Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Design: Human Behavior vs. Technology - Vita Beans

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:29:23Z

What comes first? Understanding human behavior and communication patterns to design digital technologies? Or should our technologies have the innate capacity to adapt to the profiles of all its potential users? This post will look at accessibility challenges for digital immigrants and the importance of behavioral science for the design of digital technologies. We interview Amruth Bagali Ravindranath from Vita Beans.

CHANGE-MAKER: Amruth B R

PRODUCT:
Vita Beans and Guru G

METHOD OF CHANGE:
Borrow elements from behavioral science and social marketing to make technology more intuitive.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
Make technology easy to use, fun and effective.

Chirptoons: Create Cartoons in a Jiffy. Designed by Vita Beans
(The animation seems to be skipping a few lines. Check box below for a transcript)
Design your own here: http://bit.ly/1dOEpPo

Transcript of animation:

Ajoy: Hi!
Usha: Hi! What will we talk about today?
Ajoy: We will learn to design digital stories!
Usha: What do you mean by digital stories?
Ajoy: What we are doing right now!.
Telling a story through a digital medium.
Usha: Oh! But what is so complicated about that?
You write a story and then you post it online What’s
the big deal?
Ajoy: This is true. But you want everyone to access
your story right?
Usha: Yes! Of course!
Ajoy: Then you need to think about your audience!
Are you sure they all know how to use this technology?
Usha: Well...no, not really.
Ajoy: Do you know what makes it challenging for them?
Or how to adapt technology to make it easier?
Usha: Eh, no...no clue :(
Ajoy: Then read on.Today we will take a step back.
We must think about human behaviour first!
and then design our technology accordingly.
Usha: Sounds good! Let's do it.

First off, apologies for such a feeble and sad animation. When I was given access to Chirptoons, I was quite confident I would be able to produce a somewhat interesting introduction to this post and get you excited about our next interview. However, between first-time user friction and a couple of glitches in the program, I found myself -a semi-savvy digital native who has been using technology, almost every day of her life, for the last 15 years- struggling to create the cartoon and clearly failing at it. The biggest challenge was translating what I had in mind into a digital format (The demo was very straightforward. I was just particularly inept), and it was frustrating to the point I decided to drop it, leave it as is, publish my unfinished cartoon and turn this post into a reflection on 'design challenges behind digital storytelling', so I could move on with my life.

What I experienced with Chirptoons is what many users: both digital natives and immigrants constantly face due to the pace at which new digital technologies are emerging. While the privileged demographic who has physical access to technology has a decent knowledge of basic web browsing and document processing features, there is still a very large gap in accessibility in terms of how to navigate more complex formats. At the end of the day, producers retain the creative power and determine the functions and flexibility of the technologies we use in the day to day. Just think of Facebook and its constant interface updates. We have all felt the wrenching need for that 'dislike' button to make our interactions a tad more honest, yet we have no power to create it or change Facebook's format to one that enables our needs better.

So far, we have explored information from different angles: as activism, as visual design, as stories; and how digital technologies have been used strategically to disseminate it. However, our analysis is lacking a better understanding of the digital. We have been focusing on citizens as technology 'consumers', and we have not looked at whether digital infrastructures are accessible enough for users to become 'producers'. The question is: how do we do this: how do we engage different users with different digital literacy levels, skills and aptitudes in the production of digital content? With this post we bring a new topic into our series: accessibility and Information infrastructures. This one will focus on design and the role of behavioural science. Our interview with Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, brought a very unique perspective into the conversation, from which I would like to highlight three points:

a) The importance of behavioral science for design. Amruth stressed why we need a thorough understanding of behavioral and cognitive science in the design of digital technologies and how crucial it is to investigate the decision processes and communication strategies of humans to make technologies user-friendly and context appropriate.

b) How public relations and social marketing concepts can also provide insight on how to target and engage potential users more effectively. This point starts to answer some of the questions we raised on the Information Design post: thinking about the citizen as a consumer. This point also works as an alternative take on how to target civic engagement through technology.

c) How to engage different type of users: not only the digital native, but also digital immigrants[1]

who still play crucial roles as information gatekeepers in fields such as education or urban governance.

Vita Beans

We interviewed Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, Founder of Vita Beans to answer some of these questions. Vita Beans’ mandate is to create inspiring, easy-to-use applications in areas of education and human resources, to share knowledge in innovative, fun an effective ways. The logic behind their technological framework is trying to mimic the profile of the human brain linked to decision making -including economic, evolutionary, emotional, and psychological elements- and design their applications based on these patterns. Some of the products they offer are cognitive skill development applications, game based learning applications, educational technology research, among others, and their latest educational product: Guru G was chosen by the Unreasonable at Sea program (by Unreasonable institute & co-founder of Stanford d.school) as one of the 11 companies changing the world.

"We are trying to adapt to how the user wants to use something, rather than expecting the user to learn. This is essential in the education space to make things work".

Guru G is a "gamified teaching, teacher training & open certification platform", that aims to democratize access to technology for quality teachers. Rather than focusing on the student as most education technologies do, Guru G believes that teachers are the most important element of the education system. Enabling teachers, means quality education will reach the lives of hundreds of students during their professional life time, and with this in mind, Vita Beans designed a platform that is engaging, easy to use and intuitive, designed specifically with teachers, schools and governments in mind.

Unreasonable Barcelona: Anand Joshi, Guru-G from Unreasonable Media on Vimeo.

Inspiration

"Teachers don't use and don't like to use technology"

The idea came from the products Vita Beans had already developed for the education space, such as their text2animation & text2game prototypes. They had produced over 80 collaborative games teachers were using in the classroom. Students play together in teams and learn about different topics through the process of gaming. However, suddenly they realized teachers had great ideas they didn't know how to translate into a digital form because they did not have the knowledge or the skills to create digital content. This is, according to Amruth, the crisis they are trying to solve in the education space: the quality of teachers, access to good teachers and the difficulty for teachers to adopt new technologies were the biggest challenges. "

The design challenge

Their initial prototypes were designed with assumptions based on their gamification experiments with students. "We miserably failed with teachers and we discovered what a good gamification system for teachers looks like by prototyping with teachers and looking at the small things. It was an interesting learning experience." They identified two common reasons why they hesitated to adopt anything new in the classroom.

Teachers don't want to feel like they can't use something a student can.
Teachers can't visualize themselves using that tool, this there is an element of uncertainty and lack of confidence.

It was imperative for Vita Beans to switch focus: "Any tool you design, you expect to train the user to understand your tool, and if they refuse to do that; you blame them." They used their behavioural science background to come up with infrastructural solutions that solve the limitations from the outset.

The solutions

They started prototyping with natural language processing for their text2animation & text2game projects. NLP is a branch of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Teachers articulated their ideas in simple English and the program used NLP to take what they said, try to understand what they were trying to visualize and convert into programming language to build an animated movie out of it (like what we used to open this article -but with hopefully better results). Amruth was very confident about the potential of this prototype and shared with us that UNICEF might take it up and implement it as an open source animated video and game creation tool in Africa.

They also developed an adaptive navigation engine for one of their game based learning platforms; a tool that adapts to what you are trying to do: "There is no fixed way to navigate from one task to another. It tries to learn the closest action that each teacher is trying to do and it executes that. It tries to learn how the teacher wants to use it."' This was a success. They incorporated touch screens to make the product more intuitive and the teachers picked it up quickly.

Amruth claims they are the first in the world to develop a gamification platform specifically for teachers and the reason was their solution to the navigation issue. This experience also indirectly helped in designing Guru-G.

"Amruth Bagali Ravindranath talks about text2animation & text2game prototypes"
Amruth B R, at TedxMcGill. Courtesy of YouTube

These design solutions and the learnings from each project inspired the team to come up with products which have been adopted commercially across 10 states in India, reached 4000+ schools & over 3 million kids internationally through partners in India & North America. They have helped education companies build their primary and secondary school education products, (including one of India's top classroom technologies), have been covered by the media and won several entrepreneurship awards. More information here and on their website. Our question is: what is it about behavioral science that helped Amruth's team arrive to this epiphany in tech design?

