hypothetical creation of a code or a language that has signs for every sign of every archive that facilitates an endeavor like this. It is neither humanly possible to create something like this and teach it to a group of people to create the community necessary for communication nor is it a plausible submission that individual archives that imagine themselves to be self contained systems of the whole are likely to undergo. Indeed, it is not a human that facilitates this. The machine is the monster that smashes these worlds together.

The machine is a monster which has immense capacity for memory and storage but is othered as we other the diseased. There are more elegant explanations for the nature of a digital native’s language but in true archeological, Foucauldian sense; we are mainly interested in one of the conditions of possibility. Let us now look at the operations of the addressee in conjunction with those capable by the machine. The machine’s “storage” is akin to a full cabinet of files and its “memory” is the desk upon which the employee of a company pulls up the requisite files to perform an operation. We said the addressee perceives a message as a combination of constituent signs in the context of the larger sign and selected from the repository or all possible constituent parts, which Jakobson calls the code and Foucault calls the archive. We substitute the word memory in the addressee as the faculty that perceives combination, which looks at the context, the table of the sign and pulls up grammatic rules of combination necessary to decode the sequence. The perception and the reception of selection, however, is one that requires an access to the full code as it is a virtual set consisting of all the possible synonymic, antonymic, metaphoric and subjective equivalences that can all only be contained within the total archive (storage) which no addressee has access to. It is here that Derrida would say deconstruction occurs as a sort of Joycean stream of consciousness ensues in the mind.

When I searched for the order of things on google search, however, the machine entered into its storage, its archive, and performed a version of selection and substitution with an access to the whole as only the monstrous machine can and birthed its deconstructed offspring. This access to the whole, off course, is made possible by the binary code that allows such vast networks to form. The othered element of this monstrosity is in the way we other the diseased as Foucault explores in History of Madness and specifically aphasiacs in The Order of Things. In Jakobson’s “The Linguistic Problems of Aphasia”, he says one of the types of the condition is “contexture-deficient aphasia, which…diminishes the extent and variety of sentences. The syntactic rules organizing words into higher units are lost; this loss, called “agrammatism,” causes the degeneration of the sentence into a mere “word heap””. [11]

However, this type of aphasia has the capacity to select and substitute and the google search, and indeed most means of gathering and perceiving data on the internet is performed through selection and substitution ungoverned by the government of grammar or what is “correct” combination. The aphasic google search does not play by the taxonomical boundaries and rules while it interacts with the archive and thus recalibrates and imbricates the text trapped in the archive’s imagination. The result then leaves the reader with that very deconstructed offspring.

I see in the result “the order of things” as something to do with Foucault, colleges, fashion and Canadians. Even between the two results shown from amazon.com, I see that the book is in the context of “cultural studies > history of ideas” and “philosophy> History and surveys”. The free play of word association that the engine performs based on an alogarithm that functions on truly arbitrary levels of preference like statistical percentage of keywords, webpage hits or something of that ilk that results in a constantly mutating, multiplying context makes the perception of context closer resemble that of selection. That is to say, because the reader is simultaneously processing many contexts, what was a temporal process of combination perception in presentia is now in absentia in the virtual mnemonic series, conjoined merely in the code but not in the actual message, selected from something resembling a repository of all that is possible. What you see and read in the digital is therefore a myth and by the time you perform a third order deconstruction upon what is perceived, language has traversed such a distance in space and time that comparing it to Saussure’s encoding and decoding a message is like comparing Facebook to the tin-can telephone.

I grant that everyday life may not seem to have changed by much for the average user of the internet or consumer of digital data. There doesn’t seem to be a seismic change in the way we interact with the world after this invasion. In order to make this change more acute and feel the pungency of its impact, we must move now to a larger picture than you and me reading philosophy online. Let us take a look at how Big Data functions. When a particular reading of data is required, the machine memory extracts, transforms and loads (ETL) data from the various archives in the archive and combines them on the staging table where it is all converted into the same format, the machine level language or the binary code and travels back to the memory where the function is performed.[12]

