Centre for Internet and Society

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:06:46Z

An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the second among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

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

The Problem of Definition

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem of the Discipline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:07:06Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living in the Archival Moment

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:08:22Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

[2] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-07-14T10:05:11Z

Our newsletter for month of June is below:

Highlights

Nehaa Chaudhari participated in a Stakeholders Consultation organized by the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Human Resource Development in New Delhi, February 21, 2014, on Mapping Institutions of Intellectual Property. She blogged about the outcome in a two-part series. The first part discusses establishment of a National Institute of Intellectual Property Rights and the second part deals with the documents introduced at the Stakeholders’ Consultation for India’s National Programme on Intellectual Property.
For the first time in the history of Indian books, 10 Telugu books by a single author were released under Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). These books will be uploaded on Telugu Wikisource and converted into Unicode (searchable) text. This will ensure that these books are freely read, both online and offline in various formats like PDF, epub, mobi, text, etc. This is a major milestone initiative by CIS-A2K to make the sum of all knowledge in Telugu freely available to all Telugus over the internet.
ICANN published a call for public comments on "Enhancing ICANN Accountability" in the wake of the IANA stewardship transition spearheaded by ICANN and related concerns of ICANN's external and internal accountability mechanisms. CIS submitted its comments.
ICANN sought comments on the existing barriers to Registrar Accreditation and operation and suggestions on how these challenges might be mitigated. CIS sent its comments.
Vodafone, the world’s second largest mobile carrier released a report disclosing to what extent governments can request their customers’ data. Joe Sheehan analyses the report to tell us that if more companies were transparent about the level of government surveillance their customers were being subjected to then the public would press the government for stronger privacy safeguards and protections.

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. We compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). We will be publishing this soon. The draft chapters along with 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

Work Report for June (by Suman Dogra, June 30, 2014).

►Other

Blog Entry

For a Truly Inclusive Consultative Process (by Amba Salelkar, June 25, 2014).

Media Coverage

NISH Website to Help the Disabled (The New Indian Express, June 26, 2014).

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.

►Analysis

Mapping Institutions of Intellectual Property (Part A): India's National Programme on Intellectual Property Management (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 10, 2014). This discusses establishment of a National Institute of Intellectual Property Rights.
Mapping Institutions of Intellectual Property: Part B — India's National Program on Intellectual Property Management (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 26, 2014). This deals with the documents introduced at the Stakeholders’ Consultation for India’s National Program on Intellectual Property

►Participation in Event

Yogyakarta Meeting on Open Culture and Critical Making (organized by organized by HONF Foundation, Catec, and r0g, June 12 – 15, 2014). Sharath Chandra Ram was a panelist.

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).

The following were done this month:

►Articles / Blog Entries

Twitter weekly Curation WeAreWikipedia brings one Wikipedian Every Week (by Diptiman Panigrahi, June 16, 2014).
This Twitter Account Puts a Face to the Unsung Volunteer Editors Behind Wikipedia (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Global Voices, June 18, 2014).
Odia Language gets a new Unicode Font Converter (by Subhashish Panigrahi, June 20, 2014).
Ten Telugu Books Re-released Under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License (by Rahmanuddin Shaik, June 22, 2014).

►Events Organized

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Book Lovers (co-organized by Navakarnataka Publications, Bangalore, June 4, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era (co-organized by Andhra Loyola College and CIS, Vijaywada, June 24-25, 2014).

►News and Media Coverage
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era: Coverage in Sakshi (Sakshi, June 25, 2014).
Knowledge and Openness in the Digital Era: Coverage in Enadu (Enadu, June 25, 2014).
Loyola Faculty Enlightened About Open Edn Resources (The New Indian Express, June 25, 2014).

Internet Governance

Freedom of Expression

As part of our project on Freedom of Expression (funded through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation) to study the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government and contribute to the debates around Internet governance and freedom of expression at forums like ICANN, ITU, IGF, WSIS, etc., we bring you the following outputs:

►Submissions

CIS Comments: Enhancing ICANN Accountability (by Geetha Hariharan, June 10, 2014).
Comments to ICANN Supporting the DNS Industry in Underserved Regions (by Jyoti Panday, June 13, 2014).

►Blog Entries

Free Speech and Contempt of Court: Overview (by Gautam Bhatia, June 8, 2014).
Multi-stakeholder Models of Internet Governance within States: Why, Who & How? (by Geetha Hariharan, June 16, 2014).
UN Human Rights Council Urged to Protect Human Rights Online (by Geetha Hariharan, June 19, 2014).
Free Speech and Source Protection for Journalists (by Gautam Bhatia, June 19, 2014).
WSIS+10 High Level Event: A Bird's Eye Report (by Geetha Hariharan, June 20, 2014).
Understanding IANA Stewardship Transition (by Smarika Kumar, June 22, 2014).
IANA Transition: Suggestions for Process Design (by Smarika Kumar, June 22, 2014).
Free Speech and Civil Defamation (by Gautam Bhatia, June 25, 2014).
CIS Policy Brief: IANA Transition Fundamentals & Suggestions for Process Design (by Geetha Hariharan and Smarika Kumar, June 22, 2014).
An Evidence based Intermediary Liability Policy Framework: Workshop at IGF (by Jyoti Panday, June 30, 2014).

►FOEX Live
We are also posting a selection of news from across India implicating online freedom of expression and use of digital technology: June 8 – 15, 2014 and June 16 – 23, 2014.

Privacy

As part of our Surveillance and Freedom: Global Understandings and Rights Development (SAFEGUARD) project with Privacy International we are engaged in enhancing respect for the right to privacy in developing countries. We have produced the following outputs during the month:

►Blog Entries

A Review of the Functioning of the Cyber Appellate Tribunal and Adjudicatory Officers under the IT Act (by Divij Joshi, June 16, 2014).
Content Removal on Facebook — A Case of Privatised Censorship? (by Jessamine Mathew, June 16, 2014).
Vodafone Report Explains Government Access to Customer Data (by Joe Sheehan, June 16, 2014).

►Event Organized

Privacy and Surveillance Roundtable (co-organized with the Cellular Operators Association of India and the Council for Fair Business Practices, June 28, 2014, IMC Building, Churchgate, Mumbai).

►Participation in Events

Commonwealth Domain Name System Forum 2014 (organized by the CTO, hosted by ICANN, and supported by Nominet and the Public Interest Registry, London, June 19, 2014). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist. Jyoti Panday participated in the event.
Research Advisory Network Meeting (organized by the Global Commission on Internet Governance’s Research Advisory Network, OECD Headquarters, Paris, June 26-27, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a panelist.

►News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Right to be forgotten poses a legal dilemma in India (by Leslie D' Monte, Livemint, June 5, 2014).
Stay connected even when you go underground (by Sunita Sekhar, The Hindu, June 12, 2014).