Behavioral Science and Social Marketing

Comparing marketing to advocacy is bound to be met by resistance and perhaps controversy. I raised this question when we interviewed Maya Ganesh for the Information Design post, and stated the following in our conclusion: "Our consumption habits in the market are shaping how we process and interact with information in the public space. The possibility of 'consumer behavior' permeating modalities of activism, reinforces the need to explore more interesting strategies for information dissemination." Now that we are starting to look closely at the infrastructure supporting information, I will stubbornly return to the same question: to what extent should we borrow tactics for advocacy from marketing? and add: how much of it should permeate the design of digital technologies?

Amruth made a casual reference during our interview that triggered this thought. We were discussing the importance of understanding behavior patterns, when he brought up Edward Bernays. This man used psychoanalysis, psychology and social science to design public persuasion campaigns and could get masses to choose what he wanted them to without them realizing it. While this sounds awfully dangerous and manipulative, I would like to rescue the idea of understanding human behavior well enough to design technology around it and I will entertain this thought in the context of social change -please, don't judge.

Pillip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, wrote a paper bringing marketing and social change together: “Can social causes be advanced more successfully through applying principles, concepts and techniques of marketing?”. He defines marketing as:

"a sophisticated technology, that draws heavily on behavioral science for clues to solve communication and persuasion related to influencing accessibility. [...] Most of the effort is spent on discovering the wants of a target audience and creating goods and services to satisfy them" (Kotler, 1971)

This definition is a useful bridge to link marketing with accessibility of digital technologies. G.D. Wiebe wrote an influential paper on social marketing, that coined the question: "Why can't you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you can sell soap?", that later influenced public information campaigns by USAID, the WHO, and the World Bank [2] . While he recognized how these models can to an extent commodify human behavior and social principles, he stressed that knowledge of behavioral science is a useful framework for product planning, that must be given a socially useful implementation. He developed the following criteria of considerations:

Criteria	Description
Force	The intensity of the person's motivation toward the goal -a combination of his predisposition prior to the message and the stimulation of the message
Direction	Knowledge of how or where the person might go to consummate his motivation.
Mechanism	The existence of an agency that enables the person to translate his motivation into action.
Adequacy	The ability and effectiveness of the agency in performing its task.
Distance	Estimate of the energy and cost required (by the user) to consummate the motivation in relation to the reward

Considering this framework is part of recognizing how knowledge circulating market networks affects our behavior. Nishant Shah addressed two ideas along these lines in the thought piece. First, he suggests us to recognize the negotiations that take place in the state-citizen-market ecosystem, and how they affect our rights, demands and responsibilities in society. Second, how this leads to a different understanding of the citizen as an "embodiment of these state-market negotiations". Keeping consumer behavior, and the forces shaping, enabling and constraining it in mind, is an interesting framework when we think of ourselves as information consumers -and as Yochai Benkler posits in The Wealth of Networks- in an ongoing transition to information producers. This also depends on how we think of information. We usually define content as information, but the structure and infrastructure are also pieces of 'information' we continuously shape through our interaction with technology. Hence, when we talk about making information accessible, we are also talking about producing legible and intelligible infrastructures.

Linking it back to digital technology

I am aware that the relationship we are trying to draw seems little far-fetched, but Amruth and the Vita Bean's team experience shows this behavioral-science approach, not only has a lot of potential, but is seldom explored in the education technology market. He told us about his success story with a behavior simulation engine. They used neuroscience as a base to build computer based activities and games to predict the behavior of its users on specific situations. They had an accuracy of 86%, which according to Amruth, is larger than every known psychological framework, and according to their testimonial, above most behavioral tests in the market (which only yield 20-40% of accuracy). Amruth said: "That was the first behavior research connection that brought us into the start-up space. Exploring games, exploring human behavior."

Design challenges in
mobile applications**

Make it noticeable
Make it useless if not shared
Manufacture peer pressure
Easy to personalize
Must evolve constantly
(static stories die)

We can also link these ideas back to storytelling. Amruth and I discussed what is the best way to use technology to engage users with digital stories. He made a good point at pairing up both processes: "What makes a storytelling session effective is how you contextualize a story for the person you are sitting with. As kids we are used to a one way process. As adults, stories are more interactive, so you may bring a new dimension, and the story might go in a very different direction. The technology must enable and reflect that." Compelling narratives must motivate the audience to interact with the stories, and digital devices must perform the same function. The infrastructure and interface of technologies must be intuitive, familiar and persuasive enough to sway users into interacting with it.

A way to do this is by pairing up technologies with the criterion above. In terms of functionality: provide them with a mechanism that translates the users ideas into action, that is efficient at enabling them, and that reduces the 'distance (the cost or amount of energy needed) to perform a task -as has been accomplished with Guru G in India. As for the force and direction of motivation, Amruth brought up some design challenges when discussing adoption of mobile applications [**"by analysing what increases the probability of a solution / campaign growing organically by word of mouth, going viral, and specifically what make something fashionable". See box on the left]. These challenges may vary from one application to the other but, at the end of day, the analysis and conceptualization of the product must be persuasive and empathetic with its users.

Making Change

To close our interview, Amruth and I talked about what it means to 'make change' through digital design. He believes 'making change' is composed of three elements:

Empathy: Your attempt to make change will depend on the amount of empathy you feel towards the people you are trying to create change for. "We spend time interacting with teachers, classrooms, just to get an idea of how the teacher thinks, empathize with prospective users".
Imagination: How you translate this empathy into solutions. "Imagination helps you think of as many solutions as you can to solve the design and adoption challenges"
Action: The most challenging stage according to Amruth: "If your technology is too hard to use, you will lose audience. If it's not impactful enough, it is trivialized. How do you reach a balance in making it effortless and yet, impactful?"

This post took a step back in our analysis of citizen action, to uncover a less visible space where change is also taking place: the intersection of the user with the machine. We seldom look at the relationship: producer-machine-consumer (and its multiple combinations) and how our behavior is being reconfigured by new digital technologies (in this project). The pace at which we need to upgrade our own operation systems, requires a degree of digital literacy that is not being facilitated by the state, the market or even civil society. Vita Beans, is one of the few examples of market actors working towards cutting the middle-man between users and digital technologies. If widely adopted, this model has the potential of re-organizing the state-citizen-market dynamic: from how citizens interact with the technology market to how new ways of producing and using technology might shape citizens' negotiation with the state.

This was also a set of explorations. It is a fairly new area in our research that will lead to more conversations with people who understand technology as an infrastructure and as material, as opposed to us- who often understand it as a practice, a space or an actor. Our goal is to bring content and infrastructure closer together, and make a stronger emphasis on inter-disciplinarity and multi-stakeholderism as a strategy to leverage change.

Footnotes:

[1] Refer to Marc Prensky's Digital Native, Digital Immigrant, for more on the limitations of digital immigrants in the education space; "It‟s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language". Access it here: http://bit.ly/IMBu0j

The CIS book : Digital Alternatives with a Cause, is also an interesting and comprehensive read of what comprises a digital native or digital immigrant today: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook

[2] The World Bank makes reference to G.D. Wiebe's thinking on their blog: http://bit.ly/1jNZVZA. Also refer to: Baker, Michael (2012). The Marketing Book. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. p. 696 and Lefebvre, R. Craig. Social Marketing and Social Change: Strategies and Tools to Improve Health, Well-Being and the Environment\year=2013. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 4. for examples of these interventions. Finally, the Wikipedia page on Social Marketing explains the role of G.D. Wiebe in the field: http://bit.ly/1lw4jPV

Sources:

Kotler, P., & Zaltman, G. (1971). Social marketing: an approach to planned social change. Journal of marketing, 35(3).

Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

Wiebe, G.D. (1951-1952). "Merchandising Commodities and Citizenship on Television". Public Opinion Quarterly 15 (Winter): 679.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/digital-storytelling-human-behavior-vs-technology

Digital Coverage in a Digital World

tjburks90 — 2012-04-04T10:53:19Z

Name(s): Thomas Burks
Location: Birmingham, AL USA
Age: 26
Profession: Cinematographer

Video Genre: Film

Interview

What do you understand by the term Digital Native? Do you consider yourself one?
The term digital native, I understand, is any person living a lifestyle dominated by technology. It is a facet in their day to day lives and a staple in
their structure and organization. I do consider myself a digital native; I spend more time a day dealing with technology than not. I don't think your background could have anything to do with someone's status as a digital native, unless their location and situation would keep them from accessing it. But the beauty of the internet and our way of life is that the world is much smaller today. Our window to the world is becoming a doorway.

There is a perception that a digital native is typical of a young, American geek who’s plugged in to his devices 24x7 and apathetic to social causes. You agree?
I agree that this perception exists. Most people's first thought about my country (U.S.) when you think of a techie or a social media addict is a hipster in a coffee shop with an indie band and a hemp beanie. But this is only in my country; I see people of all cultures and creeds flourishing with technology all the time, involved with causes and doing their bit for society, whether they come from America or other countries.

Can digital natives from developing nations create an impact with digital activism?
Absolutely! Take the Kony 2012 campaign. Although it ended badly for the director, it caused a major buzz in less than a week. It's only a matter of time before pop culture takes a hold of it and we see it in major media like sitcoms and cartoons. I try to stay involved with film making endeavors going on around my town through Facebook and Twitter. I did a digital ad for "Operation Warm", a charity that provides coats to children in need.

Activism has changed in the last decade. How effective are online campaigns in raising awareness about an issue vis-à-vis onsite deployment?
I think it's much more effective than it was five years ago, and seems to still be growing, especially where the younger generation is involved. The only drawback to the effectiveness of digital activism is that it discourages educating yourself about an issue in its entirety. Once again, take Kony2012, so many people took it at face value. But it raised ire with many due to the Foundation's shaky background and vague details. It's easy to get your message to the masses, but it's also easy to not see the whole picture.

Are digital natives taking the easy way out by what critics say is ‘slacktivism’: tweeting, linking and liking about grave social issues?
Unfortunately, yes I think so. Some get so wrapped up in "getting their message out" that they don't remember to ACT. You'll affect more lives out there on the street, than you ever will behind a computer. You have to find balance in the two.

A recent example of digital native activism is the Get Kony video campaign. What are your thoughts on the criticism it received?
I honestly thought the video was well edited and shot, and delivered a message strongly. But further digging led to details that were not so noble about the Invisible Children’s organization; the possibility that Joseph Kony has not been heard from in years and may be dead. It's just important to step back and say, "Okay, they seem to have a strong argument here, but what if..."

Are we seeing a trend where digital natives are more involved with local causes than with global issues?
It's just easier for most people to tackle things close to home, and that's okay. Imagine if EVERYONE focused on their own community and well being, everyone would be better off. That's no reason to try and help someone who's far away, but you can do more good in person than you can do over the internet. It's good to incorporate it into your strategy, but remember it's you actions that count.

Your thoughts on Citizen Action and the use of ICT
I think we're going through a transition, people are learning more and more through the internet, and have access to such powerful tools. It's going to be a renaissance of knowledge and creativity. I have learned more technical details for my trade off the internet in a year, than I have during my time in school. It's an exciting time to be alive.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-coverage-in-a-digital-world

Digital Activism in Asia Reader

sumandro — 2015-10-24T14:36:44Z

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation. Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia. It is our great pleasure to present the Digital Activism in Asia Reader.

The Book

The Reader took shape over two workshops with a diverse range of participants, including activists, change-makers, and scholars, organised by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in June 2014 and March 2015. During the first workshop, the participants identified the authors, topics, and writings that should be included/featured in the reader, based upon their relevance in the grounded practices of the participants, who came from various Asian countries. The second workshop involved open discussions regarding how the selected readings should be annotated, from key further questions to strategies of introducing them, followed by development of the annotations by the participants of the workshop. The full list of contributors, annotators, and editors is mentioned at the end of the book.

We are grateful to the Meson Press for its generous and patience support throughout the development process of the book.

Please download, read, and share this open-access book from the Meson Press website.

The Reader has been edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun.

Excerpt from the Foreword

Compiling this Reader on Digital Activism in Asia is fraught with compelling challenges, because each of the key terms in the formulation of the title is sub-ject to multiple interpretations and fierce contestations. The construction of ‘Asia’ as a region, has its historical roots in processes of colonial technologies of cartography and navigation. Asia was both, a measured entity, mapped for resources to be exploited, and also a measure of the world, promising anorientation to the Western World’s own turbulent encounters. As Chen Kuan-Hsing points out in his definitive history of the region, Asia gets re-imagined as a ‘method’ in cold-war conflicts, becoming the territory to be assimilated through exports of different ideologies and cultural purports. Asia does not have its own sense of being aregion. The transactions, interactions, flows and exchanges between different countries and regions in Asia have been so entirely mediated by powers of colonisation that the region remains divided and reticent in its imagination of itself. However, by the turn of the 21st century, Asia has seen a new awakening. It finds a regional identity, which, surprisingly did not emerge from its consolidating presence in global economics or in globalised structures of trade and commerce. Instead, it finds a presence, for itself, through a series of crises of governance, of social order, of political rights, and of cultural productions, that binds it together in unprecedented ways.

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn, because with the new networks of connectivity, with Asian countries marking themselves as informatics hubs, working through a circulated logic of migrant labour and dis-tributed resources, there came a sense of immediacy, proximity, and urgencythat continues to shape the Asian imagination in a new way. In the last decade or so, the rapid changes that have emerged, creating multiple registers of modernity, identity, and community in different parts of Asia, accelerated by a seamless exchange of ideas, commodities, cultures, and people have created a new sense of the region as emerging through co-presence rather than competition and conflict. Simultaneously, the emergence of global capitals of information, labour and cultural export, have created new reference points by which the region creates its identities and networks that are no longer subject to the tyranny of Western hegemony...

While the digital remains crucial to this shaping of contemporary Asia, both in sustaining the developmental agenda that most of the countries espouse, and in opening up an inward looking gaze of statecraft and social organisation, the digital itself remains an ineffable concept. Largely because the digital is like a blackbox that conflates multiple registers of meaning and layers of life, it becomes important to unengineer it and see what it enables and hides. The economic presence of the digital is perhaps the most visible in telling the story of Asia in the now. Beginning with the dramatic development of Singapore as the centre of informatics governance and the emergence of a range of cities from Shanghai to Manilla and Bangalore to Tehran, there has been an accelerated narrative of economic growth and accumulation of capital that is often the global face of the Asian turn. However, this economic reordering is not a practice in isolation. It brings with it, a range of social stirrings that seek to overthrow traditional structures of oppression, corruption, control, and injustice that have often remained hidden in the closed borders of Asian countries. However, the digital marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being excavated by the ICT4D logic, of the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself. These are questions that emerge from the ground, as more people interact with progressive and liberal politics and aspire not only for higher purchase powers but a better quality of rights. The digital turn has opened up a range of social and political rights based discourses, practices, and movements, where populations are holding their governments and countries responsible, accountable, and culpable in the face of personal and collective loss and injustice...

