Centre for Internet and Society

Wiki Loves Pride 2014 and Adding Diversity to Wikipedia

dorothy — 2014-07-25T10:56:38Z

Since Wikipedia’s gender gap first came to light in late 2010, Wikipedians have taken the issue to heart, developing projects with a focus on inclusivity in content, editorship and the learning environments relevant to new editors.

Click to read the original published on Wikimedia blog here.

Wiki Loves Pride started from conversations among Wikipedians editing LGBT topics in a variety of fields, including history, popular culture, politics and medicine, and supporters of Wikimedia LGBT - a proposed user group which promotes the development of LGBT-related content on Wikimedia projects in all languages and encourages LGBT organizations to adopt the values of free culture and open access. The group has slowly been building momentum for the past few years, but had not yet executed a major outreach initiative. Wiki Loves Pride helped kickstart the group’s efforts to gather international supporters and expand its language coverage.

Pride Edit-a-Thons and Photo Campaigns Held Internationally

We decided to run a campaign in June (LGBT Pride Month in the United States), culminating with a multi-city edit-a-thon on June 21. We first committed to hosting events in New York City and Portland, Oregon (our cities of residence), hoping others would follow. We also gave individuals the option to contribute remotely, either by improving articles online or by uploading images related to LGBT culture and history. This was of particular importance for users who live in regions of the world less tolerant of LGBT communities, or where it may be dangerous to organize LGBT meetups.

We decided to run a campaign in June (LGBT Pride Month in the United States), culminating with a multi-city edit-a-thon on June 21. We first committed to hosting events in New York City and Portland, Oregon (our cities of residence), hoping others would follow. We also gave individuals the option to contribute remotely, either by improving articles online or by uploading images related to LGBT culture and history. This was of particular importance for users who live in regions of the world less tolerant of LGBT communities, or where it may be dangerous to organize LGBT meetups.

In addition to New York City and Portland, offline events were held in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with online activities in Houston, Seattle, Seoul, South Africa, Vancouver, Vienna and Warsaw. Events will be held in Bangalore and New Delhi later this month as part of the Centre for Internet and Society’s (CIS) Access to Knowledge (A2K) program. Other Wikimedia chapters have expressed interest in hosting LGBT edit-a-thons in the future.

Campaign Results

The campaign’s “Results” page lists 90 LGBT-related articles which were created on English Wikipedia and links to more than 750 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Also listed are new categories, templates and article drafts, along with “Did you know” (DYK) hooks that appeared on the Main Page and policy proposals which may be of interest to the global LGBT community.

The campaign also attracted participation from Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia. Wikimedia Commons hosted an LGBT photo challenge, which received more than 50 entries and an LGBT task force was created at Wikidata. So far the group, which also seeks to improve LGBT-related content, has gathered 10 supporters and has adopted a rainbow-colored variation of the Wikidata logo as its symbol.

	Continuing Efforts Our hope is that the campaign will continue to grow and evolve, galvanizing participation in more locations and in different languages. Wiki Loves Pride organizers will continue to provide logistical support to those interested in hosting events and collaborating with cultural institutions. Contiguous with the events of Wiki Loves Pride, Wikimedia LGBT has an open application to achieve user group status from the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee and looks forward to expanding its members and efforts on all fronts.

Continuing Efforts

Our hope is that the campaign will continue to grow and evolve, galvanizing participation in more locations and in different languages. Wiki Loves Pride organizers will continue to provide logistical support to those interested in hosting events and collaborating with cultural institutions.

Contiguous with the events of Wiki Loves Pride, Wikimedia LGBT has an open application to achieve user group status from the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee and looks forward to expanding its members and efforts on all fronts.

Jason Moore, Wikipedian

Dorothy Howard, Wikipedian

Copyright notes: "SF Pride 2014 - Stierch 6.jpg" by SarahStierch , under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons, "Portland Pride 2014 - 036.JPG" by Another Believer , under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikimedia-blog-dorothy-howard-wiki-loves-pride-2014-and-adding-diversity-to-wikipedia

Asia in the Edges: A Narrative Account of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School in Bangalore

nishant — 2015-04-14T12:47:38Z

The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School is a Biennial event that invites Masters and PhD students from around Asia to participate in conversations around developing and building an Inter-Asia Cultural Studies thought process. Hosted by the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society along with the Consortium of universities and research centres that constitute it, the Summer School is committed to bringing together a wide discourse that spans geography, disciplines, political affiliations and cultural practices for and from researchers who are interested in developing Inter-Asia as a mode of developing local, contextual and relevant knowledge practices.

This is the narrative account of the experiments and ideas that shaped the second Summer School, “The Asian Edge” which was hosted in Bangalore, India, in 2012. The peer reviewed article was published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal, Volume 15, Issue 2, on July 3, 2014. Click to download the file. (PDF, 95 Kb)

At the heart of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) project has been a pedagogic impulse that seeks to train young students and scholars in critical ways of thinking about questions of the contemporary. The ambition of developing an “Asian way of thinking” is not merely a response to the hegemony of North-Western theory in thought and research, especially in Social Sciences and Humanities. It is also a way by which new knowledge is developed and shared between different locations in Asia, to get a more embedded sense of the social, the political and the cultural in the region. Apart from building a widespread network of researchers, activists, academics and artists who have generated the most comprehensive and critical insights into developing ontological and teleological relationships with Asia, there have always been attempts made to integrate students into the network’s activities. From student pre-conferences that invited students to build intellectual dialogues, to subsidies and fellowships offered to allow students to travel from their different institutions across Asia, various initiatives have inspired and facilitated the first encounter with Asia for a number of young researchers who might have lived in Asian countries but not been trained to understand the context of what it means to be in Asia. Over time, through different structures, such as the institutionalisation of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal and the growth of the eponymous conference, the IACS has already expanded the scope of its activities, involving new interlocutors and locations in which to grow the environment of critical academic and research discourse.

Building upon the expertise and networks of scholarship developed for over a decade, the IACS Society initiated the biennial Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, in order to engage younger scholars and students with some of the key questions that have been discussed and contested in the cultural studies discourse in Asia. The IACS Summer School that began in 2010 in Seoul, is a travelling school that moves to different countries, drawing upon local energies, resources and debates to acquaint students with the critical discourse as well as the experience of difference that marks Asia as a continent. The summer school in 2012 was hosted jointly by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Indian Institute of Sciences.[1]

For a snapshot of the Summer School, see Table 1 below:

Table 1. The 2012 Inter-Asia cultural studies summer school: a snapshot

The Asian Edge

Core course: Methodologies for Cultural Studies in Asia (2–11 August, 2012)
Optional courses
The Digital Subject / Technology, Culture and the Body (13–16 August, 2012)
Language of Instruction: EnglishHomepage: http://culturalstudies.asia/?page_id=86
Organisers: Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore
Host: Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore
Co-organisers: Consortium of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium Institutions; Institute of East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, Korea
Course Coordinators: Nitya Vasudevan & Nishant Shah
Number of Students: 35 students from 12 Asian countries
Number of Faculty: 17 from 5 Asian countries[2]

Plotting Edges: The Rationale

The second summer school, hosted in August 2012, with the support of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and the Institute of East Asian Studies, was entitled “The Asian Edge.” We decided to stay with the metaphor of the Edge because it allowed us to experiment, both conceptually and in process, with new modes of engagement, interaction, knowledge production and pedagogy. The idea of an Asian Edge was interesting because it signalled a de-bordering of Asia. The Edge is also an inroad into that which might have remained invisible or inscrutable to those outside of it. The imagination of an Asian Edge brings in both the imaginations of geography as well as the notion of extensions, where Asia, especially in this hyper-real and geo-territorial age does not remain contained within the national boundaries. Within the Inter-Asia discourse, there has been a rich theorisation around what constitutes Asia and what are the ways in which we can reconstruct our Asianness that do not fall in the easy “Asian Studies” mode of being defined by the West as the ontological reference point. Chen Kuan-Hsing’s (2010) argument in Asia as Method, where he argues that Asia is a construct that emerged out of the Cold War and needs to be deconstructed and unpacked in order to understand the different instances and manifestations of India, have captured these dialogues quite comprehensively. Similarly, Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s (2009) landmark work Indian Cinema in the time of Celluloid marks how questions of nationalism, modernity, governance and technology have been peculiarly and particularly tied to cultural objects and industries such as cinema, not only in negotiations with the post-colonial encounters of India with its erstwhile colonial masters but also with the different locations and imaginations of India. Chua Beng-Huat (2000) in Consumption in Asia similarly points at the ways in which Asia works at different levels of materiality and symbolism, creating communities, connections and commerce in unprecedented ways, not only within Orientalist imagination but in Asia’s own imagination of itself. The Asian Edge was also a way of introducing new thematic interventions in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies discourse. While the IACS project has invited and initiated some of the most diverse and rich conversations around cultural production—ranging from creative industries to cultural politics; from cultural objects to flows of consumption and distribution—we haven’t yet managed to shift the debates into the realm of the digital. The emergence of digital technologies has transformed a lot of our vocabulary and conceptual framework, but we haven’t been able to translate all our concerns into the fast-paced changes that the digital ICTs are ushering into Asia.

With this summer school, we wanted to introduce the digital and the technological as a central trope of understanding our existing and emerging research within inter-Asia cultural studies. And the edge, borrowing from the Network theories that have their grounds in Computing, Actor-Network modelling and ICT4D discourse, gives us another way of thinking about Asia. As the computing theorist Duncan Watts (1999) points out in his model of our universe as a “small world”, the edge, within networks is not merely the containing limit. It is not the boundary or the end but actually the space of interaction, communication and exchange. An edge is the route that traffic takes as it moves from one node to another. Edges are hence tenuous, they emerge and, with repetition, become stronger, but they also die and extend, morph and mutate, thus constantly changing the contours of the network. The ambition was to refuse the separation of technology from the Cultural Studies discourse, introducing what Tejaswini Niranjana in her work on Indian Language education and pedagogy calls “Integration” (Niranjana et al. 2010) rather than “interdisciplinarity”. It was also to provide a different historical trajectory to technology studies, what science and technology historians Kavita Philip, Lily Irani, and P. Dourish (2010) call “Postcolonial Computing.”