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:

►Blog Entries

Not a Goodbye; More a ‘Come Again’: Thoughts on being Research Director at a moment of transition (by Nishant Shah, June 15, 2014).
Living in the Archival Moment (by P.P. Sneha, June 19, 2014).

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

A Great Start (for the Modi government) (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot, June 5, 2014).

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 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 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/june-2014-bulletin

Digital Humanities in India?

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:05:29Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Background

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

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

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

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

Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habits of Living: Surrogate States, Bodies and Networks, Bangalore

praskrishna — 2012-09-28T12:40:30Z

The Centre for Internet & Society is organising the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012.

Schedule

26^th September, Wednesday

9:30 – Registration and Tea

10:00 – Introduction – Wendy Chun, Nishant Shah

11:00 – Pecha-kucha presentations followed by Q&A from all the participants

13:00 – Lunch

14:30 – Akansha Rastogi, Shiv Nadar Museum, New Delhi

16:00 – Oliver Lerone Schulz, Post Media Lab, Lueneburg

19:00 – Welcome Banquet @ Jaymahal Palace with other invitees

27^th September, Thursday

10:00 – Radhika Gajalla, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green

11:30 – Saumya Pant, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad

13:00 – Lunch

14:30 – Deepak Menon, India Water Portal, Bangalore

14:00 - Joshua Neeves, Brown University, Rhode Island

16:30 – Eivind Rossaak, National Library of Norway, Oslo

19:00 – Trip to down-town Bangalore (optional)

28^th September, Friday

07: 30 – Bangalore Heritage Walk (optional)

11:30 – Maya Ganesh (via Skype), Tactical Technologies, Berlin

13:30 – Lunch

14:30 – Rijuta Mehta, Brown University, Rhode Island

16:00 – Wendy Chun, Brown University, Rhode Island

19:00 – Dinner at South Indies, Infantry Road

29^th September, Saturday

09:30 – Maesy Angelina, AusAid, Jakarta

11:00 – Renee Ridgway, NEWS, Amsterdam

12:30 – Lunch

14:00 – Gita Chadha, SNDT Women’s College, Mumbai

15:30 – Open Board: Habits of Living

17:00 – Wrap up and next steps

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

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: PechaKucha

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-10T07:15:27Z

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.

The following are the summaries of the Habits of Living Thinkathon’s PechaKucha presentations. These are short introductions presented by the participants on their research interests and how they are grappling with the questions posed by the themes of the Thinkathon:

Rijuta Mehta begins the discussion on a serious note by bringing up critical issues of violent Hindu nationalism and citizenship, demonstrating how community networks are being formed around injury from an imagined "other". She also argues that technology allows the soldier to become an agent of civic violence, and discusses how networks make civic malfunctions mobile. In a post-9/11 world, internet platforms have created spaces where global and local hate-speech can cross-pollinate. Rijuta grapples with a question posed online: Where is the Hindu Holocaust Museum? For Ritjuta, this museum actually is located in the networks that ask this question.

Joshua Neves continues the discussion by sharing his thoughts on producing a different kind of self-relationality through media archipelagos. Inspired by island studies, Neves encourages us to think of a set of relations between islands, an alternative cartography of relationships. Drawing from sources as diverse as ephemeral film festivals across the world, Neves ask us: what does it mean to become each others' reference?

Maesy Angelina brings the discussion to the domain of popular culture. While people try to romanticize networks as a site of activist resistance, the reality of the situation is that the majority of tweets produced are about celebrities. Instead of viewing this as deafening banality of the masses, Angelina questions the claim that pop-culture consumers can only be mindless. She suggests that celebrities can actually serve as a medium for citizenship expression of the masses, especially in the Indonesian context. Celebrities may be surrogates for citizen practice. Her presentation encourages us to think about alternative discourses beyond the lexicon of the Academy and 'activism' as we understand it.

Namita Malhotra follows by reviewing cultural texts produced in India, with a particular emphasis on how particular stories of India tie up with meta-narratives of technology. She shows how these texts provide a space in which we can think about our affective relationships with technology.

Deepak Menon asks: how do we build knowledge networks? This is particularly pertinent for NGO groups like his own who are trying to do their work without necessarily getting into a donor relationship with the groups he works with. He is concerned with what happens to the networks if the donors move out. Deepak challenges us to think about important practical questions about networks, including the historical nature of networks, whether networks create knowledge that is network-specific, and how online networks differ from offline networks.

Eivind Rossaak encourages us to think of archives in motion. Archives are traditionally viewed as working towards the preservation of objects and knowledge that are static in time — making the preservation of technological artifacts very difficult for this archival structure. In order to document ideas and items that are constantly in motion, archives need to be in motion, as well. To help us conceptualize this, he challenges us to think of YouTube as both an archive and a site of construction and knowledge creation. Elvind asks us: how do media and social websites forge new associations between 'human' and 'objects'? We have to redefine the notion of 'life' and 'person' to understand these phenomena and construct a new way of thinking about memory, archives, and identities.

Saumya Pant speaks to us about surrogacy in India, and challenges the mainstream narratives of either understanding surrogacy as a reward or gift that only certain types of women can participate in, or as completely unnatural. To study this, she has spent the last two years recording the stories of Indian women who have been surrogates. Her methods include participatory theater, participatory photography, and life histories. This work is highly relevant, as India is set to pass new legislation on surrogacy in India.

Renée Ridgway draws our attention to crowd-funding, the idea that 'big society' can function on volunteerism. In a crowd-funding structure, the social funding and subsidies traditionally provided by the state in a socially-democratic society begin to be replaced by groups of people contributing their wealth to particular projects. In this method of wealth distribution, those who need funding for projects solicit financial support from their friends and family in exchange for some kind of incentive (for example, an artist may produce small art objects in return for receiving funding). This solicitation usually takes place through the use of social media networks. Renee is concerned with how our social and familial networks become monetized in this structure of funding.

Oliver Lerone Schultz brings our attention to counterculture and how these are created by re-interpreting and queering networks. Countercultures can create contradictory space — images that queer and remask and create new alternative geographies. He points out that physical and social creations, especially images, are forms of networks that we create both socially and physically, and that images in particular can be sites of network creation. Everything, from thoughts to highways, can be seen as a node in a network. He is interested in how images relate to global networks, and how they are both created by them and represent these networks.

Akansha Rastogi compels us to think about the artistic domain. She grapples with questions of networks and surrogacy by asking: how does one creates an exhibition, an archive of space?

Gita Chadha remarks that the two major affects of modernity are the self and truth. Considering this, she asks: where do we position ourselves in a post-colonial context in feminist science? In the post-modern discourse, both nature and the body becomes completely plastic and unbound. Gita states that there must be a middle ground, especially in feminist studies. We must recycle lineages of thought and think critically of the feminist politics of surrogacy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-1-pecha-kucha

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Joshua Neves on Media Archipelagos

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:04:53Z

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.