In the face of this multiplicity of digital sites and usages that are reconfiguring Asia, it is obvious then, that the very nature of what constitutes activism is changing as well. Organised civil society presence in Asia has often had a strong role in shaping modern nation states, but more often than not these processes were defined in the same vocabulary as that of the powers that they were fighting against. Marked by a strong sense of developmentalism and often working in complement to the state rather than keeping a check on the state’s activities, traditional activism in Asia has often suffered from the incapacity to scale and the inability to find alternatives to the state-defined scripts of development, growth and progress. In countries where literacy rates have been low, these movements also suffer from being conceived in philosophical and linguistic sophistry that escapes the common citizen and remains the playground of the few who have privileges afforded to them by class and region. Digital Activism, however, seems to have broken this language barrier, both internally and externally, allowing for new visualities enabled by ubiquitous computing to bring various stakeholders into the fray... At the same time, the digital itself has introduced new problems and concerns that are often glossed over, in the enthralling tale of progress. Concerns around digital divide, invasive practices of personal data gathering, the nexus of markets and governments that install the citizen/consumer in precarious conditions, and the re-emergence of organised conservative politics are also a part of the digital turn. Activism has had to focus not only on digital as a tool, but digital also as a site of protest and resistance...

The Reader does not offer an index of the momentous emergence with the growth of the digital or a chronological account of how digital activism in Asia has grown and shaped the region. Instead, the Reader attempts a crowd-sourced compilation that presents critical tools, organisations, theoretical concepts, political analyses, illustrative case-studies and annotations, that an emerging network of changemakers in Asia have identified as important in their own practices within their own contexts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader

Did Sibal just get arm-twisted by book publishers?

praskrishna — 2012-05-28T06:08:57Z

The publishing industry seems to have got the better of the Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal. Pranesh Prakash's article on parallel importation of books is referred in this article published in FirstPost on May 25, 2012.

The move to open up the market for distribution of international books to competition has been successfully thwarted with the removal of an amendment allowing parallel imports from the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2012 that was passed by the Lok Sabha on 22 May.

This despite the Parliamentary Standing Committee supporting the amendment on the grounds that it will increase student access to books.

But it could well only be a temporary victory for the publishing giants with Sibal promising to restore the amendment if the National Council of Applied Economic Research – to which the matter has been referred – should in its report (expected in August) recommend parallel imports.

The draft bill (which included the amendment) had created a furore in publishing circles last year. Parallel imports, claimed leading publishing houses, would destroy the industry. Read Thomas Abraham’s Death of Books published last year in The Hindustan Times.

While that remains open for debate, there is no denying the larger common good of faster and cheaper availability of books to millions of students that parallel imports will make possible. Ordering books may no longer be a click away if Flipkart had to take permission from the Indian copyright owner every time you ordered an international title.

In an article titled Why Parallel Importation of Books should be Allowed published by The Centre for Internet and Society Pranesh Prakash makes a compelling case for ending the distribution monopoly.

Underlying the huge benefit to students, the author says “Currently a large percentage of educational books in India are imported, but with different companies having monopoly rights in importation of different books. If this was opened up to competition, the prices of books would drop, since one would not need to get an authorisation to import books—the licence raj that currently exists would be dismantled—and Indian students will benefit.

“This is especially important for students and for libraries because even when low-priced editions are available, they are often of older editions.”

The article also argues how the business model of hugely popular site such as Flipkart depends on parallel imports to deliver books to its customers at great bargains.

Allowing parallel imports, argues the author, will dismantle distribution monopoly rights and help book publishers, libraries, the print-disabled and consumers in general. He also makes the important distinction between the black market and parallel imports, which is legal.

Offering a point-by-point rebuttal of the publishing industry’s claims of the destructive impact of parallel imports, the author observes “It seems to us that the publishing industry – especially foreign publishers with distributorship in India – don’t want to open themselves up to competition in the distribution market and are opposing this most commendable move.”

He concludes that allowing parallel imports will, in fact, result in an expansion of the reading market.

“It is mainly foreign publishers’ monopoly rights over distribution which will be harmed by this amendment, while Indian publishers, Indian authors, and Indian readers, especially students, will stand to gain. Furthermore, in the long run, even foreign publishers will stand to gain due to market expansion. Any legitimate worries that publishers may have are better dealt with under other laws (such as the Customs Act) and not the Copyright Act.”

Read the original from FirstPost.India

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/did-sibal-just-get-arm-twisted-by-book-publishers

DFI and Cambridge University Press join hands for getting print access to the "print impaired"

radha — 2011-08-17T08:45:27Z

Cambridge University Press has given permission for books published in India by them to be converted into other accessible formats such as in DAISY, says Dr. Sam Taraporevala, Director, Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged in this blog.

Print access is a major area that the DAISY Forum of India (DFI) is working towards. Two of the many member organizations of DFI, The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) and the Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC) approached the India office of Cambridge University Press, one of the major publishers in India. The rationale behind contacting publishers is to explain to them the need to have accessible copies of the printed word for the print disabled and obtain their permission for converting their books into such accessible formats such as in DAISY.

XRCVC interacted with Mr. Anil Kumar Pandey, General Manager for Western India of Cambridge University Press, Nirmita Narasimhan of CIS contacted Mr. Manas Saikia, Managing Director of Cambridge University Press, India. Both of them were very open to this idea of accessibility and thereby began a collaborative effort from both the Cambridge University Press in India and the DFI.

Mr. Saikia strengthened his support to the cause by not only giving permission for books published in India by Cambridge University Press but also offering to obtain for DFI the global permission of Cambridge University Press books. Ms. Anita Parkash, Legal and IP Manager, Asia of the Singapore office of Cambridge University Press also endorsed this stand. She reinforced the positive response given by Mr. Saikia and agreed for collaboration with the XRCVC to work out a system which would be in the best interests of the stakeholders. Having worked out the final draft of this agreement, she offered to get it duly endorsed from the United Kingdom office of the Cambridge University Press.

This brought together Mr. Gordon Johnson, the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University Press, Mr. Manas Saikia and Mr. Anil Kumar Pandey to the XRCVC on 23rd November, 2009 to sign the agreement with DFI. Dr. Sam Taraporevala, Director of XRCVC on behalf of DFI signed this agreement in the presence of Mr. Ketan Kothari who represented Sightsavers International, one of XRCVC’s partners in its “print access” quest. This we are sure has marked the beginning of a long and continuing association between DFI and Cambridge University Press for championing the cause of making the printed word accessible to the print disabled across India.

Coverage in The Bookseller

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/dfi-and-cambridge-university-press

Developments in spectrum sharing

radha — 2011-08-18T04:54:47Z

New ways to share spectrum can revolutionise broadband in India - An article in the Business Standard by Shyam Ponappa / New Delhi December 3, 2009, 1:35 IST

As the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) deliberates on spectrum and licensing after the hearings ending December 2, some important points are worth highlighting. Spectrum is public property and, therefore, need not add a layer of cost (through auctions and such other artifices), provided it is available to network builders, and these networks are available to operators for their customers on payment. The question is whether the government should give spectrum
free, or for an up-front price, i.e., a hefty spectrum fee, or through a progressive revenue-sharing arrangement as for telecommunications. This can be to network builders for their use, or to operators, to pool through either their own arrangements or through network builders-cum-operators.

One way to think about communications networks is to consider an analogy with road networks. The road network is accessed by paying road taxes and special tolls as required, e.g., when using a toll bridge or highway. The rest of the time, once a transport operator pays road taxes, the fleet’s vehicles have access to the entire public road network.

In the same way, it should be feasible for operators to access communications networks. These networks may be the operator’s own, or the public network, i.e., the Public Switched Telephone Network, paying as they go. In other words, whether operators use their own or others’ networks should be immaterial as long as they pay the tariffs, which result from a mesh of interconnection agreements. In this manner, network builders/service providers can use the spectrum as part of their “plant” for wireless transmission, just as they use optical fibre and copper wire for wire-line transmission.