The Asian Edge then became a space where we could consolidate the knowledge and key insights from the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies discourse, but could also open it up to new research, new modes of engagement, and new questions that need the historicity and also the points of departure. These ambitions had a direct impact on both the structure of the Summer School as well as the processes that were subsequently designed
to implement it.

The core course: methodologies for cultural studies in Asia

The Inter-Asia Summer School in Bangalore thus had some distinct ambitions, which were reflected in its structure. While it wanted to reflect the rich heritage of scholarship that has been produced through the decade-long interventions, and give the participating students a chance to engage with these intellectual stalwarts of Asia, it also wanted to reflect some of the more cuttingedge and future-looking work that is also a part of the movement’s younger scholars. Hence, instead of going with the traditional model where the pedagogues teach their own text, explaining the nuances and intricacies of their work, we decided to stage a dialogue between the existing scholarship and emerging work. The curriculum for the summer school was designed by Dr Tejaswini Niranjana, Dr Wang Xiaoming and Nitya Vasudevan, to form the first Inter- Asia Cultural studies reader, reflecting the various trends and debates around different themes that have occurred in the movement. The reader, which served as a basic textbook for the summer school, and has plans to be bilingual (English and Mandarin Chinese), introduced historical thought, critical interventions and conceptual frameworks drawn from different locations within Asia. The reader not only incorporated the scholars whose work has shaped the Inter-Asia cultural studies movement but also the formative modern thought that has been central to the social, cultural and political theorisation in Asia.

However, instead of inviting the scholars whose work has been central to the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies thought, the instructors for the courses were younger critical scholars who are building upon, responding to and entering into a dialogue with the work prescribed in the curriculum. The pedagogy, hence, instead of becoming a “lecture” that synthesises earlier work, became a threeway dialogue, where the students and the instructors were responding to common texts, not only in trying to understand them but also in the context of their own work and interests. Moreover, each session was co-taught, by instructors from different disciplines, locations and geographies, to show how the same body of work can be approached through different entry points and pushed into different directions. The classroom hours, thus became a “workshop” space where the students and the faculty were engaging in a dialogue that sought to make the historical debates relevant to the discussions in the contemporary world. They also showed how the older questions persist across time and space, and that they need to be engaged with in order to make sense of the world around us.

Additionally, the Summer School classroom was designed as a space for collaborative pedagogy. The morning discussions around texts from the readers were followed by students presenting their work as a response to the texts prescribed for the day. Taking up a pecha-kucha format, it invited students to introduce themselves, their work, their context and their interventions and to open everything up for response and dialogue. The ambition was to build a community of intellectual support and interest, so that the students not only forge an affective bond but also a sense of collaboration and commonality in the work that they are already pushing in their existing research initiatives. The faculty for the day, along with some of the senior scholars also attended these presentations and helped tie in some of the earlier questions that might have emerged in the class, to the new material that was being introduced in the space.

While this dialogue around new research was fruitful, we also were aware that there is a huge value in getting the students to interact with some of the more formative scholars whose work was prescribed in the curriculum. Hence, alongside the classrooms, we also hosted three salons that brought some of the significant scholars from the Inter-Asia movement into a dialogue with each other, as well as into a conversation with local intellectuals and activists. The first salon, organised at the artist collaborator 1 Shanthi Road, saw Chen Kuan-Hsing and Tejaswini Niranjana, discussing the impulse of the Inter-Asia movement. Charting the history, the different trajectories and the ways in which it has grown, both through friendships and networks, and intellectual interventions and collaborations, the conversation gave an entrypoint to younger scholars in understanding the politics and the motivation of this thought journey. The second salon, organised at the Alternative Law Forum, had Ding Naifei (Taiwan) and Firdaus Azim (Bangladesh) in conversation with legal sexuality and human rights activists Siddharth Narrain and Arvind Narrain (India) to unpack the politics of rights, sexuality, modernity and identity in different parts of Asia. The third salon, hosted at the Centre for Internet & Society, saw Ashish Rajadhyaksha (India) in conversation with Stephen Chan (Hong Kong) looking at questions of infrastructure, sustainability and the new role that research has to play in non-university and non-academic spaces and networks. The salons were designed to be informal settings for conversations and socialising, giving the summer school students access to the senior faculty outside of the classroom setting.

The summer school also wanted to ensure that the students were introduced to the materiality and the texture of the local, to understand the different layers of modernity and habitation that the IT City of Bangalore has to offer. Hence a local tour, charting the growth of Bangalore from a sleepy education centre to the burgeoning IT City that it has become, guided by curator and artist Suresh Jairam, was included as a part of the teaching. The four-hour walking tour laid bare the different contestations and layers of an IT city in India, showing the liminal markets, local cultures of production, and the ways in which they need to be factored into our images and imaginations of modernity and the IT City. Along with these, there were student parties arranged in different local clubs and institutions of Bangalore, to offer informal spaces of socialising for the students but also to give them a glimpse of what public spaces and cultures of being social might look like in a city such as Bangalore.

The summer school found a new richness because two of the days were twinned with a workshop on Culture Industries, supported by the Japan Foundation, which became a pedagogic space for the summer school participants. The students had a new focus introduced to their work and a chance to meet other scholars and activists in the field from Asia, who presented their work as part of the Summer School. The creative industries workshop also afforded a chance for students to form new connections and collaborations with projects and research initiatives that were being discussed in that forum.

These different components were thus designed and put together as a part of the core course for the Inter-Asia Summer School in Bangalore. Each component had a specific vision and was designed to offer different spaces of learning, pedagogy and interaction for everybody included. The core course was an overview of the diversity and exchange that are parts of the Inter-Asia movement. The course ended with a “booksprint” model where the students, inspired by the conversations at the summer school, were given a day to submit written work that would capture their own learning and growth in the process. The submissions could take the form of an academic essay, a sketch towards a research essay, a blog entry summarising key events from a particular conversation, or a narrative summary of the key points in their own research and how it relates to the conversations at the Summer School. While the core course was compulsory for all the participants, the Summer School also offered two optional elective courses, which the students could opt for after the core course was concluded. The optional courses were designed to introduce students to work and debates that had not yet emerged centrally in the Inter-Asia debates, but were part of their current conversations.

New nodes: Optional courses: the digital subject/technology, culture and the body

The optional courses, which lasted for four days, were a way of introducing the students to some new core debates that are emerging in the Cultural Studies discourse. The courses were designed to specifically concentrate on how the older questions and frameworks are being reworked with the emergence of digital technologies, thus helping students to consolidate their own work and also engage with research initiatives across different parts of Asia.

The first optional course, entitled “The Digital Subject,” was coordinated by Nishant Shah and had lectures by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Lawrence Liang. It proposed to account for the drastic changes in the relationships between the State, the Citizen and the Markets with the rise of digital technologies in the twenty-first century. The course proposed that as globalisation consolidates itself in Asia, we see changes in the patterns of governance, of state operation, of citizen engagement and civic action. We are in the midst of major revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, powered by digital social change, some headed by cyber-utopians specialising in Web 2.0 and Social media. Phrases such as “Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” have become very common.

Instead of concentrating only on the newness of technology-mediated change, there is a need to engage with the changing landscape of political subjectivity and engagement through a reintegration of science and technology studies with cultural studies and social sciences. The course thus posited certain questions that need to be addressed, within the domain of cultural studies, around the digital: what does a digital subject look like? What are the futures of existing socio-cultural rights based movements? How do digital technologies produce new interfaces for interaction and mobilisation? How do we develop integrated science-technologysociety approaches to understand our technology-mediated contemporary and futures?

Through a series of seminars, workshops, film screening, lectures, and fieldtrips, the course challenged the students not only to look at new objects of the digital but also to ask new questions of the old, inspired by the new methods and frameworks that the digital technologies are opening up for us.

The second optional course entitled “Technology, Culture and the Body” was coordinated by Nita Vasudevan and had Audrey Yue, Ding Naifei, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wing-Kwong Wong, and Hsing-Wen Chang as instructors. The course began with a hypothesis that, at this moment in history, we seem to be embedded in what Heidegger calls “the frenziedness of technology.” Hence, now more than ever, it is important that we try to understand how the gendered body relates to technology, and what this means for the domain of the cultural. For instance, what are the freedoms that technology is said to offer this body? What are these freedoms posed in opposition to? How do we understand technological practice contextually, both historically and in the contemporary? Is it possible to have a notion of the body that is outside technology, and a notion of technology that is outside cultural practice?

The course called for a move away from the idea of technology as a tool used by the human body, or the idea of technology as mere prosthesis or extension, to map the different ways of understanding the relationship
between culture, technology and the body, specifically in the Asian context. It will involve examining practices, cultural formations and understandings that have emerged within various locations in Asia. The course engaged the students in closereadings of key events and texts, hosted workshops to present and critique their own work, and think of collaborative pathways towards future distributed research and pedagogic initiatives that can emerge within the Inter-Asia space.

Both courses had additional assignments that included close-reading of texts, practical field work, critical reflection and collaborative projects completed during the span of the course.

Tying things up: key learnings

The Second Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School was an ambitious structure, and while there were logistical hiccups in the implementation, there were some key learning aspects that need to be highlighted.

