The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 11 to 25.
Call for Contributions and Reflections: Your experiences in Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages!
https://cis-india.org/raw/stil-2020-call
<b>Whose Knowledge?, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Centre for Internet and Society are creating a State of the Internet’s Languages report, as baseline research with both numbers and stories, to demonstrate how far we are from making the internet multilingual. We also hope to offer some possibilities for doing more to create the multilingual internet we want. This research needs the experiences and expertise of people who think about these issues of language online from different perspectives. Read the Call here and share your submission by September 2, 2019.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: <a href="https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/" target="_blank">Call for Contributions and Reflections</a></h4>
<p>The call is available in <a href="https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/#CIS-AR" target="_blank">Arabic</a>, <a href="https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/#CIS-PT" target="_blank">Brazilian Portuguese</a>, <a href="#en">English</a>, <a href="https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/#CIS-IZ" target="_blank">IsiZulu</a>, <a href="https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/#CIS-ES" target="_blank">Spanish</a>, and <a href="#ta">Tamil</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> This call for contributions is in a few languages right now, but we invite our friends and communities to translate into many more! Please reach out to info (at) whoseknowledge (dot) org with your translations… thank you!</p>
<hr />
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cis-india/website/master/img/CISraw_WK-OII_DTIL-banner2.png" alt="Call for Contributions and Reflections: Your experiences in Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages!" />
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<h4 id="en">“It’s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It’s too beautiful for English to explain.”</h4>
– Potawatomi elder, cited in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.”</blockquote>
<p><strong>The problem:</strong> The internet we have today is not multilingual enough to reflect the full depth and breadth of humanity. Language is a good proxy for, or way to understand, knowledge – different languages can represent different ways of knowing and learning about our worlds. Yet most online knowledge today is created and accessible only through colonial languages, and mostly English. The UNESCO Report on ‘<a href="https://unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentViewer.xhtml?v=2.1.196&id=p::usmarcdef_0000232743&file=/in/rest/annotationSVC/DownloadWatermarkedAttachment/attach_import_8df09604-0040-4b44-b53c-110207ac407d%3F_%3D232743eng.pdf&locale=en&multi=true&ark=/ark:/48223/pf0000232743/PDF/232743eng.pdf#685_15_CI_EN_int.indd%3A.7579%3A23" target="_blank">A Decade of Promoting Multilingualism in Cyberspace</a>’ (2015) estimated that “out of the world’s approximately 6,000 languages, just 10 of them make up 84.3 percent of people using the Internet, with English and Chinese the dominant languages, accounting for 52 per cent of Internet users worldwide.” More languages become endangered and disappear every year; <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/atlas-of-languages-in-danger/" target="_blank">230 languages have become extinct between 1950 and 2010</a>.</p>
<p>At best, then, 7% of the world’s <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics" target="_blank">languages</a> are captured in published material, and an even smaller fraction of these languages are available online. This is particularly critical for communities who have been historically or currently marginalized by power and privilege – women, people of colour, LGBT*QIA folks, indigenous communities, and others marginalized from the global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific Islands). We often cannot add or access knowledge in our own languages on the internet. This reinforces and deepens inequalities and invisibilities that already exist offline, and denies all of us the richness of the multiple knowledges of the world.</p>
<p>Some of the issues that shape our abilities to create and share content online in our languages include:</p>
<ul>
<li>The internet’s infrastructure (hardware, software, platforms, protocols…);</li>
<li>Content management tools and technologies for translation, digitization, and archiving (voice, machine-learning systems and AI, semantic web…);</li>
<li>The experience of those who consume and produce information online in different languages (devices like cell phones and laptops, messaging tools, micro-blogging, audio-video…);</li>
<li>The experience of looking for content in different languages online, through search engines and other tools.</li></ul>
<p>Understanding the range of these issues will help us map the possibilities and concerns around linguistic biases and disparities on the internet.</p>
<p><strong>Who we are:</strong> We are a group of three research partners who believe that the internet we co-create should support, share, and amplify knowledge in all of the world’s languages. For this to happen, we need to better understand the challenges and opportunities that support or prevent our languages and knowledges from being online. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The <a href="https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Oxford Internet Institute</a> is a multidisciplinary research and teaching department of the University of Oxford, dedicated to the social science of the Internet. <a href="https://whoseknowledge.org/" target="_blank">Whose Knowledge?</a> is a global campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalized communities – the majority of the world – online.</p>
<p>Together we are creating a State of the Internet’s Languages report, as baseline research with both numbers and stories, to demonstrate how far we are from making the internet multilingual. We also hope to offer some possibilities for doing more to create the multilingual internet we want.</p>
<p><strong>Why we need YOU:</strong> This research needs the experiences and expertise of people who think about these issues of language online from different perspectives.</p>
<p>You may be a person who:</p>
<ul>
<li>Self-identifies as being from a marginalized community, and you find it difficult to bring your community’s knowledge online because the technology to display your language’s script is hard to access or read</li>
<li>Works on creating content in languages that are from parts of the world, and from people, who are mostly invisible and unheard online</li>
<li>Is a techie who works on making keyboards for non-colonial languages</li>
<li>Is a linguist who tries to bring together communities and technologies in a way that is easy and accessible</li>
<li>... you may be any of these, all of these, or more!</li></ul>
<p>We are looking for your experience online to help us tell the story of how limited the language capacities of the internet are, currently, and how much opportunity there is for making the internet share our knowledges in our many different languages. Most importantly: you don’t have to be an academic or researcher to apply, we particularly encourage people experiencing these issues in their everyday lives and work to contribute!</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Some of the key questions we’d like you to explore:</h3>
<ul>
<li>How are you or your community using your language online?</li>
<li>What do you wish you could create or share in your language online that you can’t today?</li>
<li>What does content in your language look like online? What exists, what’s missing? (<em>you might think about, for example, news, social media, education or government websites, e-commerce, entertainment, online libraries and archives, self-published content, etc</em>)</li>