Networks are already being built and operated by network builders-cum-operators. According to The Economist on developments in network operations, initially in New Zealand and then extended on a much larger and broader scale in India, “The vendors... gain economies of scale because they build, run and support networks for several Indian operators. Ericsson’s Mr Svanberg says his firm can run a network with 25% fewer staff than an operator would need. Bharti’s operating expenses are around 15% lower than they would be if it were to build and run its network itself, and its IT costs are around 30% lower, according to Capgemini.”*

Meanwhile, a momentous experiment in spectrum sharing is taking place in America. A company called Spectrum Bridge has developed a database-driven model for dynamic spectrum allocation in unused spectrum bands, the “white space” in the TV bands. This is in the 200 to 600 MHz band, with considerable advantages in propagation over distances, through foliage and walls, without attenuation as experienced at higher frequencies.

This system is being tried in Claudville, a rural community on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. As is likely to be true in rural India, using open spectrum that is unlicensed is impractical because of the distances, terrain and foliage. Fibre and copper lines are not only impractical, but also prohibitively expensive, a fact that people who suggest the use of existing wiring for broadband don’t seem to realise.

In this context, given the discussions on the possibility of spectrum trading as a solution going forward in the Trai hearings, it is instructive to note that despite the US Federal Communication Commission’s secondary market initiatives taken in 2003, not much spectrum trading had actually taken place until Spectrum Bridge’s introduction of their tracking and trading model, SpecEx (see www.specex.com). Subscribers view available spectrum at a chosen location and frequency band with pricing details when they want to buy, or list available spectrum to sell by location and frequency band. Therefore, any recommendations by Trai or decisions by the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) or the government should take this into account in considering the path of market traded spectrum based on exclusively assigned bands. It would be unrealistic to expect such trading to take place simply because it is allowed, without other
facilitating developments as have been achieved by Spectrum Bridge in America.

A second problem is that trading in spectrum can result in effects equivalent to land-grabbing in real estate. This serves less for effective communications than as an asset play for profit.

Like SpecEx for priced spectrum, www.ShowMyWhiteSpace.com is a free website that the company supports to show free TV white space (the “digital dividend” that is talked about) that can be used on the basis of open access to unlicensed or open spectrum.

In the trial at Claudville, Spectrum Bridge deployed the network with Dell and Microsoft contributing computer equipment and software to the local school. Teachers can now incorporate distance learning resources into the school’s curriculum.

Our policy-makers need to move beyond debates over slicing and dicing the spectrum to determine the smallest efficient band — 2.5 MHz for CDMA and 4.4 for GSM? Is 6.2 MHz all that any operator needs?... and so on. A direct solution is to not assign spectrum for exclusive use, and instead enable its use as a common resource that must be accessed by everyone
who needs to communicate on the network, exactly as public roads are accessed by paying road taxes and tolls. If spectrum must be assigned nominally to operators for administrative reasons, they should be obligated to pool this spectrum for common access.

Once we are able to aggregate spectrum in the frequency range which allows propagation over distances and through natural and man-made obstacles — buildings, foliage, etc. — we will have the open “highways” for broadband for its widespread usage across the country. This can only be achieved at relatively low cost through a progressive revenue-sharing arrangement, which is what happened eventually for voice communications with the National Telecom Policy 1999.

These are complex technical and commercial issues, and require the concerted effort of stakeholders and experts to devise the most effective solution in the public interest. The Trai hearings are the first step in this process.

shyamponappa@gmail.com <mailto:shyamponappa@gmail.com>

* ‘The mother of invention’, The Economist, September 24, 2009

Link to the original article

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/developments-in-spectrum-sharing

Development Informatics

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2019-09-27T15:12:01Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/development-informatics

Developing Screen Reader and Text to Speech Synthesizer for Indian Languages: Quarterly Report (November 2013)

praskrishna — 2016-09-29T13:16:32Z

Report of the activities of the NVDA and Espeak project between November 2012 and February 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/developing-screen-reader-quarterly-report-november-2013.pdf

Developing Open Knowledge Digital Resources in Indian Languages

teju — 2015-04-22T18:09:08Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K), in collaboration with the Centre for Indian Languages (CILHE) at TISS Mumbai, conducted a two-day workshop at English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) at Hyderabad on January 28-29, 2015. Titled ‘Developing Open Knowledge Digital Resources in Indian Languages’, the workshop was the third in this series during 2014-15.

The first workshop, focusing on Bangla, was held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in August 2014, and the second, focusing on Marathi, at Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, in September 2014. The EFLU workshop participants were drawn from Telugu and Malayalam backgrounds.

The objectives of the workshop was to familiarize student volunteers and their faculty with (a) tools of collaborative knowledge production on the internet, and (b) methods for generating new online content in Indian languages. The workshop had 19 student participants, from EFLU and TISS Hyderabad, along with 4 faculty members from these two institutions.

After opening remarks by Prof. K.Satyanarayana and Dr. Uma Bhrugubanda of the Department of Cultural Studies, the local hosts at EFLU, Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana of CILHE-TISS and Advisor to CIS-A2K spoke about the importance of creating new digital resources in local languages for both teaching and research in higher education. She stressed that students should not remain passive consumers of knowledge but instead participate in creating new knowledge resources. Vishnu Vardhan of CIS-A2K then elaborated on the theme of ‘Building Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages via Mass Collaboration on the Internet’. After this, the participants were introduced to some basic principles of editing on Wikipedia, and worked on establishing their presence as Wikipedia editors by creating their Profile pages, etc.

In order to familiarise students with the key Telugu and Malayalam terminology in their areas of study (cultural studies, linguistics, education), an exercise was conducted in which each participant tried to describe a few of the concepts without using the term itself. A successful description would draw attention to the intellectual work done by the concept, and establish its usefulness in the relevant language context. Animated discussion took place around concepts like public sphere, labour/work, human rights, feminism, caste, culture, etc. In a second exercise, the denotative meaning and connotative meaning of selected key terms were discussed, with a view to understanding how they could be used in Indian language writings. Following this exercise, participants also attempted to map the cluster of concepts associated with their chosen concept so they could comprehend the larger cognitive context of each term. They were then introduced to how hyper-linking and giving suitable references are a significant part of Wikipedia editing strategy. Participants ended the day by shortlisting topics for entries they wanted to create on Wikipedia.

Day Two began with an exercise that aimed to explore translation challenges on Wikipedia. Since one way of increasing Indian-language content was to translate or transcreate existing Wikipedia articles, students needed to be aware of the problems this task could pose, and the possible solutions that could be adopted. Workshop participants were asked to choose English Wikipedia entries on one person, one book, and one concept each, and report on the difficulties they encountered while attempting to translate the English content, at the level of terminology, conceptual framework or subject matter. The ensuing discussion was useful not only in consolidating strategies for translation but also in drawing attention to the problems of creating Indian-language content in areas of knowledge which have become familiar to us through the modern university curriculum.

In the last phase of the workshop, participants focused on creating their entries in Telugu and Malayalam. A few succeeded in creating three entries each, while the others managed to do at least two. The faculty of EFLU and TISS Hyderabad who were present at the workshop have agreed to meet with their students once a month to do production sprints for new content, thus ensuring that those who were merely digital users have indeed become digital authors.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/developing-open-knowledge-digital-resources-in-indian-languages

Developing Open Educational Resources in Indian Languages

Sohnee Harshey* — 2016-06-10T01:50:22Z

The Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), has been involved in organising workshops on developing open educational resources (OER) in Indian languages with undergraduate and postgraduate students across various partner institutions. The objective of these workshops is to introduce students to: a) tools of collaborative knowledge production on the Internet, and b) methods for generating new online content in Indian languages.

During November 2015 - February 2016, four such workshops have been organised at TISS’ Mumbai and Tuljapur campuses, Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women's Studies Centre (KSPWSC), Pune University, and at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.

A one and half day workshop was organised at KSPWSC, Pune during January 22-23, 2016. A total of 20 students attended this workshop along with three faculty members from the Centre. This workshop is a part of CILHE's ongoing and sustained engagement with KSPWSC to generate and strengthen content pertaining to women's studies on the Marathi Wikipedia.