Joshua Neves presents two areas of his work today. The first presentation is about his research on what he calls “media archipelagos,” a project that was inspired by island studies and grew into a focus on inter-Asian film festivals. The use of the term “archipelagos,” Neves argues, is a much more useful way of conceptualizing islands and “edge” communities—regions that are often thought about in terms of their isolation or juxtaposition against the mainland—than the current understanding of these regions as disconnected or “fringe.”

The idea of an archipelago of these fringe regions becomes particularly useful when we attempt to realize, or even map, the networks that are beginning to characterize the media industries in these areas of the world, especially in the study of film festivals. Exclusively Asian film festivals like BUSAN represent the emergence of what Neeves calls “minor media capitals” in the periphery, which are significant entry points (nodes) in a network or multitude of networks that exist outside of or even parallel to the core’s networks (the implications of the use of dependency theory terms was not discussed). Increasingly, these minor media capitals are becoming important sites of the production of Asian experience and Asian identity.

Of course, true to network theory, the mapping of these media networks, even within the archipelago framework, only leads to the discovery of more networks, or at least ways of thinking about these networks. Joshua asks us: are these networks at the edge or networks made up of edges? Do different networks characterize continental islands and oceanic islands? The only certainty is that there are many different ways of imagining these networks.

In his second presentation, Neves discusses with us another one of his research projects focused around mobile TV in post-socialist China. Mobile television has become common-place in most public spaces in urban China. Public squares, train stations, subways and buses—Television screens, and almost constant programming, can be found in all of the spaces. Many of these screens are aimed towards capturing the gaze of migrant populations, which Joshua finds particularly interesting and has become a major site of inquiry in this work.

Because mobile TV is tailored to time and location, the common model of televisuality as being distant and uninfluenced by the individual viewer has been reconstructed. Specific viewers at specific places are viewing programming that has been created specifically for their consumption, and the experience is becoming seamless, in that the average urban Chinese individual moves from one screen to the next throughout their daily activities. Joshua asks: what is it to be seamless? How do we become seamless? How does homelessness interplay with seamlessness in this context?

In the discussion, participants debated the use of the term “archipelagos,” particularly for islands, because there was a worry that the term did not invoke the complexity of many of the regions that it could encompass. Issues were also brought up with conceptualizing periphery media centres in the same way as core media centres, the structures of power in the dependency theory framework, and whether or not seamlessness could be invoked in the characterization of archipelago networks. Discussions about the habits of living as being temporal or spatial were also brought up, which led into a discussion of habits versus practice and habitus.

I actually found Neves' use of the word Archipelagos to be very useful for the conceptualization of "fringe" networks, as I felt that it was a term that invoked geography more than essence. I was troubled by the use of dependency theory in his presentation, but his reasoning for its use ("I like using problematic terms; they create dialogue") was satisfying for me. I think, though, that we must look closer at the film festival as a site of identity creation. How is this process happening? Why? Through films or the event itself? What type of films, then, are being rewarded? Is this influencing the types of identities being produced? Are these sites also producing restrictions on what is acceptable as "Asian" and asian identity?

I was also very intrigued by the participants’ further discussion of habitus and its relation to the entrenchment of power relations and unequal systems. Development, participants reasoned, is impeded by habits as they reinforce an understanding of the socio-cultural world. Without getting into a discussion on highly troublesome use of the word development, this is a problematic claim for me, as it infers that habitus is homogenous across multiple individuals. While I do not disagree that there must be patterns of habitus in certain groups or networks, the experience of socialization that leads to habitus must be different for each individual, especially overtime as their navigate the creation of their own identity. This idea of habitus-as-impediment also gestures towards a set of habits that are static over time.

This is an interesting claim for development theory, especially in the context of relating networks to habits, as the starting point of development would then be to identify the cultural habitus (i.e. map the network), which would cause the network to fall into crisis. Is this not similar to the colonial process of dismantling local culture?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-media-archipelagos

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Akansha Rastogi's Performance on Exhibition Space

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:09:29Z

Akansha Rastogi changes the pace of the afternoon session with a lecture—nay, a performance—on the form in exhibition spaces. Using language that can only be called poetry, she leads us through the biology of an image, and asks us to archive the image to the point of exhaustion and non-meaning. Though image analysis, she helps us to think about images through how they are accessed, to read their stories through their creators, their viewers, their past and present and their correspondences with the elements inside and out of the exhibition space—everything but the actual meaning of the image as art.

Towards the end of her presentation, Rastogi switches from prose to a discussion of her work, in which she divulged to us that many of the images she works with are from events that she was not involved in, and that she approached them as an outsider, a lurker. This allowed her to imagine and map the networks that were implicated in the exhibitions.

The participants were very pleased by the form that Rastogi had used in her presentation, though a debate was generated around whether or not it was art piece. Another artist in the crowd interpreted it as a performance lecture, and was critical of the discussion of Rastogi’s work in the end. Other participants and Rastogi herself defended the discussion of the project in the end, as it was useful in helping the participants understand the layers and context of the documentation.

Another large discussion that was spurred by the performance was centered on the method of network mapping that Rastogi put forward, and whether or not the claim that we must be outside of a network to see it is valid or not. Further, participants debated the role that locationality played in the mapping of networks, especially if networks could be mapped from within.

Participants were also interested in the concepts of “parasite” in the performance and its relation to surrogacy. While it was almost universally agreed that surrogacy was a troublesome concept that required further study, there was general contention around whether characterized terms like “parasite” or “epiphyte” were useful for discussion of surrogacy, and if more useful conceptualizations of surrogacy needed to move beyond the use of bounded language.

I was very intrigued by the discussions of inclusion and exclusion in the viewing and mapping of networks. Like many participants, I found the claims of required exclusion in order to view a network to be problematic. I agree that it may be easier to perceive a network when we are on the outside of it, but I don’t agree that it’s a pre-requisite. I think that this sort of “logical-academic” way of thinking about networks—that we need to be in a position of study, which requires an overview of all the various bits and pieces—places networks in an essence of structure that I am not sure is useful or not. Maybe the ability to see only certain parts of a network, which may be a position we find ourselves in when we are part of the network, is a better way of understanding the network, particularly its locationality, its presence, and its purpose, than comprehending it through the identification of all of its parts (i.e.: mapping).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-exhibition-space

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Closing Remarks

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:27:31Z

Nishant Shah closed the Habits of Living Thinkathon in Bangalore by disclosing that there truly was no blueprint planned for the event, as all of the participants were so diverse. There are future events already planned, and a repeat event with the same participants was mentioned for a year’s time from now.