<li>How and where and using what technologies do you share or create content in your language? (<em>you might think about, for example, video, audio, writing, social media, digitization…whatever formats, tools, processes or websites you use for creating oral, visual, textual, or other forms of content</em>.)</li>
<li>What is challenging to create or share on your language online? (<em>you might think about, for example, access, device usability, platforms, websites, apps and other tools, software, fonts, digital literacy, etc when developing digital archives, online language resources, or just making any presence on the web in general for your language</em>.)</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h3>Submissions:</h3>
<p>We would love to hear about your and your community’s experiences in response to any or some of the above questions!</p>
<p>Your contribution could be in the form of a written essay, a visualization or work of art, a video or recorded conversation – we’d be happy to interview you if that’s your preference. We would be happy to accept in any language, and will review the submissions with the support of our multilingual communities and friends.</p>
<p>Are you interested in participating? Please email <strong>raw [at] cis-india [dot] org</strong> a short note (of about 300 words) by <strong>2 September at 23:59 IST (Indian Standard Time)</strong>, briefly outlining your idea along with the following information:</p>
<ul>
<li>Your name</li>
<li>Your location – both country of origin and your current location is useful!</li>
<li>Your language(s)</li>
<li>Your community or any other background you’d care to share with us</li>
<li>Which questions you’re interested in addressing, and why</li>
<li>Your prefered contribution format</li>
<li>Any requests for how we can best support your participation</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h3>Timeline:</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>By 2nd September 2019:</strong> Send us your submission note</li>
<li><strong>By 1st November 2019:</strong> Contributors will be notified of selection</li>
<li><strong>By 1st December 2019:</strong> First round of contributions are due. We’ll work with you to finalise contributions by mid January.</li></ul>
<p>Selected contributors will be offered an honorarium of USD 500, and their final works will be published as part of the Decolonising the Internet – Languages Report, in early 2020.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="ta">பங்களிப்பதற்காக அழைப்பு இணைய மொழி ஆதிக்கச் சூழலை மாற்றியதில் உங்கள்அனுபவம்!</h2>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<h4>“மொழி அழிவால் சொற்கள் மட்டும் அழிவதில்லை. நம் பண்பாட்டின் சாரமே மொழி தான். மொழியே நம் எண்ணங்களை வெளிப்படுத்துகிறது. இவ்வுலகத்தை நாம் காண்பதும் மொழிவழியே தான். ஆங்கிலத்தால் அதை ஒருக்காலும் வெளிப்படுத்த முடியாது.”</h4>
– போட்டோவாடோமி எல்டர் (ராபின் வால் கிம்மெரார் எழுதிய ‘பிரெயிடிங் சுவீட்கிராஸ்’ என்ற நூலில் இருந்து)</blockquote>
<p><strong>சிக்கல்:</strong> மனித குலத்தின் பரந்துவிரிந்த பண்பாட்டுச் சூழலை வெளிப்படுத்தும் அளவுக்கு இன்றைய இணையம் பன்மொழிச் சூழல் கொண்டதாய் இல்லை. தகவல்களை அறிந்துகொள்வதற்கு மொழி ஒரு கருவியாய் இருக்கிறது. ஒவ்வொரு மொழியும் உலகத்தை வெவ்வேறுவிதத்தில் காட்டத்தக்கன. இருந்தபோதும், பெரும்பாலான அறிவுசார் தளங்கள் ஆதிக்க மொழிகளில், குறிப்பாக ஆங்கிலத்தில் அதிகளவில் இருக்கின்றன. ‘இணையவெளியில் பன்மொழிச் சூழலைக் ஊக்குவிக்க பத்தாண்டுகளில் எடுத்த முயற்சி’ (2015) என்ற யுனெசுகோ அறிக்கையில் குறிப்பிட்டுள்ளதாவது: “உலகில் பேசப்படும் சுமார் 6,000 மொழிகளில், வெறும் 10 மொழியை பேசுவோர் மட்டுமே இணையத்தின் 84.3 சதவீதம் பேராக உள்ளனர். இவற்றில், ஆங்கிலமும் மாண்டரின் சீனமும் பேசுவோர் மட்டும் 52 சதவீதத்தினர் என்பது குறிப்பிடத்தக்கது.” ஒவ்வொரு ஆண்டும் அதிகளவிலான மொழிகள் அருகி, அழிந்து வருகின்றன. 1950 – 2010 ஆகிய ஆண்டுகளுக்குள் 230 மொழிகள் அழிந்திருக்கின்றன</p>
<p>எல்லா உள்ளடக்கத்தையும் கணக்கில் எடுத்தால் கூட, உலகின் 7% மொழிகளில் தான் ஆக்கங்கள் இருக்கின்றன. இவற்றில் சிலவே இணையத்தில் கிடைக்கின்றன. முற்காலத்தில் ஒடுக்கப்பட்டிருந்த பழங்குடியின சமூகத்தினர், அடக்குமுறைக்கு உட்பட்டிருந்த பெண்கள், நிறவெறிக்கு உட்பட்டிருந்தோர், மாற்று பாலின கருத்தியல் கொன்டோர் ஆகியோருக்கான ஆக்கங்கள் வெகு சில. பெரும்பாலானோர் இணையத்தில் தம் தாய்மொழியில் தகவல்களை தேடிப் பெற முடிவதில்லை. தம் மொழியில் கிடைக்கப்பெறாத பெரும்பாலானோருக்கு இவ்வுலகைப் பற்றிய அறிவுசார் ஆக்கங்கள் மறுக்கப்பட்டு, சமமின்மை வெளிப்படுகிறது.</p>
<p>நம் மொழியிலேயே இணையத்தில் ஆக்கங்களை உருவாக்குவதிலும் பகிர்வதிலும் சில சிக்கல்களை எதிர்நோக்குகிறோம். அவை:</p>
<ul>
<li>கட்டமைப்பு வசதிக் குறைபாடு : வன்பொருள், மென்பொருள், இயங்குதளம், மரபுத்தகவு</li>
<li>உள்ளடக்க மேம்பாட்டுக் கருவிகளும் தொழில்நுட்பங்களும் போதிய அளவில் இல்லாமை: மொழிபெயர்ப்புக் கருவி, மின்மயமாக்கக் கருவி, சேமிப்பகம், செயற்கை நுண்ணறிவு, குரல்வழி உள்ளடக்கம்</li>
<li>இணையத்தில் பொருட்களை வாங்கிப் பயன்படுத்துவோரின் கருத்துக்களோ, பொருட்களைப் பற்றிய தகவலோ, இணையச் செயலிகளான செய்தியனுப்பல், வலைப்பூ போன்றவையோ தம் மொழியில் இல்லாமை</li>
<li>தேடுபொறிகளையும் பிற கருவிகளையும் கொன்டு வெவ்வேறு மொழிகளில் ஆக்கங்களைத் தேடிப் பழக்கம் இல்லாமை</li></ul>
<p>இச்சிக்கல்களைப் புரிந்துகொள்வதன் மூலம், இணையத்தின் பன்மொழிச் சூழலுக்கான தேவைகளையும் அவற்றிற்கான குறைநிறைகளையும் சரிப்படுத்திக்கொள்ள முடியும்.</p>
<p><strong>நாங்கள் யார்?:</strong> உலக மொழிகளிலான ஆக்கங்கள் இணையவெளியில் இடம்பெற உதவவும், ஊக்குவிக்கவும் மூன்று ஆய்வு நிறுவனங்கள் கைகோர்த்துள்ளோம். இதை நடைமுறைப்படுத்துவதற்கு முன், நாம் எதிர்கொள்ளும் சிக்கல்களையும் பெறக்கூடிய வாய்ப்புகளையும் நன்கு அறிந்துகொள்வது அவசியம் என உணர்ந்தோம்.</p>
<p>1. சென்டர் ஃபார் இன்டர்நெட் அன்ட் சொசைட்டி (the Centre for Internet and Society or CIS) என்ற தன்னார்வல நிறுவனம், இணையத்தையும், மின்மயமாக்கத் தொழில்நுட்பங்களையும் பற்றிய ஆய்வுகளை கொள்கை நோக்கிலும், கல்விசார் நோக்கிலும் செய்கிறது. உடற்குறைபாடு உடையோருக்கு மின்மயமாக்கிய உள்ளடக்கம், அறிவைப் பெறும் சூழல், அறிவுசார் சொத்துரிமை, திறந்தவெளி ஆக்கங்கள், இணையவழி ஆளுகை, தொழில்நுட்பச் சீர்திருத்தம், இணையவெளியில் தனியுரிமை, இணையவெளிப் பாதுகாப்பு போன்ற தலைப்புகளில் இந்நிறுவனம் கவனம் செலுத்துகிறது.</p>
<p>2. ஆக்சுபோர்டு இன்டர்நெட் இன்ஸ்டிடியூட் என்ற ஆய்வு நிறுவனம் ஆக்சுபோர்டு பல்கலைக்கழகத்தைச் சேர்ந்தது. இது இணையச் சமூகத்துக்காகவே தனித்துவமாக உருவாக்கப்பட்ட துறை.</p>
<p>3. ஹூஸ் நாலெட்ஜ் என்ற இயக்கம், உலகளவில் ஒடுக்கப்பட்ட சமூகங்களின் அறிவுசார் ஆக்கங்களை இணையவெளியில் கொண்டு வர முயற்சி எடுக்கிறது.</p>
<p>நாங்கள் மூவரும் இணைந்து, இணையத்தில் பயன்பாட்டிலுள்ள மொழிகளைப் பற்றிய ஆய்வறிக்கையை தயாரிக்கிறோம். புள்ளிவிவரங்களையும், தகவல்களையும் வெளியிட்டு, பன்மொழிச் சூழலில் எந்தளவு பின்தங்கி இருக்கிறோம் என்பதை உணர்த்த உள்ளோம். இணையவெளியில் ஆக்கங்களை வெளியிட எங்களால் முடிந்த சில வாய்ப்புகளையும் வழங்க உள்ளோம்.</p>
<p><strong>உங்கள் உதவி எங்களுக்கு தேவைப்படுவதன் காரணம்:</strong> இத்தகைய சிக்கல்களை எதிர்நோக்கி வருவோரின் அனுபவங்களையும், அவர்கள் முயன்ற தீர்வுகளையும் பற்றி அறிந்துகொள்வதே இவ்வாய்வின் நோக்கம்.</p>
<p>நீங்கள்,</p>
<ul>
<li>ஒடுக்கப்பட்ட சமூகத்தைச் சேர்ந்தவராக உணர்ந்தாலோ, உங்கள் சமூகத்தின் அறிவுசார் உள்ளடக்கங்கள் இணையவெளியில் கிடைப்பதில்லை என்று கருதினாலோ, உங்கள் மொழி எழுத்துவடிவங்கள் அணுகவும், படிக்கவும் ஏற்றவகையில் கணினிமயமாக்கப்படவில்லை என்று உணர்ந்தாலோ,</li>
<li>தொழில்நுட்பராக இருந்து, ஆதிக்கத்துக்கு உட்பட்டோரின் மொழிகளுக்காக விசைப்பலகைகள் செய்பவராக இருந்தாலோ,</li>
<li>மொழியியலாளராக இருந்து, பல்வேறு சமூகங்களை ஒருங்கிணைத்து, தொழில்நுட்பத்தை அவர்களுக்கு புரியும் வகையிலும், அணுகும் வகையிலும் கிடைக்கச் செய்தாலோ,</li>
<li>… உங்களைத் தான் தேடிக் கொன்டிருக்கிறோம்!</li></ul>
<p>உங்கள் இணையவெளி அனுபவங்களை எங்களுக்கு தெரிவிப்பதன் மூலம், ஒவ்வொரு மொழிச் சமூகத்தின் நிலையையும் நாங்கள் அறிந்துகொள்ள உதவியாக இருக்கும். அத்துடன், எத்தகைய வாய்ப்புகளை ஏற்படுத்தித் தரலாம் என்றும் நாங்கள் சிந்திக்க உதவியாய் இருக்கும்.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>உங்களிடம் நாங்கள் கேட்க விரும்பும் சில கேள்விகள்:</h3>
<ul>
<li>நீங்களும், உங்கள் மொழிச் சமூகத்தினரும் இணையவெளியில் உங்கள் மொழியை எப்படி பயன்படுத்துகிறீர்கள்?</li>
<li>இன்றைய நிலையில், இணையவெளியில் உங்கள் மொழியைக் கொண்டு செய்ய முடியாதது இருப்பின், அதற்கு என்ன செய்ய விரும்புவீர்கள்?</li>
<li>இணையவெளியில் உங்கள் மொழியில் என்னென்ன ஆக்கங்கள் இருக்கின்றன, எவை இல்லை? (எடுத்துக்காட்டாக, செய்திகள், சமுக வலைத்தளம், கல்விசார் உள்ளடக்கம், அரசுசார் உள்ளடக்கம், மனமகிழ் வீடியோக்கள், இணையவழி கற்றல், போன்றவை)</li>