Pune
On Day 1, after the opening address by Dr. Anagha Tambe from KSPWSC, Sohnee Harshey from CILHE, TISS spoke about the importance of creating open educational resources in Indian languages for social sciences and humanities. She sought responses from participants about the nature of their engagement with their research areas—which languages they used while collecting data, whether they had accessed reading material in languages other than English, and what were their sources of information. All the participants had used languages other than English in their learning process, some had even accessed Indian language Wikipedias, and all of them felt the need for more resources in Indian languages—especially in simpler and more accessible formats. Tanveer Hasan from CIS then spoke about the utility of Wikipedia for knowledge consumers and its immense potential for students to become knowledge producers, especially in the Indian languages.

In order to familiarize the participants with social sciences (specifically women's studies) terminology in Indian languages, an exercise was conducted, wherein they were asked to describe a concept (from a given list) without using the term itself. The idea behind this was to highlight what function a concept performs in a sentence and in the language context, and what assumptions are made while using this concept. This was followed up with another exercise where the participants were encouraged to choose two concepts and explain their denotation and connotation. This was done in order to familiarise them with the web of other concepts in which a concept is located. The concept of ‘labour’ or ‘shram’ (in Marathi) was chosen for discussion.

On Day 2 of the workshop, Abhinav Garule, Programme Associate with A2K-CIS, introduced the participants to the basics of Wikipedia editing through a hands-on activity. They navigated through both the English and Indian language Wikipedias to see how the edit, talk, and view history functions work, what the key characteristics of a good article are, and how one can read more about a certain topic through interwiki and external links and categories. This was interspersed with recalling the exercises done on the previous day and comparing the critical thinking process involved.

Since one of the simpler ways to populate Indian language Wikipedias is through translation of existing content in English, participants were encouraged to try this with an entry of their choice. They were asked to also list difficulties that they faced in the process of translation. At the end of this exercise, a range of ‘problems’ like lack of appropriate terminology for complex concepts, the dangers of oversimplification, differences between languages in terms of the structure of sentences, and lack of references in Indian languages, were highlighted by the participants. While they were still thinking about these problems, another challenge was put forth for them to look at two conflicting or opposing references for a topic (for example, a movie review, or reporting around an event) and come up with a ‘neutral’ write-up about it. Questions of what constitutes a valid reference, issues of plagiarism, personal opinion, codes of civility on Talk pages formed part of this discussion.

Following this, the participants chose one topic (each) on which they wished to create a Wikipedia article in an Indian language. Most of the participants worked on the Marathi Wikipedia. They worked in groups of 3-4 to edit and create a range of articles including ones on patriarchy, colonialism, masculinity, family, and tribes, among others. A total of 12 entries were created in this workshop. Participants also explored Wikimedia Commons, Meta, and Wikisource as allied repositories. The students have now become active as knowledge producers and will join the existing group of editors at KSPWSC in the wiki-sprints to generate new content every month.

Hyderabad:

Similar exercises were also conducted during the two-day workshop at EFLU, Hyderabad in February 2016. The participants worked on the Malayalam, Telugu, and Hindi Wikipedias. Articles were written on geographical entities like Tamil Eelam and West Godavari district, on academic figures like M.S.S. Pandian and Maxine Berstein, academic and literary works such as My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk and Towards a World of Equals by Susie Tharu, among other topics. Since creating an article from scratch also involved deliberation regarding issues of translation, and the limits of concepts and their meanings in the Indian context, it is hoped that these new editors will find it useful for their own research to think critically about the process of generating content on the Indian language Wikipedias.

* Sohnee Harshey works at the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Article edited by Subhashish Panigrahi of CIS-A2K.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/developing-open-educational-resources-in-indian-languages

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

praskrishna — 2014-08-22T00:51:52Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) in partnership with the School of Cultural Texts and Records, School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai is organizing a two-day workshop for students at Jadavpur University on August 25 and 26, 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/developing-digital-open-knowledge-resources-in-indian-languages

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan — 2014-10-12T03:52:20Z

A two-day workshop for students was organized by Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune (KSPWSC), Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Access to Knowledge Programme, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore (CIS-A2K) on September 11 and 12, 2014 in Pune. Tejaswini Niranjana and Tanveer Hasan summarize the developments from the workshop in this report.

Day 1

The workshop began with Tejaswini Niranjana speaking about the monolingual nature of the present day higher education system. She explained why monolingual students were disadvantaged in their pursuit of knowledge, since they could not grasp the concepts coming from the societies they lived in. The mandate of CILHE was briefly explained, and the commitment of the centre to generate accurate and relevant multi-lingual terminology for the social sciences and humanities stressed upon. She lauded the role of the KSPWSC, Pune University, in using bilingual pedagogic material and promoting an engagement with Indian language materials in their courses. The importance of using digital resources was also discussed. The collaborative nature of creating entries on the Wikipedia platform was stressed. The organizers added that students from various other institutions across the country would be participating in the larger exercise.

Next, T. Vishnu Vardhan of CIS-A2K spoke about the changing nature of knowledge repositories and the pattern of access to those repositories. He described at length the genesis of Wikipedia and the influence it has today on the way we access and understand knowledge. Different types of digital resources available to us and the nature in which they generate the knowledge and make it available was explained. Participants were also introduced to the difference between born digital material and digitized material along with the many sister projects of the Wikimedia foundation. Vishnu explained how anyone registering as an editor on Wikipedia could begin contributing to the development of this knowledge base. This was followed by a session in which the basics of Wikipedia editing were explained.

Following lunch, there was a group exercise that required the participants to pick any three concepts that were provided to them in a handout and try to explain the same without using the concept itself. This exercise was important as the participants would try to understand the concept more closely without assuming its meaning. This was self-evident. Better understanding of the concept would in turn help them to write about it or use it meaningfully in an Indian language entry on Wikipedia. Many participants found this exercise difficult in the initial stages as they fell back upon their classroom understanding of the term. They were asked to focus on explaining the concept without using the word itself but by understanding its effects and its multiple meanings.

In the second exercise, the participants made use of the material generated through the first exercise and tried to explain the denotative and connotative meanings of their chosen concept. The third exercise involved coming up with a cluster of concepts in which their chosen concept was embedded. The idea was to show how concepts derived meaning from a larger context, and could not be understood outside of their conceptual universe. The first day of the workshop ended with all the participants successfully registering themselves as Wikipedia editors, learning the basics of editing, and having taken part in an exercise that made them think about the concepts they used with greater clarity.


						Above: A participant explains the denotative and connotative meaning of her chosen concept.

Day 2

Participants were asked to search for an article in the English Wikipedia for a person, a book and a concept connected to women’s studies. They were asked to identify the challenges involved if they had to translate the article into an Indian language they were familiar with. The exercise was intended to alert the participants to the kind of problems they were likely to face during the act of translation. They were also asked to come up with solutions as to how these problems could be overcome. A key problem voiced by many participants was that of the non-availability of the right phrase/term/word in Indian languages. Tejaswini Niranjana advised the participants not to reinvent the wheel but use the terms that had been coined earlier but were now out of circulation in Indian languages. She also pointed out that translation from English to Indian languages is a different process than from Indian languages to English. In the former, one has to break sentence structure to make the meaning more clear, and in the latter one has to combine the sentences. She also said that the process of translation must happen at the level of sentences and ideas and not simply at the level of terms and words.

Answering another question about the lack of social context while translating a concept, Prof. Niranjana asked the participants to use the existing historical and social writings already available in their languages to overcome this problem. These writings could be updated and edited, and current references added.

Vishnu continued the discussion of using digital platforms to create and disseminate knowledge by explaining various tools available. He stressed the importance of sharing our efforts in creating knowledge and making it widely available, and pointed out various features of Wikipedia and Google translator. Participants were shown ways by which the existing knowledge base on Google and such other digital knowledge platforms could be improved.