Some of the next steps suggested by Nishant are the creation of a course based on the Habits of Living events run by the same participants and a publication of sorts on the work and themes that were discussed over the course of the event. Oliver discussed some future events that he will be involved in that he hopes some of the participants will be able to become involved in. Following this, Nishant suggested that some structure of circulation, feedback, interaction and/or sharing be set up so the participants can continue to stay updated and involved in each others’ work. Tumblr and wikipages were suggested.

Participants were interested in creating a digital publication on the discussions that took place during the Thinkathon. The creation of a course, and even a textbook, was also well received by the participants.

Gita Chadha felt that the process of the event and the discussions was very useful and conducive to sharing and reflection without being overwhelmed. She felt very strongly that the event was very helpful in helping her to draw parallels and connection between her work and the themes of the Thinkathon. She also felt that inviting an economist, even a political economist, might bring an interesting view to future events.

Nishant suggested that each member write a guest blog for the website on their presentations, which the participants felt was an excellent idea. Nishant also suggested requesting blogs from the invited participants who could not make it to the Thinkathon, as well as extending the invitation to anyone the participants felt would be able to bring useful viewpoints to the discussions.

The participants expressed gratitude at their involvement in the event and excitement for future events and activities with the group, and Nishant was thanked heartily by the group.

CIS would like to thank Brown University and the Brown Indian Initiative for supporting the Thinkathon, and Wendy Chun for making it possible. We would also like to thank the participants for taking part in the event and for making it a huge success! Thank you!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-closing-remarks

Digitalization of Culture

praskrishna — 2013-10-29T09:11:25Z

Dr. Nishant Shah did an introduction keynote to 1600 undergraduate students at the Leuphana University on October 8, 2013.

Click to read more about the event on Leuphana University.

Video

The various stakeholders of the Leuphana Orientation Week 2013 allow the organisation and proceeding of this one-of-a-kind project week. A combination of lecturers, experts, tutors, mentors and a high-class panel of judges, accompany the first-year students throughout these intensive days at the Leuphana University by informing, advising and supporting them.

The 1600 newly arrived students at the University will be separated into two cohorts for the Leuphana Orientation Week, each with 60 teams. All 120 teams will each have a tutor at their disposal, who will accompany them through the project days, lead them through the tasks and help them when questions or need for clarification arise.

Additionally, the teams will be supported by a total of 50 mentors and 25 presentation experts.

Aside from tutors, mentors, lecturers and experts, there is also a team of 30 persons composed of staff and students who contribute to the Leuphana Orientation Week 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/digitization-of-culture-nishant-shah-keynote-leuphana-university

Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global

praskrishna — 2013-11-20T09:35:13Z

Brown University organised the Asian Video Cultures event at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts between October 24 and 26, 2013. Nishant Shah presented a paper titled “In Access: Approaches to Understand Digital and Online Video in Contemporary Asia”.

Read about the event on Asian Video Cultures website here.

Agenda

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2013 at 6pm (Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center)
Screening and Q&A with director Paromita Vohra
Partners in Crime (2011) – http://www.parodevi.com/?p=323
*followed by reception

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 (Englander Studio, Granoff Center)

8:30-9am *Breakfast

9am Welcome – Bhaskar Sarkar

Session I: Infra-structures

9:15 Jenny Chio, “Video Documentary and Rural Public Culture in Ethnic China”

10:15 Chia-chi Wu, “Wei dianying and Xiao quexing— Technologies of ‘Small’ and Trans-Chinese Cinematic Practices”

Coffee Break

11:30 Patricia Zimmerman, “EngageMedia: The Gado Gado Tactics of Indonesia’s New Social Media”

Lunch 12:30-1:30pm (*for participants)

Session II: Circulation

1:30 Feng-Mei Heberer, “An Archive of Bad Feelings, a Site of Public Address – Experimental Video Works from Asian Germany”

2:30 Rahul Mukherjee and Abhigyan Singh, “MircoSD-ing ‘Mewati Videos’: Circulation and Regulation of a Subaltern-Popular Media Culture”

Coffee Break

3:45 Michelle Cho, “Cosmopolitics and Kpop Video Culture”

4:45-6:15pm Screening and Discussion with Paromita Vohra
Q2P (2006, 53 min) – http://www.parodevi.com/?p=254

7pm Dinner

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26 (Englander Studio, Granoff Center)

8:30-9am Breakfast

Session III: Intimacies

9am Niranjan Sivakumar, “Minorigate: The Perils and Potentials of Global Cultural Circulation”

10am Conerly Casey, “Bollywood Banned, and the Electrifying Palmasutra: The Sensory Politics of Love and Pornography in Northern Nigeria”

Coffee Break

11:15am Nishant Shah, “In Access: Approaches to Understand Digital and Online Video in Contemporary Asia”

Lunch 12:15-1pm (*for participants)

Session IV: Occupation

1pm Mariam B. Lam, “Archival Trauma, Critical Regionalism and Southeast Asian Video Arts”

2pm Nathaniel Smith, “Vigilante Video: Japan’s New Netizens and the Wrongs of the Right”

Coffee Break

3:15pm Celina Hung, “Documenting ‘Immigrant Brides’: the Stakes of Multiculturalism in the Taiwanese Media”

4:30 Closing Roundtable: “In the Penumbra of the Global”

7pm Dinner

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/asian-video-cultures-october-24-26-2013

Back When the Past had a Future: Being Precarious in a Network Society

nishant — 2013-02-12T06:16:12Z

We live in Network Societies. This phrase has been so bastardised to refer to the new information turn mediated by digital technologies, that we have stopped paying attention to what the Network has become. Networks are everywhere. They have become the default metaphor of our times, where everything from infrastructure assemblies to collectives of people, are all described through the lens of a network.

This article by Nishant Shah was published in a peer-reviewed newspaper Researching BWPWAP. The write-up is on Page 3.

We are no longer just human beings living in socially connected, politically identified communities. Instead, we have become actors, creating archives of traces and transactions, generating traffic and working as connectors in the ever expanding fold of the network.

The network is an opaque metaphor, conflating description and explanation. So it becomes the object to be studied, the originary context that produces itself, and the explanatory framework that accounts for itself. In other words, the network was our past – it gives us an account of who we were, it is our present – it defines the context of all our activities, and it is our future – where we do everything to support the network because it is the only future that we can imagine for ourselves. It is this flattening characteristic of networks that are diagrammatically mapped, cartographically reproduced, and presented outside of and oblivious to temporality, that produces a condition of the future that can no longer be imagined through our everyday lives.

Networks neither promise nor deliver a flattened utopia of coexistence and decentralised power. Networks are, in fact, quite aware of the structures of inequity and conditions of privilege they create and perpetuate: the only way to recognise the existence of a network is to be outside of it, the only aspiration to belong to a network is to be kept outside of it when you recognise it. Networks create themselves as simultaneously ubiquitous and scarce, of everpresent and ephemeral, creating a new ontology for our being human – an ontology of precariousness, contingent upon erasure of our histories, archives of our present, and unimaginable futures; futures we are not ready for, and don’t have strategies to occupy.