<li>உங்கள் மொழியில் ஆக்கங்களை படைப்பதற்கு எந்த தளத்தை நாடுவீர்கள், எந்த தொழில்நுட்பத்தை பயன்படுத்துவீர்கள்? (எ.கா : ஒளி, ஒலி, உரை, உரைநடை ஒழுங்கமைவு, பிழைத்திருத்திக் கருவி போன்றவை)</li>
<li>உங்கள் மொழியில் எழுதுவதற்கோ, பகிர்வதற்கோ முயலும் போது என்னென்ன மாதிரியான சிக்கல்களை இணையவெளியில் சந்திக்கிறீர்கள்? (எ.கா: அணுக்கம் இன்மை, கருவியில் எழுத்துரு ஆதரவின்மை, பிழை திருத்த கருவி இன்மை)</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h3>ஆய்வேடு சமர்ப்பித்தல்:</h3>
<p>மேற்கண்ட கேள்விகளுக்கு உங்கள் சமூகத்தினரிடமும், உங்களிடமும் அனுபவம் மூலம் விடை கிடைத்திருக்கும் என நம்புகிறோம். அவற்றைப் பற்றி தெரிந்து கொள்ள விரும்புகிறோம்!</p>
<p>கட்டுரையாகவோ, கலைப்படைப்பாகவோ, பதிவு செய்யப்பட்ட ஆவணமாகவோ, வேறு வடிவிலோ உங்கள் படைப்புகள் இருக்கலாம். நீங்கள் விரும்பினால் உங்களை பேட்டி காணவும் தயாராக இருக்கிறோம். உங்கள் படைப்புகள் எந்த மொழியில் இருந்தாலும் ஏற்போம். எங்களிடமுள்ள பன்மொழிச் சமூகத்திடம் உங்கள் படைப்புகளை கொடுத்து அவற்றை சீராய்வு செய்யச் சொல்வோம்.</p>
<p>உங்களுக்கு பங்கேற்க விருப்பமா? raw@cis-india.org என்ற மின்னஞ்சல் முகவரிக்கு, செப்டம்பர் இரன்டாம் தேதிக்கு முன்னர் அனுப்புக. 300 சொற்களுக்கு மிகாமல், கீழ்க்காணும் விவரங்களைக்</p>
<ul>
<li>உங்கள் பெயர்</li>
<li>இருப்பிடம் – பிறந்த நாடும், தற்போது வாழும் நாடும்</li>
<li>உங்கள் மொழி(கள்)</li>
<li>உங்கள் சமூகத்தினரைப் பற்றிய தகவல் (அ) நீங்கள் விரும்பும் சமூகத்தினரைப் பற்றிய தகவல்</li>
<li>எந்தெந்த கேள்விகளுக்கு பதிலளிக்க விரும்புகிறீர்கள், ஏன்</li>
<li>உங்கள் படைப்பு எந்த வடிவில் உள்ளது</li>
<li>உங்கள் பங்களிப்பை மேம்படுத்தல் நாங்கள் ஏதும் செய்ய வேண்டுமா</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h3>காலகட்டம்:</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>2 செப்டம்பர், 2019:</strong> உங்கள் படைப்புகள் எங்களை வந்தடைய வேண்டிய கடைசி நாள்</li>
<li><strong>1 நவம்பர், 2019:</strong> தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்ட படைப்பாளர்களிடம் விவரம் தெரிவிக்கப்படும் நாள்</li>
<li><strong>1 திசம்பர், 2019:</strong> முதற்கட்ட பங்களிப்பு நடைபெறும். பங்களிப்பை ஜனவரி மாத மத்தியில் முடிக்க முயற்சி செய்வோம்.</li></ul>
<p>தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்ட படைப்பாளிகளுக்கு 500 அமெரிக்க டாலர்கள் ஊக்கத்தொகையாக வழங்கப்படும். நாங்கள் தயாரிக்கும் அறிக்கையில் அவர்களின் படைப்பு வெளியிடப்படும்.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/stil-2020-call'>https://cis-india.org/raw/stil-2020-call</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppLanguageResearchResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeDecolonizing the Internet's LanguagesFeaturedState of the Internet's LanguagesDigital HumanitiesHomepage2019-08-07T12:29:25ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities Alliance of India - Inagural Conference 2018 - Keynote by Puthiya Purayil Sneha
https://cis-india.org/raw/dhai-inagural-conference-2018-puthiya-purayil-sneha-keynote
<b>The inaugural conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) was held at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore on June 1-2, 2018. The event was co-organised by the IIM and the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, with support from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Puthiya Purayil Sneha was a keynote speaker at the event. Her talk was titled ‘New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital’. Drawing upon excerpts from a study on mapping digital humanities initiatives in India, and ongoing conversations on digital cultural archiving practices, the keynote address discussed some pertinent concerns in the field, particularly with respect to the growth of digital corpora and its intersections with teaching learning practices in arts and humanities, including the need to locate these efforts within the context of the emerging digital landscape in India, and its implications for humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Tweets from the Conference: <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/dhai2018?f=tweets&vertical=default" target="_blank">#DHAI2018</a></h4>
<p>The above photograph of Sneha presenting at the Conference is courtesy of <a href="https://twitter.com/meldelury/status/1002760287223549952">Melissa DeLury</a>.</p>
<hr />
<h3><strong>Abstract of the Keynote</strong></h3>
<p>The discourse around the field of digital humanities in India has emerged at an interesting and crucial juncture, where the ‘digital’ has been the focal point of several changes in governance, policy, industry, education and creative practice among other areas over the last couple of decades. Even as the field has garnered much interest globally, it has also invited criticism, especially due to its largely Anglo-American framing, which traces a history in humanities computing and textual studies, located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. Now with increasing efforts to address issues of representation and diversity in emerging digital initiatives, it is imperative to trace where efforts within India have been speaking to these concerns within the global discourse as well.
In India, as with several parts of the world, a large part of the work and scholarship around digital humanities, as we have seen so far has centered around two key processes/concepts - that of digitization, or the creation of a corpora of cultural content, enabled by the availability of the internet and digital technologies, and the need for new methods and tools to work with or study them. These conversations have largely organized around two thematic areas of work within digital humanities and related digital practices - namely the creation of digital corpora in the form of archives and repositories, and the advancement of digital technologies and methods of research, or more specifically through the development of digital pedagogies. Drawing upon excerpts from a study on mapping digital humanities initiatives in India, and ongoing conversations on digital cultural archiving practices, this talk discussed some pertinent concerns in the field, particularly with respect to the growth of digital corpora and its intersections with teaching learning practices in arts and humanities, including the need to locate these efforts within the context of the emerging digital landscape in India, and its implications for humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy.</p>
<h3><strong>Conference Agenda</strong></h3>
<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_About.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - About" class="image-inline image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - About" /></div>
<div> </div>
<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day1.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1" class="image-left image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1" /></div>
<div> </div>
<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day12.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1+2" class="image-left image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - Day 1+2" /></div>
<div> </div>
<div><img src="https://cis-india.org/DHAIConf2018_Day2.jpg/image" alt="DHAIConf2018 - Day 2" class="image-left image-inline" title="DHAIConf2018 - Day 2" /></div>
<div> </div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/dhai-inagural-conference-2018-puthiya-purayil-sneha-keynote'>https://cis-india.org/raw/dhai-inagural-conference-2018-puthiya-purayil-sneha-keynote</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDHAIDigital KnowledgeResearchDigital ScholarshipDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2018-06-26T12:02:09ZBlog EntryNew Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital (Paper)
https://cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper
<b>The ubiquitous presence of the ‘digital’ over the couple of decades has brought with it several important changes in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. Particularly in the arts and humanities, the role of digital technologies and internet has always been a rather contentious one, with more debate spurred now due to the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics. Even as these fields signal several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, portending a futuristic imagination of the role of technology in academia and practice on the one hand, they also reflect continuing challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines. A specific criticism within more recent debates around the origin story of DH in fact, has been its Anglo-American framing, drawing upon a history in humanities computing and textual studies, and located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. While this has been met with resistance from across different spaces, thus calling for more diversity and representation in the discourse, it is also reflective of the need to trace and contextualize more local forms of practice and pedagogy in the digital as efforts to address these global concerns. This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha draws upon excerpts from a study on the field of DH and related practices in India, to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice with the advent of the digital and explore the developing discourse around DH in the Indian context.</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This essay was published in <a href="http://iias.ac.in/ojs/index.php/summerhill/article/view/116" target="_blank">Vol 22 No 1 (2016): SummerHill</a>, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Edited by Dr. Bindu Menon. Download the essay <a href="http://iias.ac.in/ojs/index.php/summerhill/article/view/116/99" target="_blank">here</a> (PDF).</p>
<hr />
<h3><strong>Abstract</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The last couple of decades have seen an increasing prevalence of digital technologies and internet in the study and practice of arts and humanities. With the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics, there has been a renewed interest in the increasing role of the ‘digital’ in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. DH in particular has become a field of much interest and debate in different parts of the world, including in India. Globally, in the last two decades, there have been several efforts to organize the discourse around this field which seeks to explore various intersections between humanities and digital methods, spaces and tools1. But DH also continues to remain a bone of contention, with several perspectives on what exactly constitutes its methodology and scope, and most importantly its epistemological stake.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">A specific criticism has been the Anglo-American framing of DH, located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and the higher education system at large. As a result, the connection of these two threads—a history of DH located in humanities computing and textual studies and its contextualization within the American university—is often represented as the history of DH. This has been met with resistance from several scholars and practitioners across the world calling for more global perspectives on the field. Drawing upon excerpts from a recently completed study on mapping the field of DH and related practices in India, this essay will attempt to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice emerging with the digital turn, along with a reading of some of the global debates around DH to understand the discourse around the field in the Indian context.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper'>https://cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeResearchFeaturedPublicationsDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2019-12-06T05:03:33ZBlog EntryResearch Symposium on Digital Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries in India, New Delhi, Feb 27-28
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018
<b>It is our privilege to collaborate with LabEx ICCA (Université Paris 13), UNESCO New Delhi, Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), and Centre d'études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS), to organise a Research Symposium on Digital Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries in India. The symposium gathers researchers and practitioners engaging with the changing landscape of cultural and creative industries in India in the context of the rapid expansion of digital technologies and social media. We invite you to join us for a critical exploration of the prevalent discourse around cultural and creative industries, to identify what could be the different forms of digital creative and cultural industries developing in India, and how they problematise the questions of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity, and labour.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Venue: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/UNESCO+NEW+DELHI/@28.5962104,77.1766346,17z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x390d1d69e65aea35:0x95c8f02076400bf2!2sUNESCO+NEW+DELHI!8m2!3d28.5962104!4d77.1788233!3m4!1s0x390d1d69e65aea35:0x95c8f02076400bf2!8m2!3d28.5962104!4d77.1788233?hl=en" target="_blank">Conference Room, UNESCO New Delhi, 1 San Martin Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, 110021</a> (<em>Note: Please bring your identity document to enter the UNESCO premises</em>)</h4>
<h4>RSVP: Registration is closed</h4>
<h4>Booklet: <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/docs/labex-icca-cis-unesco_symposium-2018_booklet.pdf">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Programme: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/files/research-symposium-on-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-programme-2018/at_download/file">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Poster: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cis-india/website/master/img/labex-icca-cis-unesco_symposium-2018_poster.png">Download</a> (PNG)</h4>
<h4>Organisers: <a href="https://icca.univ-paris13.fr/" target="_blank">LabEx ICCA, Université Paris 13</a>, <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/newdelhi" target="_blank">UNESCO New Delhi</a>, <a href="http://csh-delhi.com/" target="_blank">Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH)</a>, <a href="http://ceias.ehess.fr/" target="_blank">Centre d'études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS)</a>, and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India</h4>
<hr />
<img src="digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018/leadImage" alt="Research Symposium on Digital Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries in India, New Delhi, Feb 27-28" width="50%" />
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Concept Note</strong></h3>
<p>Digital technologies involve, accompany and provoke changes in the structuring of industrial sectors. How are they more particularly transforming the creation, production, distribution processes in cultural and creative industries? What are reconfigurations and challenges associated with the rise in power of actors from the industries of communication and information? What are the new stakeholder strategies, economic models and power relationships involved? Does digital have the effect of empowering the smallest actors / self-employed / freelancers or on the contrary does it allow large players to relieve themselves of the promotion, production costs on individual creator?</p>
<p>A growing interest in fields such as digital humanities, new media, digital cultures and the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector is another important development here. The rise of a number of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practice, research and teaching has also brought up significantly the question of new skills or expertise required in these fields. The need for digital literacy and ‘re-skilling’ to adapt to new forms of arts and humanities practice in a digital environment has often come with much criticism, as it is viewed as an effort towards vocationalisation and professionalization of these disciplines, a result of the changing mandates of the university and higher education in general. How do we then productively engage with these questions of skill, expertise and labour that goes into the building of new digital industries, which are often located within and at the periphery of academia and creative practices? Importantly, how can concerns about a perceived conflict of creativity and industry be addressed as these transformations take place rapidly with the advent of the digital is an important point of focus.</p>