For example, if we were to research an unauthored text to determine its authorship, then we might rely on intuitions of style and propositions’ falsifications based on an incomplete surveying of an incomplete set of texts. We will read a particular text, judge its combination based on a variety of contexts that exist in our memory, then judge its selection and substitution, which is the vertical axis of style based on a stream of consciousness comparable to the one engendered while reading another known author. Even if the research is thorough by academic standards, it still yields an inadequate, imprecise result that nonetheless is enough to fit into the taxonomical categories of history, our conception of genius and culture that we require to comprehend our world. Big data, on the other hand, has warped this disposition by making possible a real stylometry. Stylometric analysis has thus ruthlessly destabilized canonical and structural notions of authorship and genius like the vertical axis of Shakespeare in the history of Western literature, who it appears collaborated with Marlowe and Fletcher in his works.[13]

The digital has, at least in the humanities taken us down a chimerical road that we thought would lead to a Utopia, but has lead to a heterotopias.

“Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together'...heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.” [14]

If this machinistic sterilization of the cultural, literary and social archives seems to almost lead to the scientific, then that connection has already been made. Steve Lohr of the NYT writes “Mr. Jockers, for example, called his research presentation “Computing and Visualizing the 19th-Century Literary Genome.”

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas.

“What is critical and distinctive to human evolution is ideas, and how they evolve,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.”” [15]

Jean-Baptiste, echoing Herbert Spencer in the 18th century who said that sociology is the study of evolution in its most complex form [16] , is inadvertently pointing to a revolutionary change, perhaps the last revolution in the practice of science explored at length in my previous blog. Chris Anderson posits succinctly the condition of science in the big data regime. “The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years. […] But faced with massive data, this approach to science—hypothesize, model, test—is becoming obsolete. […] There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.” [17]

Big data thus “challenges the way we live and interact with the world”, as Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier say in “Big Data”, “most strikingly, society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations.” [18]

Causation, after all, was the baggage that came with the invention of a Universe. A language that identified things, everything, through their differences. A basic logic instated in language that required the human to see a combination of units based on difference while relegating the perception of true selection, a connection of different things, impossible to the mind. The machine has moved us away from that world of difference to a world of universal networks and sameness and follows it at the level of its memory that functions through selection with an access to the archive that humans do not. It then mutates our perception of combination, destroys primary context, rendering free-play, association and connection where there was merely difference before.

Sure, taxonomy was an evolutionary adaptation to see causation to make decisions better. And the data we have stored in the archives now are but a mere fraction of the totality of information that exists. However, with the current trajectory of information storage increase, we are fast approaching a world where enough information will exist to make decisions based on correlation alone. In other words, “between the encoded eye and the reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself…it is more confused, more obscure and probably less easy to analyse” but it “relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones”. [19]

This new monstrosity is, however, giving us the ability to make better decisions using just the selective faculty of language, through correlation alone and it is all done by data collection reaching the level (alas Leibniz is not alive today) of the mind of “God”. The simulacra are latching on to all information; the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave are being consumed by the outsiders and from the vast atomic network of 0’s and 1’s, Laplace’s demon is rearing its ominous head.

[1]. Foucault, Michel. The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 19711970. Print.

[2]. ibid

[3]. ibid

[4]. Strauss, Claude. The raw and the cooked. [1st U.S. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Print.

[5]. See Citation 1

[6]. Derrida, Jacques. "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. . Print.

[7]. See citation 1.

[8]. See citation 4.

[9]. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in general linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Print.

[10]. ibid.

[11]. Jakobson, Roman, and Linda R. Waugh. On language. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Print.

[12]. nberger, Viktor, and Kenneth Cukier. Big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Print.

[13]. Neural Computation in Stylometry I: An Application to the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher Matthews RAJ & Merriam TVN Lit Linguist Computing (1993) 8 (4): 203-209. doi: 10.1093/llc /8.4.203.

[14]. See Citation 1.

[15]. Lohr, Steve. "Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens." New York Times 26 Jan. 2013, sec. Technology: n. pag. Print.

[16]. Perrin, Robert. "Herbert Spencer's Four Theories of Social Evolution." JSTOR: n. pag. Print.

[17]. Anderson, Chris. "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." Wired Magazine 23 June 2008: n. pag. Print.

[18]. See Citation 12.

[19]. See Citation 1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/binary-code-invades-the-universal-problematic