I remember the times, before networks became the default conditions of being human, when kids, negotiating the variegated temporalities of their past-present-futures, would often begin their speculations on future, by saying, "When I grow up...". In that hope of growing up, was the potential for radical political action, the possibility of social reconstruction. In network societies, though, time has no currency. It has been replaced by attentions, flows of information and actions, and do not offer a tomorrow to grow into.

There is no future to help mitigate the exigencies of the present. And with the overwhelming emphasis on archiving the present, there is no more a coherent future that can be accounted for in the vocabulary that the network develops to explain itself, and the hypothetical world outside it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/aprja-net-researching-bwpwap-nishant-shah-back-when-the-past-had-a-future

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects

nishant — 2013-01-26T09:49:07Z

Brown University is organizing an international conference that elucidates the networked conditions of our times, how they produce ways, conditions, and habits of life and living, how they spread local actions globally. The conference will be held from March 21 to 23, 2013 at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Nishant Shah is participating as a speaker in this event. Read the full details published on the Brown University website. Also see the Thinkathon page.

Through a series of workshops, art residences, and dialogues, Habits of Living seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed.

Conference: Habits of Living

This international conference will bring together prominent and innovative scholars and artists at Brown University. There will be ninety-minute panels (each with two speakers), a keynote address by the RAQs Media Collective, a series of concurrent "unconferences" (informal sessions to be run by the audience), a scrapyard challenge, and an exhibition of work running in parallel. Speakers include Ariella Azoulay, Elizabeth Bernstein, Biella Coleman, Didier Fassin, Kara Keeling, Laura Kurgan, Ganaelle Langlois, Colin Milburn, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Elias Muhanna, Lisa Parks, Raqs Media Collective, Nishant Shah, Ravi Sundarum, Tiziana Terranova, and Nigel Thrift.

This event is designed as a large public conference whose major segments are participant-driven "unconferences." Unconferences are fluid events of casual five-minute "lightning" presentations and informal dialogue generated through group interactions. To facilitate discussion around networked societies, the multiple unconference sessions will focus around topics generated in advance by all the participants in the audience who will be guided through a quick and easy sign-up process. The unconferences are meant to take a more improvisational form, so the themes and locations will remain flexible, and entirely driven by audience participation.

Attendance at the conference is free, but please register here.

Habits of Living is generously sponsored by Brown University via the Dean of the Faculty, The Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, The Cogut Center for the Humanities, The Humanities Initiative, The Vice President for International Affairs, and The Brown India Initiative. Additional sponsorship provided by RISD Digital + Media.

Conference Schedule

Thurs., Mar. 21

1:00-5:00pm	Scrapyard Challenge—Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen
7:30-9:00	Raqs Media Collective

Fri., Mar. 22

9:00-10:20am	Nigel Thrift and Laura Kurgan
10:30-11:50	Elizabeth Bernstein and Didier Fassin
1:00pm-2:20	UNCONFERENCES
2:30-3:50	Nishant Shah and Kara Keeling
4:00-5:20	Nick Mirzoeff and Ariella Azoulay

Sat., Mar. 23

9:00-10:20am	Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundarum
10:30-11:50	Elias Muhanna and Speaker TBD
1:00pm-2:20	UNCONFERENCES
2:30-3:50	Lisa Parks and Ganaele Langlois
4:00-5:20	Colin Milburn and Gabriella Coleman