<p>A critical exploration of the prevalent discourse around creative industries would offer ways of identifying what could be the different forms of digital creative and cultural industries developing in India, and how they problematize for us questions of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity and labour. The conflation and overlap of both ‘cultural’ and ‘creative industries’ and the location of these terms within a larger discourse around policy, economic development, livelihoods and rights, takes on different dimensions post the digital turn. In the context of initiatives like Digital India, and efforts to consolidate an IPR regime, the implications of policy reforms for creative work, especially that performed within informal/underground economies and in the cultural heritage sector are many. These discussions would inform and draw from the ongoing efforts in fostering of a digital economy in India, and the many ways in which it determines cultural production in the rest of the world.</p>
<p>Topics that will be addressed at the symposium include, but are not restricted to:</p>
<p>- Digital turns and transformations in cultural and creative industries</p>
<p>- Media infrastructure, digital platforms, and changing landscape of actors</p>
<p>- Digital transitions in the Indian news industry</p>
<p>- Online/offline lives of creative industries and media consumption</p>
<p>Presented by the Labex ICCA and the Center for Internet and Society (CIS), the symposium will gather Indian, French, and international specialists in the cultural industries, new media and technology, information and communication sciences, and social sciences but also professionals and industrial actors in the cultural and artistic sectors. The event is driven an ambition to promote the creation of an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional Franco-Indian research network to initiate, develop and share research on cultural industries in India and more widely in South Asia.</p>
<h4>Organising Committee</h4>
<p>- Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA, Université Paris 13 / CSH)</p>
<p>- Philippe Bouquillion (LabEx ICCA, Université Paris 13)</p>
<p>- Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)</p>
<p>- Sumandro Chattapadhyay (The Centre for Internet and Society)</p>
<p>- Puthiya Purayil Sneha (The Centre for Internet and Society)</p>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Symposium Programme (Draft)</strong></h3>
<h4>First Day – Tuesday, February 27, 2018</h4>
<p>10:00-10:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>10:30-11:00<br />
<strong>Welcoming Address</strong><br />
<em>Snigdha Bisht (UNESCO Cultural Department)</em><br />
<strong>Introductions</strong><br />
<em>Shailendra Sigdel (UNESCO Institute for Statistics), Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA / CSH), and Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)</em></p>
<p>11:00-12:30<br />
<strong>Session 1: Digital Opportunities and Challenges in the Cultural Industries</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Tanishka Kachru (National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad), Akshaya Kumar (IIT Indore), and Vivan Sharan (KOAN Advisory)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA / CSH)</em></p>
<p>12:30-13:30<br />
<strong>Lunch</strong></p>
<p>13:30-15:00<br />
<strong>Session 2: Digital Transitions in the News Landscape</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Zeenab Aneez (Freelance Journalist), Ravichandran Bathran (Dalit Camera), and Franck Rebillard (University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle and Labex ICCA)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)</em></p>
<p>15:00-15:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>15:30-17:00<br />
<strong>Session 3: Technology, Creativity, and (Re)Skilling</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Padmini Ray Murray (Srishti School of Art Design and Technology), Sneha Raghavan (Asia Art Archive), and Xenia Zeiler (University of Helsinki)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Puthiya Purayil Sneha (The Centre for Internet and Society)</em></p>
<h4>Second Day – Wednesday, February 28, 2018</h4>
<p>10:00-10:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>10:30-12:30<br />
<strong>Session 4: Digital Platforms and Media Distribution</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Narendra Ganesh (KPMG), Mae Thomas (Maed in India), Philippe Bouquillion (Université Paris 13 / LabEx ICCA), and Nikhil Pahwa (Medianama)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Sumandro Chattapadhyay (The Centre for Internet and Society)</em></p>
<p>12:30-13:30<br />
<strong>Lunch</strong></p>
<p>13:30-15:00<br />
<strong>Session 5: Copyright, Creative Content, and Rights of Performers</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Nandita Saikia (Lawyer), Anubha Sinha (The Centre for Internet and Society), and Manojna Yeluri (Artistik License)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Neha Paliwal (Sahapedia)</em></p>
<p>15:00-15:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>15:30-17:00<br />
<strong>Session 6: Technologies of Aesthetic Imagi/nation</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Farrah Miranda (Artists), Rashmi Munikempanna (Artist), Swati Janu (Architect), and Tara Atluri (Writer, Researcher, Artist)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Tara Atluri (Writer, Researcher, Artist)</em></p>
<p>17:00-18:00<br />
<strong>Concluding Remarks</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA / CSH), Neha Paliwal (Sahapedia), Philippe Bouquillion (Université Paris 13 / LabEx ICCA), Puthiya Purayil Sneha (The Centre for Internet and Society), Tara Atluri (Writer, Researcher, Artist), and Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Sumandro Chattapadhyay (The Centre for Internet and Society)</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Location of Venue</strong></h3>
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d3503.1188754990826!2d77.17663461441647!3d28.596210382432034!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x390d1d69e65aea35%3A0x95c8f02076400bf2!2sUNESCO+NEW+DELHI!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sin!4v1518344368273" frameborder="0" height="450" width="600"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroDigital NewsRAW EventsDigital EconomyDigital KnowledgeDigital MediaCreative IndustriesResearchers at Work2018-02-26T11:04:24ZEventP.P. Sneha - Mapping Digital Humanities in India
https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india
<b>It gives us great pleasure to publish the second title of the CIS Papers series. This report by P.P. Sneha comes out of an extended research project supported by the Kusuma Trust. The study undertook a detailed mapping of digital practices in arts and humanities scholarship, both emerging and established, in India. Beginning with an understanding of Digital Humanities as a 'found term' in the Indian context, the study explores the discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. Further it inquires about the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today; transformations in the objects and methods of study and practice in these spaces; and the shifts in the imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and its linkages with humanities practices. </b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Download: <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/docs/CIS_Papers_2016.02_PP-Sneha.pdf">Mapping Digital Humanities in India</a> (PDF)</h4>
<hr />
<h2>Foreword</h2>
