Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Humanities and the Alt-Academy

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:29:48Z

The emergence of Digital Humanities (DH) has been contemporaneous to the ‘crisis’ in the humanities, spurred by changing social and economic conditions which have urged us to rethink traditional methods, locations and concepts of research and pedagogy. This blog post examines the emergence of the phenomenon of the alt-academy in the West, and examines the nuances and possibilities of such a space in the Indian context.

From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself.

As some of the previous blog posts have illustrated, most of the prominent debates around DH have largely been within the university context, or have least focussed around the university as the centre, and therefore emphasise the move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, or at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation.

In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and areas which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a specific kind of teachinglearning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.

The notion of a ‘digital classroom’ has been made possible by the proliferation of new digital tools and the internet; with increased access to open access archives and dynamic knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia, there is a move towards a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration.

DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ [1] —– not only in terms of people but also spaces, methods and objects of learning — to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ [2] who now inhabit what previously seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. However, it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that is now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters to the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. It may be useful to explore this change further to arrive at some idea of whether such a space exists in the Indian context, and how it informs the way we conceptualise DH; as practitioners, researchers, teachers or the lay person.

This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster these new and alternate knowledge-making practices.While the early DH debates in the Anglo-American context seemed to be dominated by certain disciplines like English, media studies and computational and information sciences, practitioners and researchers alike have branched out significantly, with research focussing more on questions of data-mining, mapping and visualisation with an increasing focus on processes and design, and using a diverse range of texts or objects.

In India, which significantly borrows the discourse from the same context, and also is still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition to the digital, the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the academic circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research (some discussed in the earlier blog posts as well), which would be likely spaces where one may see DH–related work being done. An important part of the discourse in the context of education is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom. Educational or instructional technology has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom, and this has been supported by several large-scale digitisation projects as well but the digital divide still persists, as a result of which these initiatives come with a peculiar set of problems of their own (as discussed in the earlier blog post on archival practice) the most important being the lack of connection among such practices, research and pedagogy.

While education technology is a separate field which works on better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology, it does form part of the context within which DH is to develop either as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach, and the two areas are very often conflated in some parts of the discourse in India. While moving beyond the ICTs debate — which is premised primarily around access to knowledge, DH has been posited as making an intervention into prevailing systems of knowledge — so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change.

What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it — will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.

Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University speaks about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies, particularly in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages.

While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research, which he sees even with his students now, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms like Academia.edu or Scalar, that he finds a vast change. It not only makes the process more transparent but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities.

It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata.

Curriculum development in DH comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets — we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital — but the rate of change is faster than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities (thus also seen as a threat to the disciplines themselves), and having its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.

What this essentially refers to is the alternate modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders. Wikipedia is an existing example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, [3] the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says: “The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and a historical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an inherent quality but a transitive one 6[4] located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?”

He further goes on to elaborate that the question of the authority of knowledge should ideally be located within a larger ‘knowledge apparatus’, comprising of certain technologies and practices, (in this case that of reading, writing, editing, compilation, classification and creative appropriations) which help inflate the definitions of authority and knowledge even more.

The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’— often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge.

While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of practices and occupations are but alternatives — from alternative medicine to education — to the already established system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now.

The attempts to subsume these alternate practices, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question. Another aspect of this is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which therefore prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. By extension then, the term DH itself therefore may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field.

At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of knowledge production have been brought to the foreground, which have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come.

References:

# Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 Accessed July 27, 2014 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/
Davidson, Cathy N. & David Theo Goldberg, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010) Accessed March 15, 2014 http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-thinking
See Liang, Lawrence “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15^th to the 18^thcentury” in INC Reader#7 Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011, p.50-62

[1] . See Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo. Goldberg, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010

[2] . For more on this see # Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/

[3] . See Lawrence Liang, “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15^th to the 18^th Century” in INC Reader#7Critical Point ofView: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011

[4] Adrian John’s as quoted in Liang. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy

Consultation on Figures of Learning in the Digital Context - Report

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:37:04Z

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society organised a consultation on ‘Figures of Learning in the Digital Context’ on September 22, 2014 in Bangalore.