Everyone then started working on his/her individual entries that would be the quantitative output of this workshop. They were asked to select one topic (a book, a person, a concept) from their previous exercise and develop an article based on that in any Indian language that they preferred. Most of the entries were in Marathi, with a few participants opting for Hindi. There was an entry in Bangla as well.

At the end of the workshop, more than half of our 26 participants had fully developed entries in Indian languages. These entries contained a table of contents and references, inter-wiki references, and external links, and in some cases included images too. Many participants wrote about personalities such as the writer Mukta Salve, the feminist theorist Mary John, and the contemporary Marathi writer Narayan Bhosle. Some wrote about concepts such as feminism, nationalism and domestic violence.

This two-day workshop proved to be immensely successful as the participants were motivated to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms regularly, and began to appreciate the importance of Indian language initiatives such as these.

We are very thankful to the entire faculty at KSPWSC, Pune University, Dr. Anagha Tambe, Dr. Swati Dyahadroy, Sneha Gole, Sanjay Kumar Kamble, and Deepa Tak who facilitated the discussions and were of immense help in conducting the workshop.


					Above: Tejaswini Niranjana with participants at the Pune workshop.

Click to download all the photographs from the workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/report-on-developing-digital-open-knowledge-resources-in-indian-languages

Detecting Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) Blocking

divyank — 2023-09-05T12:10:47Z

A new internet protocol makes it harder for internet service providers to censor websites. We made a technical intervention to check if censors are interfering with its deployment.

This blogpost was edited by Torsha Sarkar.

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, which is widely recognised as the lock sign in a web browser’s URL bar, encrypts the contents of internet connections when an internet user visits a website so that network intermediaries (such as Internet Service Providers, Internet Exchanges, undersea cable operators, etc.) cannot view the private information being exchanged with the website.

TLS, however, suffers from a privacy issue – the protocol transmits a piece of information known as the Server Name Indication (or SNI) which contains the name of the website a user is visiting. While the purpose of TLS is to encrypt private information, the SNI remains unencrypted – leaking the names of the websites internet users visit to network intermediaries, who use this metadata to surveil internet users and censor access to certain websites. In India, two large internet service providers – Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel – have been previously found using the SNI field to block access to websites.

Encrypted Client Hello (or ECH) is a new internet protocol that has been under development since 2018 at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and is now being tested for a small percentage of internet users before a wider rollout. It seeks to address this privacy limitation by encrypting the SNI information that leaks the names of visited websites to internet intermediaries. The ECH protocol significantly raises the bar for censors – the SNI is the last bit of unencrypted metadata in internet connections that censors can reliably use to detect which websites an internet user is visiting. After this protocol is deployed, censors will find it harder to block websites by interfering with network connections and will be forced to utilise blocking methods such as website fingerprinting and man-in-the-middle attacks that are either expensive and less accurate, or unfeasible in most cases.

We have been tracking the development of this privacy enhancement. To assist the successful deployment of the ECH protocol, we contributed a new censorship test to the Open Observatory for Network Interference (OONI) late last year. The new test attempts to connect to websites using the ECH protocol and records any interference from censors to the connection. As censors in some countries were found blocking a previous version of the protocol entirely, this test gives important early feedback to the protocol developers on whether censors are able to detect and block the protocol.

We conducted ECH tests during the first week of September 2023 from four popular Indian ISPs, namely Airtel, Atria Convergence Technologies (ACT), Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea, which account for around 95% of the Indian internet subscriber base. The results indicated that ECH connections to a popular website were successful and are not currently being blocked. This was the expected result, as the protocol is still under development. We will continue to monitor for interference from censors closer to the time of completion of the protocol to ensure that this privacy enhancing protocol is successfully deployed.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/detecting-encrypted-client-hello-ech-blocking

Designing Change? Gatekeepers in Digital Humanities

sara — 2013-07-02T08:33:54Z

After defining the archive as one of the important concepts for digital humanities research, the question arose, whether or not a redefined archive still functions as a gatekeeper. This blog entry follows the question, if the digital humanities have overcome gatekeepers of knowledge, or if there has simply been a shift in what is doing the gatekeeping.

The last digital humanities blog entry finished on a rather resentful note, arguing that perhaps the difference between humanities and the digital humanities were feigned – and badly at that – and if the digital humanities would stop worrying only about infrastructure, there would no longer be a difference between the two. This insinuates that if only digital humanities would drop the digital and go back to humanities research and include digital technologies into it, all would be well and resolved. However, it is obvious that this generalization was slightly exaggerated, as generalizations tend to be. Nonetheless, the hypotheses is that archives have served as gatekeepers to traditional humanities research in the past. As they suggest a literary canon, they contribute to shaping the field according to certain discursive perceptions. If something is archived, it is considered important enough at the time, to serve as a representation for future reference. This constructs a hierarchy of written work over others, and especially publicized work over written text without publication. Therefore archives serve as a gatekeeper of knowledge, which, if one remembers the circumstances under which books are and were published, is mostly not necessarily representative of important topics but mainly boils down to capitalistic preferences. These preferences are not made transparent and often they are not questioned.

As one could see in the last post, the digital humanities have a reviewed concept of the archive to encompass a more contemporary memory of discourse. This changes the function of the archive, which leaves the question, whether the gatekeepers have changed as well, or even completely dissolved. In traditional humanities, archives served as more of a historical perspective of discourse, which could only be accessed from a temporal distance, for a better understanding of discursive perception at the time. As a matter of fact, Derrida stresses the point that archives are not possible without exteriority and that they are always a protheses to memory, but also to reproduction (Derrida: 1998: 14). So in fact they are not only not supposed to be live, but are always highly technological transformations of events. If the archiving process “produces as much as it records the event” (ibid.: 17), then that change from archival work to live-archives is fundamental to understanding the digital humanities. As the time restrictions, the materiality and the function of the archive has changed, so must the field it is archiving. Nonetheless, as included in the citation, the archive is also a technology of reproduction and every reproductive process changes what is being reproduced incessantly, so that what was there before is not available anymore (ibid.:26). Which means that archives are not historical at all, but constantly changing themselves, as the media that contains them reproduces them.

The archives being produced nowadays therefore might be a lot more representative, as the medium of the internet in itself is ever-changing and therefore makes the repetitive and transformative process of archival work visible. Another fundamental difference in archival work, apart from the 'right-here-right-now' stance of modern internet archives, is that prior archives were mainly text-based. Up until now, the written word has been perceived as progressive as it is one of the main features of western advanced civilization (Stein 2006). This marginalizes populations who do not or cannot do research work in latin alphabetic writing. According to Vilém Flusser, writing is also a form of structuring knowledge in a one-dimensional manner, aberrations that do not fit into a flow of writing are not easily included into literary pieces (Flusser 1990). Research phenomena get a direction and a structure, just as writing is structured on a page. Text-based knowledge production therefore reproduces the “official reasoning of occidental culture” (Flusser 1999). This literary structure is closed, in a sense that a text portrays a meaning and once the text is over, its meaning will have enfolded itself completely onto the reader. It is therefore a closed train of thought without derivative. This narrative framework constructs historical consciousness as something linear. Going back to Foucault's conceptions around the archive, however, we see that history is never linear and never singular, but always a subjective fragment of the whole (Foucault 1969). Overcoming the structure of textual flow through visualizations and design could therefore mean overcoming supposed linearity and becoming more open towards diverse narratives of histories or knowledge.