Working with tensions. Asia is not a homogeneous unified entity. There are several geo-political tensions that mark the relationships between different countries in Asia. While the academic protocol and individual interest in learning more can help negotiate these tensions, these tensions do play out in different linguistic, cultural and emotional unintelligibility, which becomes part of the pedagogic moment in the Inter-Asia classroom. Orienting the instructors to these tensions, and trying to build a collaborative environment where the students appreciate these tensions and learn to communicate with each other and engage with the different contexts is extremely valuable. In the summer school, we had students helping each other with translation, providing new contexts and critiques for each other’s work, and learning how to engage with the palpable difference of somebody from a different country. These tensions can sometimes slow the content and discussions in the classrooms, but taking it up as a collective challenge (rather than just thinking of it as a logistical problem where students not fluent in English need to be given tools of translation) made for a productive and rich learning environment.
Ownership of community structures. When young scholars from different parts of the world are thrown together for such an intense period of time, it is inevitable that there will be bonds of friendship and belonging that grow. We had debated about whether we should invest in doing online community building by creating platforms, discussion boards and other structures that accompany digital outreach and coordination. However, apart from the initial centralization for applications and programming, we eventually decided to make the participants owners of these activities.’ to give a better sense of the ‘digital structures of community building’. And it was fascinating to see how they formed social networks, blogs, Tumblrs and other spaces of conversation among themselves, making these spaces more vibrant and diverse, thus leading to conversations beyond the summer school.
Infrastructure of participation. The Summer School was an extremely subsidised event thanks to the generous support of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium, the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Indian Institute of Sciences, who helped in significantly reducing the costs of registration. The availability of travel fellowships, subsidies, scholarships, and an infrastructure of access cannot be emphasised enough in our experience. Owing to the subsidised costs, the living conditions and the logistics were not optimal. And while the students were extremely cooperative and accommodating with the glitches, we realised that better living conditions and amenities, especially for young students who are travelling to a different country for the first time, are as important as the classroom and the intellectual thought and design. Finding more resources to ease the conditions of travel and living will help build richer conversations inside and outside the classrooms. Sustained efforts to find more funding for a space for the IACS summer school need to be continued.
Selection processes. It was wanted to promote the Inter-Asia movement and hence a first preference was given to students who applied for the summer school through an open call for application. The students were asked to have references from people who have been a part of the movement, and also to send in a brief essay describing their expectations from the summer school. We were scouting for students—given that the numbers we could accept were limited—who were involved in not only learning but also in contributing to the social and political thought of the Inter-Asia movement. We also encouraged students who might not have been a part of a formal education system but are considering further education. Instead of building a homogeneous student base, there was an attempt made to find different kinds of students, from different locations, at different places in their own research work, and with different disciplines and modes of engagement. Scholarships and travel aid were offered to students who we thought deserved to be a part of the summer school but did not have access to university resources for participation. The diversity helped bring a more comprehensive compendium of skills and methods to the table.
Integration and relevance. Younger students often find it difficult to deal with historically formative texts from other contexts because they do not see how this responds to their context or is relevant to their work in contemporary times. Efforts at integrating the different cultures, showing the different trajectories of thought and research within Asia, and at locating the older texts in the context of modern-day research were hugely rewarding and more attempts need to be made to continue this process of making the historical archive of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Movement relevant and critical in new research.
Planning the futures. The participants had all indicated that post the Summer School, they would be excited to see what future avenues for participation there could be. With this summer school, we hadn’t looked at modes of sustained engagement with the participants. While they did take the initiative to communicate with each other, the momentum that was generated because of these discussions could not be captured in its entirety because we did not have any formal structures and processes to continue the engagement. Especially if the IACS summer schools are some sort of an orientation into the IACS movement, then there should be more systemic thought given to how those interested in engaging with the questions can do so, through their own academic and institutional locations, but also through different kinds of support structures that continue the conversations and exchange that begin at the Summer School.
Synergy with the local. For us, as well as for the students, the synergy with the local movements, activists, artists and research was fruitful and productive. One of the values of a travelling summer school is that every summer school can take up a particular theme that is locally relevant and weave it into the summer school. For Bangalore, it made logical sense for us to bring questions of Digital Technologies and Identity/Bodies into the course. Even within the core course, there was an effort to integrate these as key questions that open up new terrains of thought and research within Inter-Asia cultural studies. The optional courses, which were introduced for the first time, were exciting and generated a lot of interest and engagement from the participants. Attempts at creating these kinds of synergies need to be supported along with new and experimental modes of pedagogy and learning.

The Second Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School was a great opportunity to harness the potentials of the incredibly rich and diverse network that the IACS movement has built up over more than a decade. For us, it also became a playground where, inspired by the hacker culture and DIY movements that dot the landscape of Bangalore, we experimented with different forms of learning and knowledge production. Involving the students as stakeholders in the process, engaging with them as peers, making them responsible for collaborative learning, and creating spaces of participation and socialisation helped us circumvent many of the problems of language and cultural diversity that might have otherwise crippled the entire process. Pushing these modes of interaction and integration, while also creating an environment of trust, reciprocity and goodwill, is probably even more important than the curriculum and teaching, because these interactions create new nodes and connections, with each student and his/her interaction creating new edges that will hopefully shape and contribute to the contours of critical thought and intervention in Asia.

References

Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Chua, Beng-Huat, ed. 2000. Consumption in Asia: Lifestyle and Identities. London: Routledge.
Philip, Kavita, Lily Irani, and P. Dourish. 2010. “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey.” Science Technology Human Values 37 (1): 3–29.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2009. Indian Cinema in the time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. New Delhi: Combined Academic Publications.
Niranjana, Tejaswini, et al. 2010. Strengthening Community Engagement of Higher Education Institutions. Bangalore: Centre for the Study of Culture and Society.
Watts, Duncan. 1999. “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon.” AJS 105 (2): 493–527.

Author's Biography

Nishant Shah is the Director of Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, an International Tandem Partner at the Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana University, and a Knowledge Partner with Hivos, in The Hague. He is the editor of the four-volume anthology Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and writes regularly for the Indian newspaper The Indian Express and for the Digital Media and Learning Hub at dmlcentral.net. His current areas of interest are Digital Humanities, Digital Activism and Digital Subjectivity.

[1]. A mammoth project such as the Inter-Asia Summer School requires resources, support and generosity from family, friends, and colleagues that can never be measured or cited in a note. However, there are a few people who need to be mentioned for their incredible spirits and the resources that they extended to us. Dr Raghavendra Gaddakar at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences and his entire staff were patient and hospitable hosts, housing the entire summer school for over a fortnight. The faculty, students and staff at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Bangalore helped in designing courses, finding venues and organising events that added to the richness of the summer school. Raghu Tankayala and Radhika P, both at CSCS were our rocks through this process, taking up a lion’s share of logistical arrangements. The help of the entire staff at the Centre for Internet and Society, who were there every step, helping with every last detail, and the Executive Director Sunil Abraham who lent us infrastructure and financial support to organise various events and salons, is unparalleled and I know I would have found it impossible to work without the knowledge that they would always be there to watch my back. All the instructors who agreed to join the teaching crew made this summer school what it became (a full list can be found at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/iacs-summer-school-2012). Both Nitya Vausdevan and I owe a huge amount of gratitude to the IACS society and the Consortium, as well as the stalwarts of the IACS movement who put faith in our vision, and pushed us, supported us, inspired us and helped us to carry out the different things we had planned. The local partners who make our life worth living—friends and colleagues at 1 Shanthi Road and The Alternative Law Forum—have been our rocks and we cannot thank them enough for their support and encouragement. A special thanks to Daniel Goh, who apart from being a faculty member, also helped us put together the website to manage the workflow for the entire project.

[2]. A full list of instructors and the prescribed curriculum can be found at http://cis-india.org/internet-overnance/iacs-summer-school-2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/routledge-inter-asia-cultural-studies-volume-15-issue-2-nishant-shah-asia-in-the-edges

Font problem hits Odia

praskrishna — 2014-07-25T08:04:20Z

Focus on search for solution to lack of compatibility.

The article by Bibhuti Barik was published in the Telegraph on July 7, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi gave his inputs.

The available Odia fonts that could be used for digital publications have compatibility problems. The fonts, which number around 10, have been developed for specific purposes and cannot be used in all applications.

Computer application researchers, linguistics, information technology experts and educationists, who met at a workshop here today, urged the state government and the IT industry to ensure the smooth use of Odia fonts.

These fonts are available on different software tools, but if one purchases one of them to install on his or her computer, it fails to open in another system. Since this happens due to lack of compatibility, it also discourages users to use Odia fonts in official work and day-to-day life.

“I think the use of Odia language in computers is restricted only to desktop publication (DTP). As the compatibility factor has come as a major handicap, the use is becoming more restricted in day-to-day life. The state government should come forward to facilitate a software so that the fonts can be used through a uniform system,’’ said linguist and founding director of the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages, Debi Prasanna Pattanayak.

Subhashish Panigrahi, a Bangalore-based IT professional who is now working on a project for Wikipedia Foundation, said: “Different fonts in Odia came to existence quite late and all were based on the skeleton of Latin fonts so that when one types an English font on the keyboard, the screen shows an Odia font. Later, unicode fonts were developed, which were not only compatible to the Internet, but had elements common with other Indian languages as well.”

Odia publishers did not agree to use the unicode fonts as they were using customised softwares. For this reason, the published books and literature fails to reach the Internet.

In 2011, Srujanika, a city-based organisation, developed a converter to use fonts from other categories to unicode type.

Sujata Patel, chief operating officer of Pune -based Tech Z Solution, said: “The affordability of Odia tools and fonts is a major concern. As they are developed by non-Odia professionals, the aesthetic aspect of Odia fonts and characters are not being taken into consideration.”

Subrat Prusty, member secretary Institute of Odia Studies and Research, said: “Odia is yet to come to the computer screen on different software tools which are used for tables, Internet applications, medical, engineering and business applications.”

“Despite having hundreds of engineering colleges, two technical universities and 10 universities we are yet to use Odia in computers,” Prusty added.

Researchers from US, Singapore, IITs, central universities, IT professionals, linguists, artistes, educationists and students of computer applications took part in the workshop that was organised at the computer science department of the Institute of Technical and Education and Research of Sikhya O Anusandhan University.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-telegraph-july-7-2014-bibhuti-barik-font-problem-hits-odia

Plan for open access to science research

praskrishna — 2014-07-25T07:07:15Z

The policy is open to comments from the public till July 25.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on July 22, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Ever felt frustrated while reading a science research journal online, only to see the message “to continue reading, subscribe now”? That may soon change.

The Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology (DBt) under the Ministry of Science and Technology have drafted a policy that says publicly-funded scientific work published in science journals must adhere to open access (OA) norms, enabling anyone to read online content on science research for free.