Conducted as part of its ‘Making Methods for Digital Humanities’ project, the discussion was an attempt to examine changes in the learning environment with the advent of digital technologies and new modes of knowledge production by mapping concepts and changes around a set of figures of learning, old and new, to understand the discursive shifts that produce and locate them in the contemporary moment. (See the concept note here).

The Making Methods project seeks to make specific interventions in structures of learning, methods of storing and documenting information, and processes of interaction and interface design, in an effort to describe and queer the contours of what we understand as the field of Digital Humanities today.

The consultation brought together a small but diverse set of people from different fields. Participants presented on figures of learning drawn from their own fields of research and practice. Archana Prasad, artist and founder of JAAGA, Bangalore spoke about the organisation and its growth as an alternative space for learning through collaborative processes in art, design and technology – the studio space made of pallet racks, its various projects and groups that converge at JAAGA reflect this diversity and interdisciplinarity. She spoke about changes in her own role from being a facilitator for diverse groups to come together, to becoming more of a mentor in the later years, the problems of sustainability of such a space and the efforts made through different projects in emphasising learning though peer-to-peer methods. Interesting projects in focus were the participatory artwork and reality game called Investmentzone which is an effort to collaboratively work and transform public spaces and the JAAGA residential study programme. The discussions were useful in understanding processes that can be used to foster alternative and participatory learning environments.

Asim Siddiqui, Ph.D. student at the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, used the figure of the ‘performer’ to talk about his research enquiry into the philosophy of performative art traditions and the role of the body, performance and practice in learning. He spoke about the relative passivity of the body in the classroom, and the predominance of certain normative discourses within which teaching-learning practices operate and therefore produce a sort of instrumental form of knowledge, which he found problematic. He drew from examples of embodied action in dance, theatre and music to look at how some of these nuances and conflicts may be brought into classroom pedagogy to make it more illustrative and inclusive. This led to an interesting discussion around problems with current teaching-learning practices and the lack of adequate measures to make them contextual and relevant to students’ lived experience. The digital now bringing in a different dimension to learning and the lack of an understanding of the body in the digital space as preventing the possibility of a somatic element to knowledge was also discussed. The problem of disciplinary constraints and the separation of humanities and social sciences came up with reference to technology becoming more prominent in classrooms.

Bitasta Das, instructor and coordinator of the UG Humanities programme at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore spoke further on this issue of separation of the disciplines from her experience of teaching in the UG programme. Her presentation on the ‘distracted inventor’ focussed on the role of technology in the classroom, and how there is a need for teachers to constantly innovate to keep students engaged, particularly in a course such as this. The notion of distraction was a useful contrast to the attention economy debates that have become increasingly prevalent. The possibility of distraction as serendipitous and productive, particularly in science which is also a space of invention and discovery was discussed as one way of taking the idea forward. Some of the work done by students in the programme, under the larger rubric of integration of disciplines, was also presented in the consultation.

Nishant Shah presented on the idea of the production of error in computing, which is also the result of a deliberate and long process or history which can be traced from scribes copying texts to print culture and now to the machine itself, which also produces or re-produces error. He spoke about the gap between the interface and the information that a person consumes in the digital context, which is contrary to what is understood by abbreviations such as Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO). He sought to critically examine this notion of transparency that the digital supposedly provides, when in effect the notion of error is as much present, but is being effectively effaced in various ways. The production of error therefore is an interesting process in signifying the limits of knowledge, and he proposed the idea of using the figure of the hipster to further explore this process of error or the glitch as a productive one.

Ekta Mittal , media practitioner and one of the founder-members of the media and arts collective Maraa presented on the figure of the worker, drawing on her research and work on a film on the Bangalore Metro construction workers. The attempt was to break through the existing discourse and simple binaries to present multiple meanings of the city, migrant labour, development, and new narratives of freedom and pleasure. Through documentation of the lives of labourers who belong to different parts of the country and their stories of migration, some of them illegal, and the question of identity and livelihood the film tries to dislocate the figure of the worker from a certain predominant discourse of the marginalised and invisible. The figure of the worker as a ghost, poet, wanderer, and now a lurker who often favours his condition of anonymity and invisibility is something that the presentation also focussed on as a way to take these ideas forward.