The symbol for the ladies washroom exemplifies how design could be more generative to meaning than a purely textual format. The schematic depiction of a female via a dress implies that only females should enter the room beyond. It works internationally and does not need to rely on language or latin letters to portray its meaning. At the same time, women all across the world feel included by the sign, even though they do not match its proportions, or may never have worn a skirt or a dress, let alone one similar to the usual depiction. The depiction of the female body is completely fictional and has no relation to biological reality. The sign, just like Derrida's archive, is a repetition of the ideal of being female, just as any other female body is a repetition of this ideal, an ideal which does not have a 'real' existing counterpart. As Judith Butler explains, all embodiments of categories such as gender, but also race and class or any other category, are repetitions of this fictional ideal, and in their repetition they prove the ideal to be non-existent (Butler 1990). As no biologically female person would agree to the sign being a representation of womanhood, at least in this instance one could imagine a more open context within that sign to include people, who feel just as badly or well represented by the crude depiction, as any strictly biological female. The pictorial representation is a good example of how having only text-based information can often narrow perspectives and choosing design over text can open knowledge production to become more inclusive.

Nowadays digital technologies allow for multimedia documentation, in fact design has been identified as a key feature in digital humanities work, up to a point where designers, coders and artists are seen as equal to textual authors when collaborating on work (Burdick et. Al 2012: 12). This is a step towards deconstructing the hegemony the written word has over alternative forms of knowledge production. Visualizing what has been written and produced before, or even producing knowledge in a not solely textual form increases the openness of knowledge and makes it more accessible for people before marginalized by the latin phonetic alphabet, thereby overcoming conceptual barriers of nationality and dominant languages. Sure enough, giving credit to non-textual authors' contributions to text is sensible, as the way the output is shaped influences accessibility, readability and finally the content itself. So overcoming the hierarchy between text and non-textual knowledge production surely is something digital humanities should work on, it surely is not achieved yet, although some might claim otherwise. Especially in academia, a certain amount of written text is important even in visual departments such as an art academy, to show that ones productivity is not completely random, but justified. Still, design is becoming more and more relevant, just as packaging is important to sell a product.

However, the question is, if design counts as a main feature in research work, does it then function as a new gatekeeper? The hypotheses is, that just as publication and academic structures were limiting the knowledge being produced, needing a designer, a coder or any visual artist to actually produce and publish work can be just as limiting. If you need someone to visualize your work so that it can be comprehended, it will be just like needing a publisher – work will again be produced according to capitalistic preference and design just helps put your (intellectual) product on the market. Putting something in pretty packaging can sometimes obscure the production process, as it adds value to the final form, while hiding any ugly obstacles that were to be overcome along the way and could serve as a learning for future research. Design and visuality being more able to display affirmative information, such obstacles and learnings could be difficult to visualize. Also, given the timely limits one is faced with, there is reason for critics to believe that a nice form is valued over 'proper' or 'good' content. The problem lies within defining what is 'good' and what is 'proper'. Digital humanists like Ramsay would argue that “doing” is more important than reading (Ramsay 2011). However, by overcoming the hierarchy between written and non-textual knowledges, content and form cannot be separated but should be seen as two intertwined facets of one bundle of research output.

Another problem with the rising importance of design is that people with visual impediments are marginalized from knowledges that rely on optics and design to get their point across. So when design reaches new importance, researchers creating output must also take into consideration in what way this output is marginalizing people and how to overcome this marginalization. It is one of the main insights of disability studies that disabilities are “not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (Garland-Thomson 1997). Just as the phonetic alphabet, visualizations are therefore conceptualizing knowledge around a norm which implies functionality of vision. One way of overcoming that barrier is including screen-reading software onto visually appealing websites like it is described by George H. Williams (2012). The concept of inclusion is called 'universal design', instead of 'assistive technology', and is based on the perception that technology is always assistive, not only in the case of e.g. screen readers for the visually impaired (Williams 2012). This breaks with the normative perspective of the body functioning in a certain way and deconstructs the understanding of disabilities as an aberration of the norm. Universal design therefore benefits not only disabled people, but all people. As Williams puts it, “whether in a physical or digital environment, designers are always making choices about accessibility. However, not all designers are aware of how their choices affect accessibility. Universal design is design that involves conscious decisions about accessibility for all, and it is a philosophy that should be adopted more widely by digital humanities scholars” (ibid.). At the same time this intentional inclusion may be difficult to follow at times. Especially when considering that technology itself can be seen as co-authoring a text in the form of programs, algorithms and code, it might become difficult to impose the philosophy of universal design on non-human authorship. This implies that technology, too, should be theorized, a thought that is being suggested throughout more critical approaches of digital humanists and humanities (see e.g. Earhart 2012). As has been stated in prior blog entries, the digital humanities are trying to move away from theorizing, which might be the reason for the problems arising within the field. The deconstruction of text-based hegemony should not take place in favor of establishing new hierarchies. The written word and the visual underly a complex power/knowledge complex, simply trying to reverse it will not work. The category 'nation', or 'nationality' portrays the ambivalence of this case very well. While in some cases, like a national constitution, the written word will be more powerful than a pictorial or designed description, in others, like a national flag, the visual and symbolic materiality of a knowledge product is a lot more powerful than simple text. Instead of moving from reading to doing, as has been suggested (e.g. Ramsay), the digital humanities need to find a balance between the two, so as to incorporate questions of race, gender and other categories of human agency into their research. Especially when it comes to postcolonial studies and research in cultures and languages other than those of western dominance, digital humanists should not only consider themselves as consumers, but as actual producers of knowledge resources. This counts for producing work as much as it does for archiving, as the productive process of today remain the archives of tomorrow, or even of simultaneously happening research projects. Design can be a factor to help overcome these barriers, if the concept of universal design is incorporated into digital humanities work. All too often, however, design is still a concept that marginalizes, often unknowingly, so as to serve as a gatekeeper to knowledge production, benefiting capitalistic values.

Butler 1990 Butler, Judith: "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity". New York/London: Routledge

Derrida 1998 Derrida, Jacques: "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression". Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Earhart 2012 Earhart, Amy E.: "Can Information be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon". Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. accessed June 28th, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/16

Flusser 1990 Flusser, Vilém: "Does Writing have a Future?" U of Minnesota Press. 2011

Flusser 1999 Flusser, Vilém: “Into the Universe of Technical Images” U of Minnesota Press. 2011

Foucault 1969 Foucault, Michel: “The Archeology of Knowledge” translated by Allan Sheridan, New York: Harper and Row, 1972

Garland-Thomson 1997 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie: "Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature". New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Ramsay 2011 Ramsay, Stephen: “On Building” accessed June 20^th 2013, http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.

Stein 2006 Stein, Peter: "Schriftkultur. Eine Geschichte des Schreibens und Lesens". Darmstadt: Primus

Williams 2012 Williams, George H.: "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities". Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open Access Edition. accessed June 28th, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/44

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

Designing a Human Rights Impact Assessment for ICANN’s Policy Development Processes

Collin Kure, Akriti Bopanna and Austin Ruckstuhl — 2019-10-03T14:18:13Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/designing-a-human-rights-impact-assessment-for-icann2019s-policy-development-processes

Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Design: Human Behavior vs. Technology - Vita Beans

Vita Beans

Inspiration

The design challenge

The solutions

Behavioral Science and Social Marketing

"a sophisticated technology, that draws heavily on behavioral science for clues to solve communication and persuasion related to influencing accessibility. [...] Most of the effort is spent on discovering the wants of a target audience and creating goods and services to satisfy them" (Kotler, 1971)

Linking it back to digital technology

Making Change

Footnotes:

Sources:

Digital Coverage in a Digital World

Video Proposal

Interview

Digital Activism in Asia Reader

The Book

Excerpt from the Foreword

Did Sibal just get arm-twisted by book publishers?

DFI and Cambridge University Press join hands for getting print access to the "print impaired"

Developments in spectrum sharing

Development Informatics

Developing Screen Reader and Text to Speech Synthesizer for Indian Languages: Quarterly Report (November 2013)

Developing Open Knowledge Digital Resources in Indian Languages

Developing Open Educational Resources in Indian Languages

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

Developing Digital Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages

Day 1

Day 2

Detecting Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) Blocking

Designing Change? Gatekeepers in Digital Humanities

Designing a Human Rights Impact Assessment for ICANN’s Policy Development Processes