<p>What different forms do digital humanities (DH) research and expertise take around the world? My colleagues and I investigated this question for our report on <a href="https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168" target="_blank"><em>Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective</em></a>. In some places, we struggled to find resources on local practices in DH, but fortunately in India we could draw upon the excellent work of P.P. Sneha and the Centre for Internet and Society. In a series of insightful blog posts, Sneha explored the implications of technology for humanities scholarship and surveyed digital humanities practices in India.</p>
<p>Now Sneha has brought this work together in “Mapping Digital Humanities in India.” Rather than falling into naive boosterism or superficial critique, this report plumbs deep questions about humanistic knowledge in a digital age: What do we make of textuality in a digital environment? How might digital tools and platforms contribute to conflicts about authority? How does digital infrastructure affect how humanities research can be practiced? Sneha probes the complexities of these questions, drawing from theorists such as Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault as well as digital humanities scholars such as Franco Moretti and Patrik Svensson.</p>
<p>From this strong theoretical foundation, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” explores specific challenges and possibilities for DH in India, synthesizing rich interviews with a range of Indian scholars. Sneha notes that digital humanities is in an “incipient stage” in India, given the persistence of the digital divide in much of the country, the association of the term with a specific history in the Anglo-American context, and concerns about the uncritical embrace of technology. The report highlights several Indian projects that demonstrate how technology can be used to create and disseminate humanistic knowledge. Creating online resources in Indic languages poses challenges, especially inputting languages and translating between them. To create an online variorum of Nobel prize-winning author Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra had to develop a Bangla character set. Bichitra enables readers to collate texts at the level of the chapter/canto, paragraph/stanza or word. In the realm of film and video, Indiancine.ma (which archives Indian films from the pre-copyright period) and Pad.ma (which houses found and deposited audio, video, and allied materials) offer powerful annotation tools and open up the archive into a space
for interpretation and collaboration.</p>
<p>As digital humanities scholars attempt to move past a limited, Anglo-American perspective, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” provides a model for how we can understand local practices in DH and connect them to ongoing discussions about humanistic knowledge. Through this report, readers can navigate central issues in digital humanities, explore the Indian context, and critically examine culturally based assumptions about DH practices.</p>
<p><em>- <strong>Lisa Spiro</strong>, Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Rice University, Texas, USA</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>In the short time span that the term ‘digital humanities’ (henceforth DH) has been around in the Indian academic landscape, it had generated much discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship
and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. What are the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today? How has it transformed objects and
methods of study and practice in these spaces? What does it tell us about the relationship between the humanities and technology? Perhaps most importantly, what is our imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and how does it shape
our humanities practices?</p>
<p>These are but a few of the questions that this study on mapping key conversations and actors around the term DH tries to explore in some detail. While the study began as an attempt to understand the growing interest
around the term itself in India, its scope has extended to explore what specific contexts and conditions are in place in India that give it critical purchase. Five universities now offer various programmes in DH in India - ranging from a Master’s degree to certificate courses, and there have been several workshops, winter schools, seminars and one national level consultation over the last five years. Academic and applied practices focus on building of digital archives, film studies, game studies, textual studies, cultural heritage and critical making
to name just a few. While these efforts have managed to create a growing interest in DH, there is still a lack of consensus on what exactly constitutes the field in India. Thus, questions around definition, ontology, and method
remain pertinent, as does the need for recognition by the national academic bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Context is another important factor here - most global narratives of DH reiterate a predominantly Anglo-American narrative that draws from a history in the field of humanities computing, as well as a crisis in higher education,
particularly in the humanities and liberal arts. The efforts to map different histories of DH in the last couple of years, seen in the emergence of fields such as postcolonial DH and feminist DH, then point to diverse locations, and more intersectional perspectives from which the discourse around the field is being shaped. This is an important opportunity to better contextualise the debates around the digital as well – where conditions and hierarchies of access and usage, transition from analogue to the digital, and the notion of ‘digitality’ itself
need to be defined and understood better. In India, with initiatives such as the Digital India programme, and the increasing push for the adoption of digital technologies in every sphere from education to governance, and now a steady push towards a digital economy, there is already a tremendous amount of investment in the idea of the digital by a diverse group of stakeholders. These advancements, and the enthusiasm, must be read within the context of a rather chequered and uneven history of the growth of science and technology in India, the advent of the internet and adoption of ICT4D, and existence of digital divides at different levels. The changing higher education system in India, and criticism around a profit-driven model of education, along with the entry of a large number of private actors in the field in the form of MOOCs and other online platforms in the last few years also contribute to this growing interest in DH, as also much of its criticism. In fact, the global discourse on DH and its
linkages with shifts in government funding has seen increasingly polarized positions, with many humanities scholars being uncertain about the political or critical stake of the field, and a concern about the its focus on certain kinds of methods and skill sets at the expense of more traditional ones.</p>
<p>In India, the discourse around DH has largely remained within an academic context so far, although emerging creative practices in art, design and media may have been asking questions of a similar nature for some time now. These include efforts to understand changes in objects of enquiry from analogue to digitised and born digital artifacts, and the need for new methods of work and study that are necessitated by these new digital objects. The process of ‘digitisation’ itself is one fraught with several challenges, and demands a closer look – what are tools, resources and skills available for digitisation or creation of new digital cultural artifacts, and the context that facilitates their creation and active use in humanities research and practice. The ‘text’ as the
primary cultural artifact or object of enquiry in the humanities, has undergone several changes with digitisation. Working with digital texts that are fluid and networked, and most often in languages other than English bring forth