The consultation brought together a small but interesting set of people and ideas, this time specifically looking at diverse art and classroom teaching - learning practices. It also brought to the fore several unconventional processes of learning such as gamification, distraction, performance and embodied action that are outside the traditional notion of learning in the context of digital technologies. These ideas would contribute to further initiatives in engaging with larger questions about technology and processes of knowledge production.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/consultation-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context

Confession in the Digital Age

sneha — 2014-04-14T07:06:11Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sneha — 2014-04-14T07:12:32Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:47:27Z

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

The ‘digital turn’ has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. The digital humanities have emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technology and the human subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the digital humanities discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. However, digital humanities is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.

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

Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in a series of posts over the next couple of weeks. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested frameworks, which we hope will inform also larger concerns of the digital humanities programme at CIS:

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

Locating these concerns in India, where the field of digital humanities is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on digital humanities still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says “Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others.”[4]

The digital humanities then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates digital humanities from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of digital humanities.

This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of these thoughts a little further and with a focus on the Indian context. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and digital humanities. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.

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

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

[3]. For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, The Technosocial subject: cities, cyborgs and cyberspace Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository@Inflibnet, Web, March 7, 2014.

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

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

A Queer Digital Humanities Experience

sneha — 2014-04-04T06:30:52Z

Questions of identity and citizenship have been an important aspect of understanding the digital realm, and what it means to be ‘human’ in this space. While one may still mull over the separation of the real and the virtual, the digital as a condition of existence has engendered new notions of the public sphere, and sought to redefine the methods of traditional humanistic enquiry. In this guest post, Ditilekha Sharma shares some reflections on her research on the queer community and the politics of identity on the Internet, within the perspective of the Digital Humanities.

At the initial stage of this research I had no idea what the Digital Humanities entailed, not like I do so much now, but I have learnt that the beauty of doing interdisciplinary research is that I get to conceptualise the research in my own terms to a very large extent. However, today I feel doing Digital Humanities is not the same as doing Humanities. The digital has a character of its own which required me to engage with it in a more nuanced way.

The research thus began with a very vague idea of me wanting to understand how youth from the queer community negotiate their identity and engaged in politics in the online space. Coming from a social sciences discipline my ideas of the online space were very uni-dimensional at the beginning of the research. I looked at the online space as being separate from lives of individuals. I viewed it as a space people could get in and out of at will, very much like any other public space. Hence I conceptualised my research in similar terms. I understood online spaces as being outside of the individuals who used it. Having been born a digital native, the digital sphere I believed became an inevitable part of individuals where access or non access to it became a matter of externalities around the individual. With some of these assumptions in mind my research went about asking questions of exclusion, marginalisation, access, online activism, online safety to name a few. All this while since my research framework saw the virtual space as a non real space in a very unquestioning, uncomplicated way, that is how my research also emerged, separating the two domains. Very interestingly during the same time the Supreme Court Verdict of the IPC Section 377 bought the issues of the queer community of India into the online space in a major way. It was very interesting to observe these developments.

In the initial drafts of the research since my understanding of the digital was of it being unreal I saw the experience of individuals in the online space as being disembodied experience. Thus the Digital Humanities workshop became an eye opener for me. The workshop for the first time made me imagine what it would be like to put digital at the centre and understand life in it. It pushed me to read more and understand the historical emergence of the digital space. I was pushed to look at both queer politics and politics in the online space differently from what I had seen it before. What was it that made the online space a place where queer politics could emerge and be played out? I came to reflect and question the very ideas of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ and started seeing them as something not very separate after all. This gave a new meaning to embodiment and the experiences of individuals in the online space. Especially it helped me in understanding the experiences of individuals who identify as queer and engage in the queer politics. For a digital novice like me, reading up on MUDs and digital avatars was extremely exciting. I realised that we never reflect on how the online space while giving us limited less space to ‘perform’ our identities, nevertheless also does operate within certain constrains especially in the case of social media as a public sphere. One of my respondents helped me reflect on the difference between presence and existence and how the two of them can hold very different meanings and get played out differently, especially in the digital space. Crime in digital space took a very different meaning to me after having read A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell. I especially realised how the digital space is not so neutral after all. It is gendered, in several ways and at several levels.