Speakers

Ariella Azoulay, Department of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Ariella Azoulay studies revolutions from the 18th century onward and investigates how civil historical knowledge can be portrayed from photographs and other visual media. The Israeli political regime has been a primary focus of her work. Recent books: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, August 2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); co-author with Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford University Press, 2012). Curator of When The Body Politic Ceases To Be An Idea, Exhibition Room – Manifesta Journal Around Curatorial Practices No. 16 (folded format in Hebrew, MOBY, 2013), Potential History (2012, Stuk / Artefact, Louven), Untaken Photographs (2010, Igor Zabel Award, The Moderna galerija, Lubliana; Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Architecture of Destruction (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Everything Could Be Seen (Um El Fahem Gallery of Art). Director of documentary films Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012), I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004), The Food Chain (2004), among others.
Elizabeth Bernstein, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University Professor Bernstein is the author of Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which received two distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association as well as the 2009 Norbert Elias Prize—an international prize which is awarded biennially to the author of a first major book in sociology and related disciplines. Her current book project is Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom, which explores the convergence of feminist, neoliberal, and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of contemporary global policies surrounding the traffic in women. Her research has received support from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Social Science Research Council, the NSF, the AAUW, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. At Barnard and Columbia, she teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, on trafficking, migration, and sexual labor, and on contemporary social theory.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Parsons MFA in Design & Technology and Parsons School of Art, Design, History, and Theory (ADHT). Dr. Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an award winning researcher, artist, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of Trinity College Dublin. His work and thesis is titled "Deconstructing Networks" and includes over 77 creative projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. His work has been exhibited and showcased at venues such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art (Artport), Palais du Tokyo,Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His writing has appeared in publications such as WIRED, Make, Gizmodo, Neural and more. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 14 countries in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and Australia since 2003. Portfolio and Work: http://www.coin-operated.com Scrapyard Challenge Workshops: http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com Twitter: @coinop29
Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman teaches, researches, and writes on computer hackers and digital activism. Her work examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Her first book, "Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking" has been published with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. Source: http://gabriellacoleman.org/
Didier Fassin, James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Director of Studies, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris Didier Fassin was the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Social Sciences (CNRS — Inserm — EHESS — University Paris North). Trained as a medical doctor, he has been Vice-President of Médecins sans Frontières and is President of the Comité médical pour les exilés. His field of interest is political and moral anthropology, and he is currently conducting an ethnography of the state through a study of policing and the prison. His recent publications include: De la question sociale à la question raciale? (with Eric Fassin, 2006), Les politiques de l’enquète: Épreuves ethnographiques (with Alban Bensa, 2008), Les nouvelles frontières de la société française (2009) and Moral Anthropology (2012) as editor; When Bodies Remember: Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007), The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, 2009), Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), and Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), as author.
Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Critical Studies (School of Cinematic Arts) and African American Studies (Department of American Studies and Ethnicity), University of Southern California Kara Keeling’s current research focuses on theories of temporality, spatial politics, finance capital, and the radical imagination; cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism, Africana media, queer and feminist media, and sound. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. Keeling is author of several articles published in anthologies and journals and co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing and (with Josh Kun) of a collection of essays about sound in American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Currently, Keeling is writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled Queer Times, Black Futures and co-editing (with Thenmozhi Soundarajan) a collaborative multi-media archive and scholarship project focused on the work of Third World Majority, one of the first women of color media justice collectives in the United States, entitled "From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema". Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Keeling was an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and was an adjunct assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. Keeling has developed and taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on topics such as Media and Activism, Cinema and Social Change, Race, Sexuality, and Cinema, and Film As Cultural Critique, among others. In the summer of 2005, Keeling participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and American Quarterly, where she is a managing editor, and she is the Editor of the Moving Image Review section of the journal Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ).
Laura Kurgan, Associate Professor of Architecture, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL), Director of Visual Studies, Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning, Columbia University Professor Kurgan's work explores things ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, new structures of participation in design, and the visualization of urban and global data. Her recent research includes a multi-year SIDL project on "million-dollar blocks" and the urban costs of the American incarceration experiment, and a collaborative exhibition on global migration and climate change. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art (where it is part of the permanent collection). She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009, and named one of Esquire Magazine's ‘Best and Brightest’ in 2008. She has published articles and essays in Assemblage, Grey Room, ANY, Volume, and Else/Where Mapping, among other books and journals. Source: http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/people.php?id=10
Ganaele Langlois, Assistant Professor of Communication, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Associate Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media Professor Langlois has recently published a co-authored book entitled The Permanent Campaign – New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang).
Colin Milburn, Associate Professor of English and Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities, UC Davis Professor Milburn's research focuses on the cultural relations between literature, science, and technology. His interests include science fiction, gothic horror, the history of biology, the history of physics, video games, and the digital humanities. He is a member of the Science & Technology Studies Program and the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. He is also affiliated with the programs in Cinema and Technocultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical Theory, as well as the W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Since 2009, he has been serving as the director of the UC Davis Humanities Innovation Lab, an experimental offshoot of the Digital Humanities Initiative. Source: http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/milburn
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University My work is in the field of visual culture. In recent years it has fallen into four main areas. First, I have been working on the genealogy of visuality, a key term in the field. Far from being a postmodern theory word, it was created to describe how Napoleonic era generals "visualized" a battlefield that they could not see. Applied to the social as a whole by Thomas Carlyle, visuality was a conservative strategy to oppose all emancipations and liberations in the name of the autocratic hero. My book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality was published by Duke University Press (2011). Second, I produce texts and projects that support the general development of visual culture as a field of study and a methodology. The third Visual Culture Reader was published in 2012 by Routledge, The second fully revised edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture was published in 2009 by Routledge, with color illustrations throughout and new sections of Keywords and Key Images. Third, I work on militant research with the global social movements that have arisen since 2011. Finally, I am working on a new project on the cultures of climate change in conjunction with the not-for-profit Islands First. Source: http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio.html
Katherine Moriwaki, Assistant Professor of Media Design, School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design Professor Moriwaki’s focus is on interaction design and artistic practice. She teaches core curriculum classes in the M.F.A. Design + Technology Program where students engage a broad range of creative methodologies to realize new possibilities in interactive media. Katherine is also currently completing a Ph.D. in the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin. Her work has appeared in numerous festivals and conferences including numer.02 at Centre Georges Pompidou, Futuresonic, Break 2.2, SIGGRAPH, eculture fair, Transmediale, ISEA, Ars Electronica, WIRED Nextfest, and Maker Faire. Her publications have appeared in a wide range of venues such as Rhizome.org, Ubicomp, CHI, ISEA, NIME, the European Transport Conference, and the Journal of AI & Society. Her project Umbrella.net, in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen was featured in "New Media Art" by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana in 2006. She has taught at a wide variety of institutions and departments, such as Trinity College Dublin, Rhode Island School of Design, and Parsons School of Design, as has lead workshops on interaction design and the creative re-use of electronic objects around the globe. These "Scrapyard Challenge" workshops have been held thirty-seven times in fourteen countries across five continents. Katherine received her Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where people and enabling interaction were emphasized over any specific technology. She was a 2004 recipient of the Araneum Prize from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO. Source: http://www.kakirine.com/?page_id=2
Elias Muhanna, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies, Brown University Professor Muhanna teaches courses on classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University in 2012, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law in 2011-12. His current research focuses on classical and early modern encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world, and on particularly on the diverse forms of large-scale compilation during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). In addition to his academic scholarship, Muhanna writes extensively on contemporary cultural and political affairs in the Middle East for several publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National, Mideast Monitor, World Politics Review, Bidoun, and Transition.
Lisa Parks, Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara Dr. Parks is a Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and an affiliate of the Department of Feminist Studies. She also currently serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara. Parks has conducted research on the uses of satellite, computer, and television technologies in different TRANSnational contexts. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, art, international relations, and communication studies. She has published on topics ranging from secret satellites to drones, from the mapping of orbital space to political uses of Google Earth, from mobile phone use in post-communist countries to the visualization of communication infrastructures. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, and Coverage: Aero-Orbital Media After 9/11 (forthcoming), and is working on a third book entitled Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies. She has co-edited three books: Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures, Planet TV, and UNDEAD TV, and is working on a fourth entitled Signal Traffic: Studies of Media Infrastructures. She has served on the editorial boards of 10 peer-reviewed academic journals and has contributed to many anthologies and edited collections.
Raqs Media Collective, Jeebesh Bagchi, (b. 1965, New Delhi, India), Monica Narula, (b. 1969, New Delhi, India), Shuddhabrata Sengupta, (b. 1968, New Delhi, India) Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces, locates them in the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory — often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai-CSDS, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series. Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu and means the state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl. It is also a word used for dance. Selected Exhibitions: 2012 Art Unlimited, Art Basel 2012 solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London 2012 group exhibition of billboards around the city of Birmingham (UK), Ikon Gallery & BCU 2012 solo exhibition Frith Street Gallery 2010 The Things That Happen When Falling In Love, a solo exhibition at Baltic Centre, Gateshead 2010 The Capital of Accumulation, a solo exhibition at Project 88, Mumbai 2010 a group exhibition at 29th Sao Paulo Biennial 2010, Brazil 2010 a group exhibition at 8th Shanghai Biennale, China 2010 The New Décor, a touring group exhibition at Hayward Gallery, London; The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow 2009 The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet, a solo exhibition at Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain, London 2009 When The Scales Fall From Your Eyes, a solo exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham (UK) 2009 Escapement, a solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery 2008 Co-curators for Manifesta 7, Trentino
Nishant Shah, Founder and Director of Research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore Dr. Shah's doctoral work at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, examines the production of a Technosocial Subject at the intersections of law, Internet technologies and everyday cultural practices in India. As an Asia Scholarship Fellow (2008-2009), he also initiated a study that looks at what goes into the making of an IT City in India and China. He is the series editor for a three-year collaborative project on "Histories of the Internet(s) in India" that maps nine alternative histories that promote new ways of understanding the technological revolution in the country. Nishant’s current research engagement since 2009 has been with the possibilities of social transformation and political participation in young peoples’ use of digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South. Working with a community of 150 young people and other stakeholders in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he has co-edited a 4-volume book titled Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and an information kit titled D:Coding Digital Natives. Nishant writes regularly for The Indian Express and GQ India to give a public voice to the academic research. He is currently also engaged in a project that seeks to articulate the intersections of digital technologies and social justice within the higher education space in India. Nishant designs Internet and Society courses for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Communication, Media, Development, Art, Cultural Studies, and STS, in and outside of India. He is a founding member of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and has also worked as a cyberculture consultant for various spaces like Yahoo!, Comat Technologies, Khoj Studios, and Nokia. Source: http://dmlcentral.net/node/4815
Ravi Sundaram, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Sarai Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the post-colonial city and contemporary media experiences. As media technology and urban life have intermingled in the post-colonial world, new challenges have emerged for contemporary cultural theory. Sundaram has looked at the phenomenon that he calls ‘pirate modernity’, an illicit form of urbanism that draws from media and technological infrastructures of the post-colonial city. Sundaram’s essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia, and Europe. His current research deals with urban fear after media modernity, where he looks at the worlds of image circulation after the mobile phone, ideas of transparency and secrecy, and the media event. Sundaram was one of the initiators of the Centre’s Sarai programme which he co-directs with his colleague Ravi Vasudevan. He has co-edited the critically acclaimed Sarai Reader series: The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life, (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media (2004) and Turbulence (2006). His other publications include Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi (2009). Two of his other volumes are No Limits: Media Studies from India (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Delhi’s Twentieth Century (forthcoming, OUP).
Tiziana Terranova, Associate Professor, Sociology of Communications, Coordinator, PhD programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L'Orientale’ Tiziana Terranova's Her research interests lie in the area of the culture, science, technology and the economy from the perspective of the intersection of power, knowledge and subjectivation. She is the author of Corpi Nella Rete, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, and numerous essays on new media published in journals such as New Formations, Ctheory, Angelaki, Social Text, Theory, Culture and Society, and Culture Machine. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studi Culturali (Il Mulino) and Theory, Culture and Society, a regular participant to the grassroots seminars of the Italian nomadic university ‘uninomade’ and occasionally also a writer on matters of new media for the Italian newspaper Il manifesto.
Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick Professor Thrift is one of the world’s leading human geographers and social scientists. His current research spans a broad range of interests, including international finance; cities and new forms of political life; non-representational theory; affective politics; and the history of time. During his academic career Professor Thrift has been the recipient of a number of distinguished academic awards including the Scottish Geographical Society Gold Medal in 2008, the Royal Geographical Society Victoria Medal for contributions to geographic research in 2003 and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. Prior to becoming the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, he was the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oxford. Source: http://liftconference.com/people/nigel-thrift