OA is an initiative of Open Archives Initiative (OAI), an organisation which works for greater reach and free access to online science research funded by public money.

T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, which assisted DST in drawing up the draft policy, said that in the absence of OA norms, commercial publishers were making money with content generated by scientists who used public funds for research.

However, those sceptical of the DST initiative are asking whether availability on the Net is equivalent to “public domain”. Concerns have also been raised about the quality of content provided through OA, as honing raw research material into scholarly journals requires rigour that commands a cost. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Hyderabad, said it was much more important to make reliable information available to the public, at a reasonable charge, because “the price of keeping it free has a cost”. The draft of the DBT-DST Open Access Policy is open to comments from the public till July 25.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-22-2014-renuka-phadnis-plan-for-open-access-to-science-research

#NAMA: The Future of Indic Languages

praskrishna — 2014-07-24T07:40:36Z

Medianama is hosting an open house session on "The Digital Future of Indic Languages" at the Oberoi in Bangalore on Thursday, July 24, 2014. The event will begin at 4.30pm and be followed by cocktails and dinner. Subhashish Panigrahi will participate in the event.

The following will be discussed in the event:

Growth of consumption of content in Indic languages in India.
Impact of mobile on Indic languages consumption.
Challenges of discovery of Indic language content: role of social and search.
Defining standards and the role of tools and translation.
Driving user generated Indic language content creation.
Video versus Text in Indic languages.
The role of government policy in supporting Indic language content.
The role of mobile devices and touch screens.
Beyond content: service delivery in Indic languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/nama-the-future-of-indic-languages

UK’s Interception of Communications Commissioner — A Model of Accountability

joe — 2014-07-24T06:08:53Z

The United Kingdom maintains sophisticated electronic surveillance operations through a number of government agencies, ranging from military intelligence organizations to police departments to tax collection agencies. However, all of this surveillance is governed by one set of national laws outlining specifically what surveillance agencies can and cannot do.

The primary law that governs government investigations is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, abbreviated as RIPA 2000.

To ensure that this law is being followed and surveillance operations in the United Kingdom are not conducted illegally, the RIPA 2000 Part I establishes an Interception of Communications Commissioner, who is tasked with inspecting the surveillance operations, assessing their legality, and compiling an annual report to for the Prime Minister.

On April 8, 2014 the current Commissioner, Rt Hon. Sir Anthony May, laid the 2013 annual report before the House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament. In its introduction, the report notes that it is responding to concerns raised as a result of Edward Snowden’s actions, especially misuse of powers by intelligence agencies and invasion of privacy. The report also acknowledges that the laws governing surveillance, and particularly RIPA 2000, are difficult for the average citizen to understand, so the report includes a narrative outline of relevant provisions in an attempt to make the legislation clear and accessible. However, the report points out that while the Commissioner had complete access to any documents or investigative records necessary to construct the report, the Commissioner was unable to publish surveillance details indiscriminately, due to confidentiality concerns in a report being issued to the public. (It is worth noting here that though the Commissioner is one man, he has an entire agency working under him, so it is possible that he himself did not do or write all of that the report attributes to him). As a whole, the report outlines a series of thorough audits of surveillance operations, and reveals that the overwhelming majority of surveillance in the UK is conducted entirely legally, and that the small minority of incorrectly conducted surveillance appears to be unintentional. Looking beyond the borders of the United Kingdom, the report represents a powerful model of a government initiative to ensure transparency in surveillance efforts across the globe.

The Role of the Commissioner

The report begins in the first person, by outlining the role of the Commissioner. May’s role, he writes, is primarily to audit the interception of data, both to satisfy his own curiosity and to prepare a report for the Prime Minister. Thus, his primary responsibility is to review the lawfulness of surveillance actions, and to that end, his organization possesses considerable investigative powers. He is also tasked with ensuring that prisons are legally administrated, though he makes this duty an afterthought in his report.

Everyone associated with surveillance or interception in the government must disclose whatever the commissioner asks for. In short, he seems well equipped to carry out his work. The Commissioner has a budget of £1,101,000, almost all of which, £948,000 is dedicated to staff salaries.

The report directly addresses questions about the Commissioner’s ability to carry out his duties. Does the Commissioner have full access to whatever materials or data it needs to conduct its investigations, the report asks, and it answers bluntly, yes. It is likely, the report concludes, that the Commissioner also has sufficient resources to adequately carry out his duties. Yes, the Commissioner is fully independent from other government interests; the commissioner answers his own question. Finally, the report asks if the Commissioner should be more open in his reports to the public about surveillance, and he responds that the sensitivity of the material prohibits him from disclosing more, but that the report adequately addresses public concern regardless. There is a degree to which this question and answer routine seems self-congratulatory, but it is good to see that the Commissioner is considering these questions as he carries out his duties.

Interception of Communications

The report first goes into detail about the Commissioner’s audits of communications interception operations, where interception means wiretapping or reading the actual content of text messages, emails, or other communications, as opposed to the metadata associated with communications, such as timestamps and numbers contacted. In this section, the report outlines the steps necessary to conduct an interception, outlining that an interception requires a warrant, and only a Secretary of State (one of five officials) can authorize an interception warrant. Moreover, the only people who can apply for such warrants are the directors of various intelligence, police, and revenue agencies. In practice, the Secretaries of State have senior staff that read warrant applications and present those they deem worthy to the Secretary for his or her signature, as their personal signature is required for authorization.

For a warrant to be granted, it must meet a number of criteria. First, interception warrants must be necessary in the interests of national security, to prevent or detect serious crime, or to safeguard economic wellbeing of the UK. Additionally, a warrant can be granted if it is necessary for similar reasons in other countries with mutual assistance agreements with the UK. Warrants must be proportionate to the ends sought. Finally, interception warrants for communications inside the UK must specify either a person or a location where the interception will take place. Warrants for communications outside of the UK require no such specificity.

In 2013, 2760 interception warrants were authorized, 19% fewer warrants than in 2012. The Commissioner inspected 26 different agencies and examined 600 different warrants throughout 2013. He gave inspected agencies a report on his findings after each inspection, so they could see whether or not they were following the law. He concluded that the agencies that undertake interception “do so lawfully, conscientiously, effectively, and in our national interest.” Thus, all warrants adequately meet the application and authorization requirements outlined in RIPA 2000.

Communications Data

The report goes on to discuss communications data collection, where communications data refers to metadata–not the content of the communications itself, but data associated with it, such as call durations, or a list of email recipients. The Commissioner explains that metadata is easier to obtain than an interception warrant. Designated officials in their respective surveillance organization read and grant metadata warrant applications, instead of one of the Secretaries of State who could grant interception warrants. Additionally, the requirements for a metadata warrant are looser than for interception warrants. Metadata warrants must still be necessary, but necessary for a broader range of causes, ranging from collecting taxes, protecting public health, or for any purpose specified by a Secretary of State.

The relative ease of obtaining a metadata warrant is consistent with a higher number of warrants approved. In 2013, 514,608 metadata warrants were authorized, down from 570,135 in 2012. Local law enforcement applied for 87.5% of those warrants while intelligence agencies accounted for 11.5%. Only a small minority of requests was sent from the revenue office or other departments.

The purposes of these warrants were similarly concentrated. 76.9% of metadata warrants were issued for prevention or detection of crime. Protecting national security justified 11.4% of warrants and another 11.4% of warrants were issued to prevent death or injury. 0.2% of warrants were to identify people who had died or otherwise couldn’t identify themselves, 0.11% of warrants were issued to protect the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom, and 0.02% of warrants were associated with tax collection. The Commissioner identified less than 0.01% of warrants as being issued in a miscarriage of justice, a very low proportion.

The Commissioner inspected metadata surveillance efforts, conducting 75 inspections in 2013, and classified the practices of those operations inspected as good, fair or poor. 4% of operations had poor practices. He noticed two primary errors. The first was that data was occasionally requested on an incorrect communications address, and the second was that he could not verify that some metadata was not being stored past its useful lifetime. May highlighted that RIPA 2000 does not give concrete lengths for which data should be stored, as Section 15(3) states only that data must be deleted “as soon as there are no longer grounds for retaining it as necessary for any of the authorized purposes.” He noted that he was only concerned because some metadata was being stored for longer periods than associated interception data. As May put it, “I have yet to satisfy myself fully that some of these periods are justified and in those cases I required the agencies to shorten their retention periods or, if not, provide me with more persuasive reasons.” The Commissioner seems determined that this practice will either be eliminated or better justified to him in the near future.

Indian Applications

The United Kingdom’s Interception of Communications Commissioner has similar powers to the Indian Privacy Commissioner suggested by the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy. Similar to the United Kingdom, it is recommended that a Privacy Commissioner in India have investigative powers in the execution of its charter, and that the Privacy Commissioner represent citizen interests, ensuring that data controllers are in line with the stipulated regulations. The Report also broadly states that “with respect to interception/access, audio & video recordings, the use of personal identifiers, and the use of bodily or genetic material, the Commissioner may exercise broad oversight functions.” In this way, the Report touches upon the need for oversight of surveillance, and suggests that this responsibility may be undertaken by the Privacy Commissioner, but does not clearly place this responsibility with the Privacy Commissioner. This raises the question of if India should adopt a similar model to the United Kingdom – and create a privacy commissioner – responsible primarily for overseeing and enforcing data protection standards, and a separate surveillance commissioner – responsible for overseeing and enforcing standards relating to surveillance measures. When evaluating the different approaches there are a number of considerations that should be kept in mind:

Law enforcement and security agencies are the exception to a number of data protection standards including access and disclosure.
There is a higher level of ‘sensitivity’ around issues relating to surveillance than data protection and each needs to be handled differently.
The ‘competence’ required to deliberate on issues related to data protection is different then the ‘competence’ required deliberating on issues related to surveillance.

Additionally, this raises the question of whether India needs a separate regulation governing data protection and a separate regulation governing surveillance.