A change in framework also meant that I had to rethink my research methods. Even though I stuck to my original methodology of conducting an online survey, in-depth interviews and observing online spaces used by the youth from the queer community; I had to ask different questions and read the answers differently. What especially changed was my observation of the online spaces. I tried to look at how the queer community used the cyber space differently from other people and how they negotiated and played out their identities within it. I tried to look at it by putting the digital world at the centre rather than the physical world. I tried to understand that the digital self is an entity in itself. Hence the end product of the research was that I no longer looked at the digital self as a disembodied entity. As a result I did not just look at how the individuals ‘used’ the digital space to do queer politics but tried to explore how the queerness of the digital space enables individuals to do politics itself.

Several questions still remain unanswered. There are several questions I would still like to explore more deeply; the idea of embodiment in the digital space being one of them.

As a person identifying queer, I started looking at my own existence and negotiations in the cyberspace in a more complicated manner. Things I did unconsciously became a conscious and reflective process which I engaged in more actively. If our everyday life and existence is a performance, the digital can take this performance to another level all together. My experience of working on digital humanities made me rethink queer politics differently all together.

This short research study has indeed been one of the most intensive and thought provoking exercises. It has certainly redefined my idea of queer politics. And having gotten hooked to the field, as I reflect more on the process, new questions and new ways of thinking keep emerging. Bringing the world of the digital and the humanities together could perhaps even help us envisage the society we live in, in a very different way.

Ditilekha Sharma is an M.Phil Scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research study was part of a series of projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See here for more on this initiative.

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

‘Doing’ Digital Humanities: Reflections on a project on Online Feminism in India

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:48:16Z

A core concern of Digital Humanities research has been that of method. The existing discourse around the field of DH assumes a move away from traditional humanities and social sciences research methods to more open, collaborative and iterative forms of scholarship spanning some conventional and other not so conventional practices and spaces. In this guest blog post, Sujatha Subramanian reflects upon her experience of undertaking a research study on online feminist activism in India and its various challenges.

When the chance to do a research project on Digital Humanities presented itself, I deliberated over the possible topics I could explore. As a student of Media and Cultural Studies, I have on previous occasions studied digital technology and online spaces. Those studies, however, were simply “social sciences” research. I had little understanding of what Digital Humanities as a discipline entailed. While I admit that I am still unable to come up with a concrete definition of the same, the process of conducting the research and the DH workshop organised at CIS led to some clarity about the field and methods of Digital Humanities.

Before beginning the research I asked myself what could I, a feminist media scholar, learn from Digital Humanities and how could I contribute to the same. I wondered if the lack of familiarity with technological skills such as design, statistics and coding- knowledge that I saw as prerequisite to Digital Humanities- meant that I couldn’t really engage with the field of Digital Humanities. While grappling with this question, I chanced upon the #TransformDH project. At the heart of the project is the question- “How can digital humanities benefit from more diverse critical paradigms, including race/ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies?” [1]

In a blogpost titled “Queer Studies and the Digital Humanities”,[2] the author states,

"...a lot of queer/critical ethnic studies/similar scholars also lack access to the resources that make it easier to combine digital and humanities work. That might not only mean physical access and training in technology, but also the time to add yet another interdisciplinary element to a project...my experience suggests that many, many politicized queers and people of color engaged in scholarly work in and out of the academy do use digital tools and think critically about them and even create them; they just don’t necessarily do so under the sign of the digital humanities."