several new questions that are not only technological but also conceptual. The emergence of new digital cultural archives and online repositories, owing to the (marginally) increased access to internet and digital technologies and the growth of a culture that facilitates collecting and sharing, has greatly expanded the scope of engagement with these questions. The archive in fact forms a significant part of the discourse around DH in India - the challenges and prospects offered by digital cultural artifacts are quite diverse, ranging from modes of documentation, preservation and curation to dissemination over online spaces, and there is a need to understand these in greater detail. Infrastructure emerges as an important political and conceptual question here – while an interest in technological advancement and innovation, and the growth of a culture of free and open access to knowledge to some extent has helped facilitate work in the humanities at large, the lack of access to funding, expertise, and of course adequate, and advanced physical and technological infrastructure , such as computational methods often limits the kind of work that can be done with digital artifacts.</p>
<p>The implications of these changes for the study and practice of humanities are several, particularly with respect to traditional methods of pedagogy and scholarship. The access to resources like Wikipedia and devices like the mobile phone have facilitated a move towards more distributed, non-hierarchical, and individualised models and practices of learning, which simultaneously are premised upon new kinds of centralisation, hierarchies, and aggregation of information. The need to develop new forms of digital pedagogy as well as creating more spaces for such conversations within and outside the academic context would be crucial here. This growth of digitally-engaged
humanities practice raises pertinent questions about how exactly the “digital turn” is transforming the humanities, its practice and politics. DH being an interdisciplinary field also offers the possibilities to engage with creative, often alternative practices that exist at the margins of mainstream academia, thus trying to encourage collaborative work across different domains of expertise. The inherited separation of disciplines, or even humanities and technology as suggested by the term DH, may then be contentious here, as it creates the
opportunity to explore a twinned history of humanities and technology.</p>
<p>While the field of DH in India continues to develop slowly but surely, and hopefully widely, as more institutions and individuals become engaged with DH and related works, these key questions around its history, methods, and scope will continue to remain pertinent over the next years. For us at the Centre for Internet and Society, studying DH at this historical juncture when the Indian state is rushing towards embracing the “digital” provides a critical lens to understand and engage with the reconfigurations in modes and practices of arts and humanities scholarship and pedagogy in particular, and digital economies of knowledge in general.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>CIS Papers</h2>
<p>The CIS Papers series publishes open access monographs and discussion pieces that critically contribute to the debates on digital technologies and society. It includes publication of new findings and observations, of work-in-progress, and of critical review of existing materials. These may be authored by researchers at or affiliated to CIS, by external researchers and practitioners, or by a group of discussants. CIS offers editorial support to the selected monographs and discussion pieces. The views expressed, however, are of the authors' alone.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppHigher EducationDigital KnowledgeCIS PapersDigital HumanitiesEducation TechnologyMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaDigitisationDigital ScholarshipRAW ResearchResearchers at Work2016-12-31T05:56:49ZBlog EntryTalk on Game Studies by Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, July 28, 6 pm
https://cis-india.org/raw/talk-on-game-studies-souvik-mukherjee-july-28-6-pm
<b>This talk will explore the story-telling aspects of game studies and how it relates to discussions of other digital media, Internet cultures and also traditional Humanities. As an introduction, it also aims to open up discussions for Game Studies in India.</b>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://cis-india.org/home-images/call-of-duty-no-russian" alt="Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - No Russian" />
<p> </p>
<h2>Abstract</h2>
<p><em>You are a CIA agent who has infiltrated the Russian mafia and the mafia bosses want you to shoot down innocent civilians in a crowded Moscow airport. What do you do - kill the civilians or blow your cover?</em></p>
<p>The above scenario is taken from the controversial ‘No Russian’ chapter in the videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Graphically realistic and often provoking us to explore deeper questions, videogames have changed from simplistic beat-em-ups to more thought-provoking media through which stories can be shaped and retold. Videogames are, therefore, storytelling media although traditional Humanities and Information Technology both struggle with this notion. This talk will explore how videogames tell stories and why traditional academia finds them problematic. It will also address how understanding this ‘new; storytelling could result in the creation of eminently more innovative and arguably, more marketable gaming software.</p>
<p>Coming back to the Call of Duty scenario, one notices a significant difference from most stories that we get in books or movies. The reader / player has a choice and this is a nontrivial choice that influences the furtherance of the story. The story therefore has multiple endings and is, in effect, constructed jointly by the affordances and mechanics created by the game designer and by the choices and the playing skill of the player. Further, the player can save and replay a game sequence over and over - each time the game plays out differently and the story changes, at least slightly. Moreover, the involvement of the player with the game environment can be very intense and create the feeling of being within the story-world. Finally, there is the issue of accepting that games, usually likened to the playful and the non-serious, can be instrumental in creating a thought-provoking narrative experience. Likewise, the idea of a computer program spinning out a story is equally unexpected and looked upon with suspicion.</p>
<p>For all the problems posed by game-narratives, the consideration that videogames tell stories and that some videogames tell very thought-provoking tales is an unavoidable one. Recent trends in Humanities criticism and in Computing recognise the synergy between the disciplines. Gaming is no longer all about creating Shooters such as Doom; videogames have changed in concept, have entered social networking platforms and are increasingly beginning to comment on real-world issues. In terms of software development, the storytelling game has made it imperative to study the player’s responses; how players interact with the game-world and how they innovate strategies are of key importance to designing successful gameplay sequences. As far as the Humanities are concerned, the game-narrative can provoke thought into philosophical problems such as the morality of killing civilians in the Call of Duty sequence; further the videogame-story also helps explore storytelling in a multiple and shared textual form and to think about inherent linkages between games, stories and machines.</p>