Allegations of Wrongdoing

It is worth noting that though May describes surveillance operations conducted in compliance with the law, many other organizations have accused the UK government of abusing their powers and spying on citizens and internet users in illegal ways. The GCHQ, the government’s communications surveillance center has come under particular fire. The organization has been accused indiscriminate spying and introducing malware into citizen’s computers, among other things. Led by the NGO Privacy International, internet service providers around the world have recently lodged complaints against the GCHQ, alleging that it uses malicious software to break into their networks. Many of these complaints are based on the information brought to light in Edward Snowden’s document leaks. Privacy International alleges that malware distributed by GCHQ enables access to any stored content, logging keystrokes and “the covert and unauthorized photography or recording of the user and those around him,” which they claim is similar to physically searching through someone’s house unbeknownst to them and without permission. They also accuse GCHQ malware of leaving devices open to attacks by others, such as identity thieves.

Snowden’s files also indicate a high level of collaboration between GCHQ and the NSA. According to the Guardian, which analyzed and reported on many of the Snowden files, the NSA has in past years paid GCHQ to conduct surveillance operations through the US program called Prism. Leaked documents report that the British intelligence agency used Prism to generate 197 intelligence reports in the year to May 2012. Prism is not mentioned at all in the Interception of Communications Commissioner’s report. In fact, while the report’s introduction explains that it will attempt to address details revealed in Snowden’s leaked documents, very little of what those documents indicate is later referenced in the report. May ignores the plethora of accusations of GCHQ wrongdoing.

Thus, while May’s tone appears genuine and sincere, the details of his report do little to dispel fears of widespread surveillance. It is unclear whether May is being totally forthcoming in his report, especially when he devotes so little energy to directly responding to concerns raised by Snowden’s leaks.

Conclusion

May wrapped up his report with some reflections on the state of surveillance in the United Kingdom. He concluded that RIPA 2000 protects consumers in an internet age, though small incursions are imaginable, and especially lauds the law for it’s technological neutrality. That is, RIPA 2000 is a strong law because it deals with surveillance in general and not with any specific technologies like telephones or Facebook, use of which changes over time. The Commissioner also was satisfied that powers were not being misused in the United Kingdom. He reported that there have been a small number of unintentional errors, he noted, and some confusion about the duration of data retention. However, any data storage mistakes seemed to stem from an unspecific law.

Despite May’s report of surveillance run by the books, other UK groups have accused GCHQ, the government’s communications surveillance center, of indiscriminate spying and introducing malware into citizen’s computers. Privacy International has submitted a claim arguing that a litany of malware is employed by the GCHQ to log detailed personal data such as keystrokes. The fact that May’s report does little to disprove these claims casts the Commissioner in an uncertain light. It is unclear whether surveillance is being conducted illegally or, as the report suggests, all surveillance of citizens is being conducted as authorized.

Still, the concept of a transparency report and audit of a nation’s surveillance initiatives report is a step towards government accountability done right, and should serve as a model for enforcement methods in other nations. May’s practice of giving feedback to the organizations he inspects allows them to improve, and the public report he releases serves as a deterrent to illegal surveillance activity. The Interception of Communications Commissioner–provided he reports truthfully and accurately–is what gives the safeguards built into the UK’s interception regime strength and accountability. In other nations looking to establish privacy protections, a similar role would make their surveillance provisions balanced with safeguards and accountability to ensure that the citizens fundamental rights–including the right to privacy–are not compromised.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uk-interception-of-communications-commissioner-a-model-of-accountability

University of Mysore Re-releases Kannada Vishwakosha (Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons Free License

pavanaja — 2014-07-24T07:03:45Z

The University of Mysore and the Centre for Internet and Society co-organized the Open Knowledge Day in Mysore on July 15, 2014. On this occasion Mysore University released six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under the Creative Commons (CC) license.

Kannada Vishwakosha brought out by the University of Mysore can easily be termed as the best encyclopaedia in Kannada. It has been modelled after the famous Britannica encyclopaedia. Mysore University Vishwakosha has 14 volumes having a total of 13802 pages. The very first volume was brought out in the year 1969 and the final volume was released in 2004. Many famous Kannada authors, scientists, academicians and stalwarts from other fields have worked on creating this encyclopaedia. The print volumes of the first version of the encyclopaedia are out of stock now. Recently UoM has started revising and reprinting the encyclopaedia. So far 4 volumes have been revised, enhanced and published.

UoM believes in Open Access to Knowledge. It has put up the research outputs from its departments online for free access to the public. UoM has done these as a subscriber to the idea of Budapest Open Access Initiative. The Open Access Institutional Repository, of UoM, covers scholarly publications covering journal articles, conference papers, books, book reviews, presentations, reports and patents ever since UoM was established in 1916. Extending the philosophy of open knowledge to the Kannada encyclopaedia published by UoM becomes a natural extension. UoM is in the verge of celebrating its centenary soon and has taken many initiatives in that direction.

CIS-A2K has been in negotiations with UoM towards releasing of its high quality Kannada Vishwakosha (Kannada Encyclopaedia) under Creative Commons license. CIS and UoM signed a MoU on February 22, 2014. Here is the relevant extract from the MoU: "They will work together to digitize all encyclopaedic publications for which the copyright is owned by UoM, and re-release them under the Creative Common license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). The digitized content will be made available for everyone through free content distribution platforms like Wikipedia and Wikisource. The digitization will be done employing the global standard Unicode so that the content has longevity, is universally portable and is easily searchable. Both parties have joined hands to undertake the above in order to enhance digital literacy in the Kannada language and facilitate collaborative production and free dissemination of knowledge in Kannada to the students, academics, researchers and the wider public. The parties also believe that by reintroducing the knowledge in digital and openly accessible formats could significantly enhance the production of knowledge in Kannada and give a new lease of life to Kannada language in the digital era. The parties will co-design and jointly implement relevant programmes to achieve this objective." As part of this MoU, UoM agreed to release the first six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha under CC.

Volume numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6 of Kannada Vishwakosha of UoM have been revised and published recently. A project page has been created in Kannada Wikipedia for this project. Kannada Wikipedians joined hands in the project. The project involved extracting the text from the soft copies of the files, converting them into Unicode, extracting articles from these files and uploading them to Kannada Wikisource.

A team of interns from Christ University had a major role to play in this development. These were students from the Wikipedia in Education Program that was conducted in Christ University during the academic period of 2013-14. These students took active part in the current project and uploaded about 1200 articles so far (till July 21, 2014).

Media Coverage

The event attracted very good media coverage. Leading English and Kannada dailies like Andolana Kannada, City Today, Deccan Herald, Hosa Diganta, Kannada Jana Mana, Kannada Prabha, Rajya Dharma, Samyukta Karnataka, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, Udayavani, Vijaya Karnataka, and Vijaya Vani published about this. Scanned versions of the published articles can be downloaded here.

Other Links:

UoM Kannada Vishwakosha conversion project page in Kannada Wikipedia - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivwp
Articles from UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreuniv
Category UoM Kannada Vishwakosha in Kannada Wikisource - http://bit.ly/mysoreunivws
For pictures from the Open Knowledge Day event in Mysore - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mysore_University_Open_Knowledge_Day

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/university-of-mysore-releases-kannada-vishwakosha-under-cc-license

Reading from a Distance — Data as Text

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:29:12Z

The advent of new digital technologies and the internet has redefined practices of reading and writing, and the notion of textuality which is a fundamental aspect of humanities research and scholarship. This blog post looks at some of the debates around the notion of text as object, method and practice, to understand how it has changed in the digital context.

The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on Digital Humanities, given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding (see TEI) to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of apps such as Storify or Scoop it have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm[1]. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation. But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts. The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts ‘ massively addressable at different levels of scale’ as suggested by Micheal Witmore. According to him “Addressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction”. This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, “textuality is addressability” and further...this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event”. What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book.[2]

The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content, process etc seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the ‘text’ through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces. One example of such a digital text perhaps is the hypertext[3]. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited in some sense as the ideal text. Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the post-structural notion of what comprises an open text as it were, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture.

But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the ‘text’ is manifested through practices of reading and writing [4]. So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, his book Graphs, Maps and Trees talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an ‘abstract model of literary history’. He describes this approach as ‘within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study’...He further says, “Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific kind of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.” The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can ‘facilitate’ this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods. An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of ‘ Bichitra’, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore varioum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation.

As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as understood in the field of computing is data that is so vast or complex that it cannot be processed by existing database management tools or processing applications[5]. But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text - and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later American New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a form of cultural and literary production. [6] Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by including corpora, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper. Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content. [7]

Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question one may ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions. This is an interesting use of the term, given that the suggestion to use quantitative methods such as clustering and pattern recognition in fields that are premised on close reading and interpretation is itself a provocative one and has implications for content. The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if the Digital Humanities can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located.

References:

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, “Texts”, Planned Obsolescence – Publishing, Technology and Future of the Academy, New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. pp.89 – 119.
Kirschenbaum, M.G, “The Remaking of Reading: Data Mining and the Digital Humanities”, Conference proceedings; National Science Foundation Symposium on Next Generation of Data Mining and Cyber-Enabled Discovery for Innovation, Balitmore, October 10-12, 2007, http://www. cs. umbc. edu/hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum. pdf.
Landow, George. P, Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, Balitmore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992 pp 2-12
Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso: London and New York, 2005. p.1
Whitmore, Michael , “Text: A Massively Addressable Object”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24
Wilkens, Mathew, “Canons,Close Reading and the Evolution of Method” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24

[1] For more on cluster analysis and algorithms see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis

[2] See Witmore, 2012. pp 324 - 327

[3] A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as “a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” ( As quoted in Landow, 1991. pp 2-12)

[4] Barthes, 1977. pp 155 - 164

[5] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

[6] See Wilkens (2012). pp 249-252

[7] See Fitzpatrick (2011), pp 89 -119

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance

Mozilla Brings Indian Communities Together

subha — 2014-07-23T07:30:06Z

I took part in two major events, Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 and MozCamp Beta – India organized by Mozilla in India as a voluntary contributor. In this blog post I am sharing with you my experience of the events.