As someone who used the space of Facebook to initiate conversations around feminist issues and was actively engaged in fighting the sexism entrenched in social media spaces, was I then already “doing” digital humanities? I reflected that since feminist activism finds such little space in mainstream media, a worthwhile Digital Humanities project could be to document and archive the contemporary feminist movement and the ways in which it is transforming our understanding of the digital space. As part of the project, I explored how feminist activists have revolutionised digital spaces for the creation of alternative public spheres, constituted of not just women but also other marginalised communities. The project gave me the opportunity to study the inclusions and exclusions facilitated by the digital space, with questions of gender, sexuality, class, caste and disability as central to the enquiry. The project also raised questions regarding popular assumptions of digital space as a disembodied, liberatory space free of power relations by exploring gendered and sexualised violence that these feminist activists face.

While the political vision of my project was clear, my methodological skills needed a little honing. The DH workshop organised at CIS was of great help in this regard. The feedback received at the workshop was instrumental in recognising the importance of “big data”. As a feminist researcher, life histories, personal narratives and stories remain important sources of knowledge for me. However, in studying social movements and their impact, the limitations of such methodological tools are revealed. Understanding how a feminist activist with 11,000 followers on Twitter offers important insight into public discourse is contingent on the ability to analyse such data. The workshop also helped me in realising that in my definition of activism, I had precluded many feminist engagements with digital technology, including the efforts of feminist Wikipedians, feminist gamers and feminist encounters with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). While these remain the shortcomings of my project, the workshop helped in foregrounding the scope for collaboration that lies at the heart of all our projects. A discussion of my project alongside Ditilekha’s project on LGBT Youth and Digital Citizenship brought to fore the intersections as well as the different activist strategies employed by the two movements in their use of social media. Sohnee’s project on the gender gap on Wikipedia underlines that an important aspect of working towards a feminist epistemology, and changing the relations of power that characterise technology, are issues of access and participation. Rimi’s use of a text mining tool to analyse the different patterns of language on confessions pages highlighted the value of such technological tools in socio-cultural analysis. The workshop which brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, helped in highlighting shared concerns of methodology, content and political visions and prompted discussions on innovative approaches to conducting research. This attempt at collaborative knowledge production- whether it is the constant communication between the research scholars through email, the workshop with the scholars and the mentors or even the dissemination of our reports on an open access site- has been the essence of my engagement with Digital Humanities. The ethos of collaboration as central to Digital Humanities is reflected in Joan Shaffer’s definition of Digital Humanities as “...a community interested in collaborative projects and sharing knowledge across disciplines." [3] This ethos of learning from fellow researchers and working together to create accessible knowledge is something that I shall carry forward to my future research endeavours.

[1]. http://transformdh.org/2012/01/

[2]. http://www.queergeektheory.org/2011/10/conference-thoughts-queer-studies-and-the-digital-humanities/

[3]. http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/members/echoln/profile/

Sujatha Subramanian is an M.Phil. Scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research study was part of a series of six projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See here for more on this initiative.

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

#CultureForAll Conference on Cultural Mapping

sneha — 2021-09-20T15:18:02Z

Sahapedia is organising the #CultureForAll Conference on Cultural Mapping, digitally on September 28 and 29, 2021. The conference will take place in collaboration with the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Azim Premji University, the Centre for Internet and Society, and the Re-Centring Afro Asia project at the University of Cape Town.

Cross-posted from Sahapedia

Featuring 15 papers across 4 sessions, the conference will present research primarily from South Asia with some papers discussing experimental mapping techniques in Africa and Europe. Sessions will be chaired by academicians from among our collaborators and promise to interrogate, discuss, and reflect upon the complex questions of who, what, how, and for whom to map culture. Speakers at the conference will present work ranging from literature in Nagaland and food in Goa to music in South Africa and architecture in Delhi. They include researchers in history, literature, and music, as well as architects and educators.

The conference will be held on Zoom. Register here: https://bit.ly/2X4XAap
For the schedule and more details, visit https://www.sahapedia.org/conferences
The Cultural Mapping Conference is part of the ongoing #CultureForAll (CFA) festival by Sahapedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/culture-for-all-conference-on-cultural-mapping