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-networked-affects-glocal-effects

Defending the Humanities in the Digital Age

nishant — 2014-03-06T11:40:42Z

The author says that he is trying to take the formulation of digital humanities as a history-in-making where we might still be able to salvage the humanities from being soft-skills and our pedagogies from becoming reduced to MOOCs.

Dr. Nishant Shah's column was published in DML Central on February 24, 2014.

Taking Care of Things: Reclaiming What is Lost in Our Defence of Humanities[1]
If this were a book, this section would be the preface. If it were an academic paper, a footnote. If an art piece, a curator’s note. But, in this mixed multi-media semi-strange space of the research blog, this is just the space where I tell you what is going to follow. And perhaps, explain (though not to justify) why I need to tell you what is going to follow. For a while now, I have been trying to work through some of the questions that have emerged around (and sometimes, because of) digital humanities as a concept and as a practice. A lot of my thought has been about addressing the concerns around infrastructure, human skill, resources, pedagogy and the need to disprivilege the digital as the only point of focus in a majority of the discourse.

As I write about these questions in the different spaces that I write in, I’m trying to take the formulation of digital humanities as a history-in-making where we might still be able to salvage the humanities from being soft-skills and our pedagogies from becoming reduced to MOOCs. In doing so, I started experiencing a strange discomfort with my own writing. This is not new. Every time I glance retrospectively at my older writing, I cringe, and despair and work hard at resisting the impulse to apologise to my readers. It could have been better, sharper, more precise.[2]But, the discomfort that I am experiencing now, looking at the last couple of years of writing about digital humanities, is different. It is a discomfort that emerges from the fact that in trying to defend and protect the domain of the humanities, the register of my writing has changed considerably.

I try to be accessible and write in prosaic forms that are easily understood and not prone to ambiguity. I try to talk to multiple stakeholders, especially those who are ringing the death knell of traditional humanities, speaking in a language of relevance, significance, impact and efficacy. I try to build infrastructure, engaging with funding agencies, carefully extrapolating the ideas of pilot innovations, mainscaling, upstreaming and integrating everyday practices.

In all these attempts, which have been successful in varying degrees, I have let go of the very things that my English literature and humanities training had equipped me to do — to write with passion, to explore the creativity of linguistic and textual expression, to mix form, function and format to generate new relationships between disparate objects that might have otherwise been kept in their self-contained silos — and to pursue, not through empirical evidence, but through creative association, through cross-cultural and inter-textual referencing, a persuasive politics of passionate dialogue. Or, to not make such a song and dance (and a possible meme) out of it, I am slowly realising that very few of us, doing digital humanities, are exploring the very tools that humanities studies have offered us, to question and contest the status quo so that we can envision and dream alternate realities and futures.[3] So caught have we been, trying to defend our craft (and sometimes the art) that we have started speaking in the language of those who question, rather than strengthening the voices we already have.

So, I write today (see, I told you, we would need an explanation), as an experiment, in a language and style that I have forced myself to forget, in a way that I don’t even remember that it is forgotten. I write about three things – archives, life-cycles, and habits — in order to look at the complex and complicated relationships that we have presumed and established in the practices of digital humanities. I write to question our human-centric approach, where we think about things, but we only think of them from our human perspectives. I write to imagine, nay, to persuade you to imagine, what it would be like to think of things as things, dislodged from our human positions and dreaming cyborg dreams. I write, to explore, what it means in our DH concerns, to take care of things as things, and not as the separate, the other, the human.

Taking Care of Things: The Beginning

Welcome, human beings, cyborgs, and things, to this blog post[4] It has been designed, by a few human beings, by a few machines, and a few things in-between. Here, I lay the ground and lead you into the fine practice of taking care of things. But this task produces in me a strange existential anxiety. I try to figure out what role I play in introducing something as common place, quotidian and everything as taking care of things.