The article was published on the website of Opensource.com on July 13, 2014. It can be read here.

Mozilla organized two national events in India during the month of June this year: Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 and Mozcamp Beta 2014.

Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 was more of an implementation-based sprint with the goal to motivate Indic language localization teams to translate strings for its upcoming Firefox OS based $25 phone. Mozcamp India Beta was an event for meeting mentors, planning for the future, and strategizing Mozilla’s mission in India.

Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014

The Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 was held at Red Hat’s Pune office, June 7 and 8, 2014. This was the first time 13 Indic language communities came under one roof to translate interface strings together, commented Mozilla Community Manager, Arky. During the two day sprint, most language groups (2 - 4 members strong) completed more than 40% of the localizations that will appear as interface strings for Firefox OS, an upcoming operating system for mobile and tablet devices. Mozilla released its developer test phones, starting with GeeksPhone Keon in April of last year, started thinking of the mobile users from the emerging nations leaving the west for Android, iOS, and Windows 8. Bringing cheaper phones to people with an interface in their own language could help to make phones smarter for common users. Assamese, Bangla, Hindi, Gujarati, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Odia, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, and Urdu are the 13 language communities that took part in the event.


Photo by Subhashish Panigrahi (CC-BY-SA 3.0 License)

Mozcamp Beta 2014

The Mozcamp India beta event aimed to bring core contributors from multiple communities housed under the Mozilla umbrella and engage with them in a participatory and learning way. Staffers from Mozilla who are responsible for various projects and products worked with these contributors over three days (June 20 - 22) building strategies for best practices for recruiting new contributors, mentoring them, and sustaining the communities in a long run. The project page says, "MozCamp Beta is an experiment. This is the first time Mozilla is testing how to train contributors to bring in more contributors across the project."

Mozilla’s core product, the Firefox browser's expanding wing, Firefox OS, was the center of attention. Mozilla is working with two Indian brands, Spice and Intex, to produce phones that are expected to be around $25, thus revolutionizing the smartphone world. Some of the sessions during the event focused on breaking the notion that app making so technical that it can only be done by some. New projects like Mozilla's Appmaker give users the option to create a web app and flash it into the Firefox OS device without knowing any code. Similarly, a session covered the User Centered Design process, a new way for users to create an app by drawing it on paper and brainstorming on paper about useful functionalities.

These two events were a grand display of user contribution and what makes Mozilla a creativity-seeking organization. "Mozilla is committed to make the web free and fun. We aim to have the maximum number of Maker parties in India this year to promote web literacy and having students to create and curate Open Educational Resources," says Mozilla’s Global Strategist and Manager of the Webmaker mentor team, Michelle Thorne.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/mozilla-brings-indian-communities-together

Mozilla brings Indian Communities together Twice in One Month

subha — 2014-07-23T07:06:58Z

The guest post was published on Mozilla' website on July 8, 2014. It can be read here.

Mozilla, in the process of putting its best effort on people that make it, has organized two larger and national events in India: Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 and MozCamp Beta – India. The first is being a more implementation based sprint with the goal to motivate Indic language localization teams to translate strings for its upcoming Firefox OS based $25 phone where the second one was an event for meeting mentors, planning for the future and strategizing Mozilla’s mission in India.

Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 was held at Redhat’s Pune office during 7 – 8 June. This was the first time 13 Indic language communities came under one roof to translate interface strings together, says Mozilla’s Community Manager Arky. During the two day sprint most language communities with the strength of 2 – 4 members each completed more than 40% of the localizations that will appear as interface strings for Firefox OS, an upcoming operating system for mobiles and tablets. Mozilla, after releasing its developer test phones starting with GeeksPhone Keon in April last year also started thinking of the mobile users from the emerging nations leaving the west for Android, iOS and Windows 8. Bringing cheaper phones to people with an interface of their own language could help to make phones more smarter for common users. Assamese, Bangla, Hindi, Gujarati, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Odia, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu are the 13 language communities that took part in the event.

The other event, MozCamp Beta – India was aimed to bring core contributors form the multiple communities housed under the Mozilla umbrella and engage with them in a participatory and learning mode. Staffers from Mozilla who are responsible for various projects and products together with these contributors spent three days (20 – 22 June) building strategies for best practices for recruiting new contributors, mentoring them and sustaining the communities in a long run. The project page says, “MozCamp Beta is an experiment. This is the first time Mozilla is testing how to train contributors to bring in more contributors across the project.” Mozilla’s core product Firefox browser’s expanding wing Firefox OS was the center of attention. Mozilla has tied up with two Indian brands Spice and Intex to produce these phones that are expected to be around $25 revolutionizing the smartphone world and breaking the stereotype of having smartphones in the hands of them who could afford them. Some of the sessions during the event were also aimed to break the notion of app making process being too technical. The newest web innovation Appmaker gives a user the option to create a web app and flash it into the Firefox OS device without even learning any coding. Similarly the User Centered Design process was helping users to go creating with creating their app by drawing them on papers and brainstorming about having useful functionalities in them. Three of the days ended with celebrating the success of the grand user contribution that makes Mozilla a creativity-seeking organization. “Mozilla is committed to make the web free and fun. We aim to have the maximum number of Maker parties in India this year to promote web literacy and having students to create and curate Open Educational Resources,” says Mozilla’s Global Strategist and Manager of Webmake mentor team Michelle Thorne.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/mozilla-brings-indian-communities-together-twice-in-one-month

Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, release first draft of Open Access Policy

sinha — 2014-12-26T11:20:59Z

The Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, recently published a draft Open Access Policy in consultation with several open access experts, government officials and CIS. This post discusses open access and the exercise undertaken to draft this policy.

The Department of Biotechnology (“DBT”) and the Department of Science (“DST”), Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, released their draft Open Access Policy (“the Policy) on July 5, 2014 (the Policy may be accessed hereand comments may be sent to madhan@dbt.nic.in by July 25, 2014). This step by the Ministry of Science and Technology is laudable, especially from the view of increasing access to research undertaken at these institutions. DBT/DST’s endeavour to provide open access applies to scientific research directly (including ad-hoc) or indirectly funded by them. It also applies to scientific research which has received benefits, infrastructure or other support from the DBT/DST. Providing open access may also ensure percolation of cutting edge research at a rapid pace into higher education curriculum, thereby raising the standard of technical and scientific education.

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (“CSIR”), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (“ICAR”) and Institute of Mathematical Sciences (“IMSc”) are the few Indian government institutions to have implemented open access policies applicable to the research undertaken at their respective institutions. While the CSIR and ICAR present outlines of their open access policies, the IMSc provides access to a digital repository containing digital theses/dissertations, matscience reports and other publications of institute members. CIS had sent comments to the ICAR upon release of ICAR’s draft policy.

Open Access in Scientific Research

Presently two models of scientific research publications exist, namely, the commercial model and the open access model. The scientific research ecosystem traditionally functioned on the commercial model, until open access was embraced by a part of the scientific community. It is reported that presently, there exist approximately 25,000 journals in the areas of science, technology and medicine. The conventional model of communicating research is by publishing it in printed journals. These journals are usually subscription based, and demand hefty amounts from interested authors for publication. Further, research was only accessible to that select group of persons willing to pay a high monetary sum for the same. These industry practices led to restrictions on access to scholarly research, including restrictions on sharing and building further on work already created. . Over the past few years, this trend has witnessed a change, with research being increasingly published in online, open access journals.

Open Access is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, web-wide, without severe restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. Open access was first defined in 2002 at the Budapest Initiative. The Bethesda Statement (2003) provided:

An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:

The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is another significant milestone of the Open Access movement. Globally, USA and Europe have been instrumental in adopting open access policies across a wide range of institutions. Illustratively, the US’ National Institute of Health open access policy is a comprehensive document detailing every aspect of the policy and its implications. Several premier academic institutions (Harvard) under experts (Peter Suber) have drafted documents containing guidelines on drafting a suitable open access policy.

The advantages of adopting an open access policy are manifold- free access to scientific research irrespective of subscription affiliation, decrease in publishing and research costs for industry and academia; It has also been argued that restricting access to government funded research is unethical, since scientific research conducted by government agencies is partly, if not entirely, funded by the taxpayers’ money. Further, adoption of open access alone could improve visibility and impact of Indian science,

Open Access and Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is the essential instrument used to effect principles of open access. The extent of rights under copyright which the owner chooses to exercise over scholarly publication in question determines whether a publication may be openly accessed or not. Traditionally, journal publishers ran an inequitable policy which required all publication and reproduction rights (copyright) to be exclusively transferred by the author or institution to the publishers in consideration of publication in reputed journals. This practice created artificial and expensive barriers to scholarly research. Contrast this with open access principles wherein to provide open access- Generally, the author or the institution (depending on the jurisdictional copyright laws) retain certain rights in the publication, whilst permitting zero-barrier access to their research. This requires careful balancing and distribution of rights between three stakeholders- author, institution and the publisher.

About the DST/DBT’s Open Access Policy

The Open Access Policy Document for DBT/ DST was drafted by the Open Access Policy Committee on a specific request from Dr. VijayRaghavan, Secretary, DBT. The Policy was drafted after multiple rounds of consultation with Ministry officials, eminent academics and experts on open access, government officials with prior experience of set-up of institutional repositories and CIS. Prof Subbiah Arunachalam led the discussions along with the Open Access Policy Committee and brought different perspectives to the fore. The Policy may be accessed here. The Policy will be applicable to publications in peer reviewed journals, and aims to maximise the distribution of these publications by providing free online access by depositing them in a gratis open access repository (deemed mandatory). Authors can make their publications open access by publishing in an open access journal, or if they choose to publish in a subscription journal, by posting the final accepted manuscript to an online repository. The Policy suggests a maximum embargo period placed on authors by journals to not exceed one year. It also addresses the methodology of depositing in a repository and provides for a proposed copyright addendum between the author and publisher.