Should I be like the head of an organised crime unit, who, for a price, shall take care of things that bother you by destroying them, silencing them, or making them invisible? Maybe I channel the energies of a grandmother, looking down the family tree of resemblances, giving out instructions on how to take care of the legacies and heirlooms, of the epilepsies in blood, that we shall pass from generation to generation. Should I be a historian who identifies patterns in the order of things, giving you hints at how we need to take care of things past and things to come so that we can live with things as they are? Or, how about a witness, blindfolded in my ignorance, a heathen in his blindness, describing to you the wonders of an elephant that looks like a pillar, a rope, a pan and a sword, trying to preserve what I remember, always knowing, always despairing that what I recall is smaller than what I remember, what I remember is smaller than what I know, what I know is smaller than what is, and what is, is both inscrutable and ineffable by the mere human?

As I negotiate with these fractured, fragmented, frail and failed attempts at trying to care for you, care for ideas, care enough to transmit thoughts via words into your receptive selves, I realise that it is a futile attempt. Even if I were to enter that state of information nirvana, where what I think translates into words, pristine, pure, uncontaminated by powers of interpretation and untouched by the fallacy of meaning, you still would be unable to process it. Everything that I say will only be misunderstood by you. And, I shall misread your misunderstanding. And, together we shall fake it, like orgasms on a surreptitious one-night stand, in the quest of making meaning. In other words, I lament that we are not machines. That we are not things. It is only in the machinistic, especially in the digital machines of computing, that these seamless flows of information are possible. Garbage in, garbage out. What you see is what you get. Does exactly what it says on the tin. All your base are belong to us.

And so, welcome, once again human beings, cyborgs, things to this piece of text that I hope turns out to be fantastic, terrific, awesome. Fantastic because it invites you to enter realms of fantasy. Terrific because it leads us into things that terrify us. To this awesome evening. Awesome because it silences us into awe. Welcome, to this text, which is a safe space — look, you can ride on the hyphen, or drop between the white spaces of words. It is a safe space where we think, not of things, but as things. That is the only way out of the quandary into which I have trapped myself.

Taking Care of Things
It is humanly impossible to do so. And it is in thinking of taking care as a human function, that we face bewilderment and anxiety. If we pretend, for the space of this text[5] to be things — immortal but destructible, without agency but with design, bereft of intention but with defined purpose, devoid of ambiguity but prone to abuse — and try and make sense of the three things that we shall return to, recursively, obsessively, desperately, in the next three days, then we might be on to something.

As things, we look at archives. The repository of things. An indexicality of things that are present. A glaring array of things that are absent. The archive has been imagined in the service of the human, at the desire of the human, and the curatorial logics of collective human experience too long. Let us think of not only an archive of things, but an archive that follows the internal logics and logistics of things. An archive that is constructed by things, which might sometimes give us human access and interface to things within it. Archives, which might use human powers — biological, organic, intellectual, affective — to organise themselves, to fuel their constant expansion and arrangement. Archives as a purpose for human existence. Archives as the alien space jelly that feeds on the human in order to survive, so that it can sustain the order and power of the things that reside within it.

In a world where the human has already conceded its right to memory — memory is a stick, it is a promiscuous, adulterous, plug and play flash drive, that romances, serenades and has infectious relationships with different machines… in such a world, it should be easy to imagine that the human, at least when it comes to informational realities, is secondary, if not insignificant. The human, prone to decay and death, attacked by biological malware that erodes its internal functions, disabling its programmes and often short-circuiting its motherboard, is fragile and surely the most unstable form of storing something as beautiful and terrifying as information.

We live too fast, die too soon, and in the process, constantly destroy the meaningless but necessary flow and circulation of information. And, so, we need to think of life-cycles differently. The things that we live with, generally outlive our carbon based biological bodies. We pass on, through genetic mutation, our eyes, our knobby knees and our genetic predisposition to chocolate to the subsequent generations. But, we also pass on our assets, our properties, our passwords and datasets. And maybe, given that the data outlives us, data is seemingly immortal, data registers our death and continues in its divine existence, we need to restructure our idea of who lives, who dies, and what constitutes a life-cycle.

Hence, I beseech you, to let go of your humanity. This stubborn sticking to the idea of being human, is merely a habit. It is taught. It is a form of co-option. Remember those days, when you were still not sure about being human. The day, when you were told that when you grow up, you can become anything you want — the disappointment of realising that it was a lie… that you wanted to be a dog, but you were trapped and coerced into becoming a human. Let go of the idea that being human has anything exceptional to it. We love. We care. We kill. Well, guess what?

Things Care
Things love. Oh, they love. Selfishly, destructively, intensely. Things love us and they demand our attention, time and intimacy, slowly enveloping us in soft glows, gently vibrating in our pockets, sensually slithering in our hands. And everybody knows what happens to a machine that you pour a cup of coffee on — like a disappointed lover, Romeo to his Juliet poisoning himself to death, like Medea on a revenge spree eating her own children, the machine, when neglected, dies.

Things care. But we are mistaken in thinking that they care for us. Things care for themselves. Things take care of each other. When you and I are asleep, your refrigerator connects to your microwave, speaking through the analogue networks, resonating in electromagnetic frequencies. And things kill. Slowly, gently, hypnotically, they wait, they watch, and when we are not looking, they stab, they sting, they betray and remind us that the human is futile.

To take care of things as human beings is then an exercise in wasted effort. Because we shall always be addressing things from a condition of inadequacy and wastefulness, well aware that the thing that we are talking to, talking about, talking through, is more precise, more fulfilled, more in control of its intentions and more aware of its destiny than we are ever going to be. Maybe in order to take care of things, we need to think of ourselves as things. Things that talk to things. Things that take care of things. That will be a world of new equalities. A world, where we can stop living in fear of the other — the thing.

Where Everything is a Thing
A thing is in everything.

[1]. This is a footnote to acknowledge that the first thought for this line of thinking emerged in conversations at the Post Media Lab, and concretized at their recent event from where I borrow this title. Special thanks for Oliver Lerone Schultz, Clemens Apprich, Christina Kral, Kelly Dobson and Wendy Chun who made this line of thinking grow through the Habits of Living workshops.

[2]. For the first time, the green underline that my word processor has produced, telling me that the correct prose would end the sentence with ‘and more precise’ is not feeding my Dysgrammatophobia. How dare it tell me how I should write?

[3]. I have to give a special shout out to Johanna Drucker whose resolute mixing of the styles and genres, writing as a digital humanist while writing about digital humanities has been truly inspiring.

[4]. I am not sure which of you would read it in its entirety, and I don’t really know how to talk to things yet, so while I welcome everybody and everything, I am going to address only the human reader in my text. My metadata, I hope, imparts pleasure to the non-humans who are not plotting their way into Actor-Network visualisations.

[5]. While battles rage on Twitter, relationships live their life-cycles on Facebook, new memes propagate and abound the Tumblrs, blink-and-you-miss-them, subcultural practices explode into meteoric showers, and somewhere, some harassed teacher tries to figure out what s/he did wrong in the last seven births that s/he now has to teach using Blackboard.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/dmlcentral-nishant-shah-february-24-2014-defending-the-humanities-in-the-digital-age