CIS’ Contribution

CIS participated in discussions along with experts brought on board by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam to develop and review an open access policy for the purposes of DST and DBT. CIS, inter alia, commented on the legality of clauses in the policy pertaining to Indian copyright law and supplied a note on utilisation of ‘public domain’ in open access policies. Legally, a work is said to have entered the public domain when it is free from copyright protection. The note recommended usage of the phrase “made available to public” as opposed to “public domain” since the said policy permitted the institution and/or author to retain rights in the scientific paper. You may access the note here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/department-of-biotechnology-and-department-of-science-ministry-of-science-and-technology-government-of-india-release-open-access-policy

ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ

praskrishna — 2014-07-16T11:14:16Z

ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿಶ್ವವಿದ್ಯಾನಿಲಯವು ಇದೀಗ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾದಲ್ಲೂ ಹೆಸರು ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿದೆ. ಹಲವಾರು ವಿದ್ವಾಂಸರ ಅವಿರತ ಶ್ರಮದಿಂದ ರೂಪುಗೊಂಡಿರುವ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶಗಳು ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾದಲ್ಲಿ ಲಭ್ಯವಾಗುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡುವಲ್ಲಿ ವಿವಿ ಯಶಸ್ವಿಯಾಗಿದೆ.

The article was published in Kannada Prabha on July 15, 2014.

ಮೊದಲ ಹಂತದಲ್ಲಿ ಮೂರು ದಶಕಗಳಷ್ಟು ಹಳೆಯ ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶದ ಆರು ಸಂಪುಟಗಳನ್ನು ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ಪರವಾನಗಿಯಡಿ ಗಣಕೀರಣಗೊಳಿಸಿ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾಗೆ ಬಿಡುಗಡೆಗೊಳಿಸಲಾಗಿದೆ. ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ಪರಿವರ್ತನೆ ಯೋಜನೆಯಾದ ಡಿಡಿಠಣಣಛ್ಝಿಡಿ.ಟಣಣಟಣಡ್ಟ್ಠಜ್ಡಟ್ಝಿಢಿಠ ಅನ್ನು ಮಂಗಳವಾರ ಮಾನಸಗಂಗೋತ್ರಿಯ ಕುವೆಂಪು ಕನ್ನಡ ಅಧ್ಯಯನ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಯ ಬಿ.ಎಂ.ಶ್ರೀ ಭವನದಲ್ಲಿ ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿವಿ ಕುಲಪತಿ ಪ್ರೊ.ಕೆ.ಎಸ್. ರಂಗಪ್ಪ ಲೋಕಾರ್ಪಣೆ ಮಾಡಿದರು. ನಂತರ ಮಾತನಾಡಿದ ಅವರು, ಇತ್ತೀಚಿನ ದಿನಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ವೇಗೆ ಹೆಚ್ಚಾಗಿದೆ. ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿವಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಉತ್ಕೃಷ್ಟವಾದ ಪ್ರೌಢ ಪ್ರಬಂಧಗಳಿದ್ದು ಅವುಗಳೆಲ್ಲ ಜನರಿಗೆ ತಲುಪಬೇಕೆಂಬ ನಮ್ಮ ಅಭಿಲಾಷೆಗೆ ಪೂರಕವಾಗಿ ಈ ಯೋಜನೆ ಈಡೇರಿದೆ. ನಮ್ಮ ವಿವಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶದ 14 ಸಂಪುಟಗಳಿದ್ದು, ಈಗ 6 ಸಂಪುಟಗಳು ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾಗೆ ಮಾರ್ಪಟ್ಟಾಗಿವೆ. ಇನ್ನುಳಿದ ಸಂಪುಟಗಳನ್ನು ಮಾರ್ಪಾಟುಗೊಳಿಸಲಾಗುವುದು. ವಿಷಯ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶದ 30 ಸಂಪುಟಗಳಿದ್ದು 5 ಸಂಪುಟಗಳನ್ನು ಮಾರ್ಪಟಿಸಲಾಗಿದೆ. ಬೆರಳ ತುದಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಬೇಕಾದ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಲಭ್ಯವಾಗಬೇಕೆಂಬುದು ವಿವಿಯ ಉದ್ದೇಶವಾಗಿದೆ ಎಂದರು.

ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ಪರಿವರ್ತನಾ ಯೋಜನೆಯ ರೂವಾರಿ ಯು.ಬಿ. ಪವನಜ ಮಾತನಾಡಿ, ಕನ್ನಡ ಭಾಷೆ ಉಳಿಯಬೇಕೆಂದರೆ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಬಳಸಬೇಕು. ಭಾಷೆಯನ್ನು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನಕ್ಕೆ ಅಳವಡಿಸಿದರೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮುಂದಿನ ಪೀಳಿಗೆ ಬಳಸಿ, ಬೆಳೆಸಿಕೊಂಡು ಹೋಗುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಗೆ ಓದೋಕೆ ಪಠ್ಯಪುಸ್ತಕಗಳಿವೆ. ಆದರೆ, ಬೇಕಾದ ಮಾಹಿತಿಯನ್ನು ನೀಡಬೇಕೆಂದರೆ ಪುಸ್ತಕದಲ್ಲಿರುವ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶವನ್ನು ನೆಚ್ಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕಾಗಿತ್ತು. ಈಗ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾಗೆ ಮಾರ್ಪಡಿಸಿರುವುದರಿಂದ ಜನರಿಗೆ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಅನುಕೂಲವಾಗಿದೆ ಎಂದರು.

ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತುಂಬಬಹುದು: ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಕಣಜ ಎನಿಸಿರುವ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾದಲ್ಲಿ ಇದುವರೆಗೆ ಪ್ರಪಂಚದ 287 ಭಾಷೆಗಳು ಅಳವಡಿಕೆಯಾಗಿದ್ದು, ಭಾರತದ 20 ಭಾಷೆಗಳಿವೆ. ಮುಕ್ತವಾಗಿ, ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ವಿವಿ ಎಂದೆ ಕರೆಯುವ ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾದಲ್ಲಿ ಯಾರು ಬೇಕಾದರು ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತುಂಬಬಹುದು. ಆದರೆ, ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಆಕ್ಟ್‌ನಡಿ ಬರುವ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಬಳಸುವಂತಿಲ್ಲ. ಅದಕ್ಕಾಗಿಯೇ ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ಪರಾವನಗಿ ಲಭ್ಯವಿದ್ದು, ಇದರ ಸಹಾಯದಿಂದ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಒದಗಿಸಬಹುದು ಎಂದರು.

ಸ್ಮರಣಿಕೆ ನೀಡಿ ಗೌರವ: ಇದೇ ವೇಳೆ ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿವಿಯ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶವನ್ನು ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯಾಗೆ ಅಳವಡಿಸಲು ಶ್ರಮಿಸಿದ ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಕ್ರೈಸ್ತ ವಿವಿಯ ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿಗಳಾದ ಕೋಮಲ್, ಗೀತಾ, ಗೌತಮ್, ಪ್ರತಾಪ್, ಭರತ್, ಸ್ಮಿತಾ ಅವರಿಗೆ ಸ್ಮರಣಿಕೆ ನೀಡಿ ಗೌರವಿಸಲಾಯಿತು.

ಕುವೆಂಪು ಕನ್ನಡ ಅಧ್ಯಯನ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಯ ನಿರ್ದೇಶಕ ಪ್ರೊ.ಆರ್. ರಾಮಕೃಷ್ಣ ಅವರು ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿವಿಯ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿದರು. ಮೈವಿವಿ ಯೋಜನೆ, ಉಸ್ತುವಾರಿ ಮತ್ತು ಮೌಲ್ಯಮಾಪನ ಮಂಡಳಿಯ ನಿರ್ದೇಶಕ ಪ್ರೊ.ಎಸ್. ರವಿ, ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವಿ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್‌ನ ತೇಜಸ್ ಜೈನ್ ಇದ್ದರು.

ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ಲೈಸನ್ಸ್ ಬಳಸಿ

ಮೈಸೂರು ಸಾಕಷ್ಟು ಪುಸ್ತಕಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನಮಗೆ ಬೇಕಾದ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಇದ್ದರು ಸಹ ಹಂಚಲು ಮುಂದಾದಾಗ ಕಾಡುವ ಕಾಪಿರೈಟ್ ಆಕ್ಟ್ ಭೂತದಂತೆ ಕಾಡುತ್ತದೆ. ಅದರಿಂದ ಹೊರ ಬರಲು ಇರುವ ಪರ್ಯಾಯ ಉಪಾಯವೇ ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ಲೈಸನ್ಸ್. ಇದನ್ನು ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಬ್ಬರೂ ಬಳಸಬಹುದಾಗಿದೆ ಎಂದು ಸಂಸ್ಥೆಯ ತೇಜಸ್ ಜೈನ್ ಅಭಿಪ್ರಾಯಪಟ್ಟರು. ಜ್ಞಾನ ಯಾರ ಸ್ವತ್ತೂ ಅಲ್ಲ. ಅದೊಂದು ಮುಕ್ತ ಹಾಗೂ ಸುಲಭದಲ್ಲಿ ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಸಿಗುವಂತಾಗಬೇಕು. ಇದಕ್ಕೆ ವೇದಿಕೆಯೊದಗಿಸಿಕೊಡುವ ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲಕ್ಕೆ ಪರವಾನಗಿ ಎಂಬ ಕೊಂಕು ಕಾಡುತ್ತಿದೆ. ಇದರ ವಿರುದ್ಧ ಎಬೆನ್ ಮೊಗ್ಲೆನ್ ಎಂಬವರು ಚಳವಳಿ ನಡೆಸಿ ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ಲೈಸನ್ಸ್ ಎಂಬ ಹೊಸ ಪರಿಕಲ್ಪನೆಯನ್ನು ಹುಟ್ಟುಹಾಕಿದರು. ಇದರಡಿ ಯಾರ ಬೇಕಾದರು ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಬಳಸಬಹುದು ಎಂದರು.

ಏನಿದು ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ?

ಜ್ಞಾನದ ವಿವಿಧ ಶಾಖೆಗಳ ವಿವೇಚನೆಯುಳ್ಳ, ಸಾಮಾನ್ಯವಾಗಿ ಬಿಡಿ ಲೇಖನಗಳನ್ನು ಅಕರಾದಿಯಾಗಿ ಒಳಗೊಂಡ ಭಂಡಾರವೇ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ. ಎನ್‌ಸೈಕ್ಲೋಪಿಡಿಯಾ ಬ್ರಿಟಾನಿಕ ಮಾದರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿವಿಯಲ್ಲಿ 1954 ರಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ರಚಿಸುವ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನ ಆರಂಭವಾಯಿತು. 1968 ರವರೆಗ ಈ ಯೋಜನೆಯು ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯ ಮತ್ತು ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿ ಅಭಿವೃದ್ಧಿ ಇಲಾಖೆಯ ಅಧೀನದಲ್ಲಿತ್ತು. ನಾಡೋಜ ಡಾ. ದೇಜಗೌ ಮೈಸೂರು ವಿವಿಯ ಕುಲಪತಿಯಾಗಿದ್ದಾಗ ಯೋಜನೆಯನ್ನು ವಿವಿಯ ವಶಕ್ಕೆ ವಹಿಸಲಾಯಿತು. ಇದುವರೆಗೆ ಒಟ್ಟು ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶದ 14 ಸಂಪುಟಗಳನ್ನು ಹೊರತರಲಾಗಿದ್ದು, 30 ವಿಷಯ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶಗಳಿವೆ.

ಇದನ್ನು ಬಳಸುವವರ ಗಮನಕ್ಕೆ

ಯಾವುದೇ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಪಡೆದರು ಸಹ ಅದರ ಕರ್ತೃವಿನ ಹೆಸರನ್ನು ಪ್ರಕಟಿಸುವುದು
ಕೆಲಸವನ್ನು ಬದಲಾವಣೆ ಮಾಡಿ ಅಥವಾ ಹಾಗೆ ವಿತರಿಸಬಹುದೇ ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ಗಮನಿಸಬೇಕು
ಕೆಲವು ಸಂದರ್ಭದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾಹಿತಿಯನ್ನು ಬದಲಾಯಿಸುವ ಅಥವಾ ಪುನರಾವರ್ತಿಸುವ ಸಂದರ್ಭ ಬಂದಲ್ಲಿ ಕ್ರಿಯೇಟಿವ್ ಕಾಮನ್ಸ್ ಲೈಸನ್ಸ್‌ನಡಿ ಮಾಡಬಹುದು

ಬಳಸುವಾಗ ಎದುರಾಗುವ ಸವಾಲುಗಳು

ಇಷ್ಟುದಿನ ಪುಸ್ತಕದಲ್ಲಿ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ದಾಖಲಿಸಿ ವ್ಯಾಪಾರ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದವರಿಗೆ ಆತಂಕ ಕಾಡಬಹುದು
ತಮ್ಮ ಬೌದ್ಧಿಕ ಸ್ವಾಮ್ಯತೆ ಹೋಗುತ್ತೆ ಎಂಬ ಭಯ ಕಾಡಲಿದೆ
ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲದಲ್ಲಿ ಬಳಸಬೇಕಾದಾಗ ಗಣಕೀಕರಣಕ್ಕೆ ಒಪ್ಪುವ ಭಾಷೆಯನ್ನು ಬಳಸುವುದು
ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲವನ್ನು ಬಳಸುವುದರಿಂದ ಗ್ರಂಥಾಲಯಗಳ ಅವಶ್ಯಕತೆ ಬೇಕೆ ಎಂಬ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಕಾಡಲಿದೆ

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/kannada-prabha-july-15-2014-coverage-of-open-knowledge-day

Soon, all 14 volumes of Kannada encyclopaedia to be online

praskrishna — 2014-07-16T11:06:56Z

Four volumes have been uploaded so far on a pilot basis.

The article by R.Krishna Kumar was published in the Hindu on July 15, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave his inputs.

All 14 volumes of the Kannada Vishwakosha published by the University of Mysore along with five volumes of subject encyclopaedia — also published in Kannada by the varsity — may soon be available on the internet.

This will not only enrich Kannada content on the Internet, but will give the multi-volume publications that are available only in a few libraries and research institutions a new lease of life.

While four volumes of the Vishwakosha published by the Prasaranga wing of the varsity have already been uploaded on Wikisource, talks are on to upload other volumes along with the subject encyclopaedias.

“We are in discussion with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, in this regard and may soon decide on making the other volumes available on the Internet through Creative Commons (CC) licence to coincide with the centenary of the university in 2016,” said K.S. Rangappa, Vice-Chancellor, University of Mysore.

Speaking at the Open Knowledge Day organised in collaboration with the CIS here on Tuesday, Prof. Rangappa said four volumes of the Vishwakosha have been uploaded as part of a pilot project. “This has helped people access the contents and hence its popularity has grown,” he said.

The university is in talks with the authors and editors concerned at Prasaranga to take the project forward and was also considering digitising the subject encyclopaedia and migrate them to the CC licence platform for public sharing, he added.

The CIS and the varsity signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to re-release the first six volumes of the Vishwakosha under the CC licence, of which four volumes have been released, and the Open Knowledge Day was organised to mark the occasion. The CIS said it also coincided with the Open Knowledge Festival being held in Berlin (July 15 to 17).

U.B. Pavanaja of the CIS said it was imperative to make the latest developments in the world available in Kannada so that people can keep themselves updated. “But for books prescribed in the syllabus, there is not much available on the Internet in Kannada and this project will help bridge the gap,” he said.

Students of Christ University, Bangalore, who worked to upload the Vishwakosha, were felicitated on the occasion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-15-2014-r-krishna-kumar-soon-all-14-volumes-of-kannada-encyclopaedia-to-be-online

The Fifth Elephant in Bangalore

praskrishna — 2014-07-16T11:02:15Z

HasGeek is organizing the Fifth Elephant in Bangalore at NIMHANS Convention Centre on July 25 and 26, 2014. The Centre for Internet and Society is a community outreach partner with HasGeek.

Facebook has 100 million users in India. You know who has a billion?

The Indian Census.

Varsha Joshi, Director of the National Population Register, was present at The Fifth Elephant 2013 to explain on how the census team collects and processes such a vast amount of data.

Each year, The Fifth Elephant conference brings consumers and producers of technology to understand how data is processed (via available technologies), insights mined from datasets in different domains, and opportunities that data presents for economy and society. The key differentiator of The Fifth Elephant conference is that the content is crowdsourced and carefully curated by a panel of experts.

HasGeek, organizer of The Fifth Elephant, also shares a strong commitment to open access, open knowledge and open data. We ensure that every edition of The Fifth Elephant has representatives from the government –– either officials themselves or technology teams working on important data projects –– addressing citizens’ concerns around privacy and protection of data.

In 2012, we had Pramod Varma and Regunath B. speaking about the Aadhar project alongside Lucy Chambers’ presentation on the OKF’s work with data journalism, Nikhil Pahwa’s on RTI and Sumandro’s on NSSO data.

In 2013, Varsha Joshi talked to participants about the challenges that the census faces in collating data.
This year, we have invited Mr. Ram Sewak Sharma, secretary of Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), to talk about the state of government data and how citizens can participate in strengthening government’s efforts.

Why should you attend The Fifth Elephant?
The Fifth Elephant is a relevant event for data geeks and enthusiasts, NGOs, journalists and members of advocacy groups not just from the immediate standpoint of open data. This year’s edition also brings talks from finance and healthcare where speakers will talk about the challenges of working with complex financial datasets, data security and privacy concerns in the field of genomics, and related concerns. S. Anand will speak about what it took – in terms of technology infrastructure and data visualization – to do real-time visualizations for the recently concluded Indian elections. Participants will also get a flavour of frameworks – Lambda, Julia,OSM – and how these are used for building tools and platforms for mining data.

We welcome you to participate in the discussions and enrich interactions at the conference.

Schedule: https://fifthelephant.in/2014/conference
Registrations: http://fifthelephant.doattend.com
For more information, write to support@hasgeek.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-fifth-elephant

Open Access: Students help revive and digitize rare books for Malayalam Wiki Library

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T08:50:07Z

The blog post that quotes Centre for Internet and Society was published in SPICY IP on July 15, 2014.

The New Indian Express reports that in a terrific effort, more than 1000 school students and 234 members of the public across the state of Kerala digitized, proof-read and uploaded more than 150 rare and out-of-copyright Malayalam books as part of a digitization contest organized to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Wiki Source project by the Centre for Internet and Society, the state government run IT@School project, Swanthanthra Malayalam Computing and the Kerala Sahitya Akademi online library.

While these rare books were already in the public domain, the importance of preserving them in an accessible format cannot be emphasised enough. Books published as early as 1772 are now available on Wiki Grandhasala, the Malayalam wiki library to which these digitized copies have been uploaded. As they have been digitized rather than simply scanned, one can also search through them for keywords/phrases. If I’m not mistaken, OCR solutions for Indian languages either do not exist or are not of reliable quality. This would mean that much of the over 13,000 pages were typed out! I understand that these articles will also be used to cross reference wikipedia articles as well.

A big round of applause to all the involved parties for organizing and participating in this great effort at preserving as well as making accessible local literature and culture, that could otherwise be at a risk of getting lost amongst unhelpful copyright laws and/or tarnished or lost physical copies amongst other risks.

(I’m not sure if these overlap but as we reported here, there also seems to be the Kerala State Central Library that makes rare books available as well).

Can this effort be replicated in other states? I know the Panjab Digital Library is another resource that looks to do something similar. Their mission statement includes: to locate, digitize, preserve, collect and make accessible the accumulated wisdom of the Panjab region, without distinction as to script, language, religion, nationality, or other physical condition. There is also the Digital Library of India, hosted by IISC Bangalore, which states that they are trying to digitize all the significant works of mankind! If our readers know of other such databases, please do let us know in the comments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/spicy-ip-swaraj-paul-barooah-july-15-2014-open-access-students-help-revive-and-digitize-rare-books-for-malayalam-wiki-library