<p>The aim of this talk is to raise questions regarding the storytelling aspect of videogames rather than coming up with any set conclusions. Ultimately, such a discussion aims to lead to the development of some new pointers for rethinking the videogame industry, especially in terms of the global marketplace and in terms of how the story-experience in videogames is a key factor in shaping player interest. This talk is an introduction to the now slightly over a decade old field of Game Studies and how it relates to discussions of other digital media, Internet cultures and also traditional Humanities. As an introduction, it also aims to open discussions for Game Studies in India.</p>
<h2>Speaker</h2>
<p><strong>Souvik Mukherjee</strong> is currently employed as Assistant Professor of English Literature at Presidency University (earlier Presidency College), Calcutta. Souvik has been researching videogames as an emerging storytelling medium since 2002 and has completed his PhD on the subject from Nottingham Trent University in 2009. Souvik has done his postdoctoral research in the Humanities faculty of De Montfort University, UK and as a research associate at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India where he worked on digital media as well as narrative analysis.</p>
<p>Souvik's monograph <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137525048"><em>Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books</em></a> was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. His research examines their relationship to canonical ideas of narrative and also how videogames inform and challenge current conceptions of technicity, identity and culture, in general. His current interests involve the analysis of paratexts of videogames such as walkthroughs and after-action reports as well as the concept of time and telos in videogames. Besides Game Studies, his other interests are (the) Digital Humanities and Early Modern Literature. He also blogs about videogames research on <a href="http://readinggamesandplayingbooks.blogspot.in/">Ludus ex Machina</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/talk-on-game-studies-souvik-mukherjee-july-28-6-pm'>https://cis-india.org/raw/talk-on-game-studies-souvik-mukherjee-july-28-6-pm</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppGamingWeb CulturesDigital KnowledgeGame StudiesDigital MediaResearchers at WorkEvent2016-09-16T13:21:58ZEventDigital Transition in Newspapers in India: A Pilot Study
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study
<b>This pilot study situates itself at the intersection of global trends in news and journalism, and emergent practises of legacy print media in India. Our aim is to explore how legacy print newspapers are transitioning to the online space. The study will address questions in two thematic clusters: 1) the work of journalism, and 2) how the emergence of the digital, both as a source of news, and the medium of distribution, is shaping the work of newspaper journalists.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>This pilot study situates itself at the intersection of global trends in news and journalism, and emergent practises of legacy print media in India. Our aim is to explore how legacy print newspapers are transitioning to the online space. The study will address questions in two thematic clusters: 1) the work of journalism, and 2) how the emergence of the digital, both as a source of news, and the medium of distribution, is shaping the work of newspaper journalists, which has expanded to include various functions particular to the digital environment. And two, newsroom practices, which focus on the different modalities of convergence emerging in Indian newsrooms, and the organisational re-engineering that is being attempted in order to do journalism in a space where professional editors and journalists no longer have dominance with respect to the production and distribution of content.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>News Culture in Transition</h2>
<p>The influx of digital technology combined with advancements in the field of telecommunications has had a disruptive effect on the global news industry. This year’s World Press Trends survey, released last month, reports that at least 40 per cent of global internet users read newspapers online and that in most developed countries, readership on digital platforms has surpassed that in print(WAN-INFRA, 2016). However, while revenue from print is said to be declining, it still makes up for more than 92 per cent of all newspapers revenues. At the same time, circulation increased by 4.9 per cent globally, mostly owing to the 7.8 per cent growth in numbers from India, China and other parts of Asia which made up 62% of the global average daily print unit circulation in 2015. This growth, the report suggests, is a function of low prices and expanding literacy in these markets.</p>
<p>While newspapers are a thriving industry in India, newspaper organisations and journalists are adopting new technology in order to remain relevant in a fast changing environment (Chattopadhyay 2012, Panda 2014). One one hand, they are swept up in the disruptive shifts in the global media economy, while on the other, they are in a unique position to convert this disruption into an opportunity.</p>
<p>The WPT report also notes, perhaps to the relief of those struggling to find a sustainable revenue model for digital news, that revenue from paid digital circulation has increased 30 per cent in 2015 and that one in five readers from the countries studied are willing to pay for online news. Revenue from digital advertising on the other hand, is growing at the slower pace of 7.3 per cent.</p>
<p>The report points out that there is a huge opportunity in mobile growth, with more than 70 per cent of readers in countries like USA, UK, Australia and Canada reading newspapers via a mobile device. Similar trends can be seen in India, as internet usage here is increasingly shaped by mobile growth (Google India Report, 2015). The fact that many digital-born news sites are adopting a mobile-first strategy (Sen and Nielsen, 2016) reflects this. More recently, Hindustan Times has hired a mobile editor to build a team of over 700 journalists specialising in mobile journalism.</p>
<p>Earlier this year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released a report on digital news start-ups in India (Sen and Nielsen, 2016), which explores how digital-born news start-ups are developing new editorial priorities, funding models and distribution strategies for news in the Indian digital media market. The study, which included observing the practices of The Quint, Scroll, The Wire, Khabar Lahariya, Daily Hunt and InShorts, concluded that India was not short of noteworthy experiments in journalism and online news. It also found that more news publishers are adopting mobile-first approaches, given that internet use in India is increasingly through mobile devices. More relevant to this study, the report established that social media has emerged as a tool for distribution and also stated that digital news start-ups are turning their focus to Hindi and local language content, in order to serve new audiences.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Studying the Effects of Convergence</h2>
<p>Their digital transition can be witnessed on two counts: publishing with digital and publishing for digital. The first involves a shift towards using the digital in the process of sourcing and publishing news. Workflow is managed by advanced content management systems, news articles contain multimedia and interactivity that require technical expertise, and the web and social media are increasingly becoming a reliable source of primary and secondary information for journalists. Second, publishing for the highly competitive comes with it’s own challenges. Distribution and consumption of news is increasingly being carried out on digital platforms, fostering a culture of interdependence that impacts news providers in previously unforeseen ways. As the decision to prioritise their digital products take hold, newsrooms themselves evolve to contain a diverse range of skill and expertise.</p>
<p>According to the 2015 Trends in Newsroom report, editors and senior reporters in newsrooms across the globe are experimenting with new ways of storytelling using podcasts, chat apps, automation, virtual reality and gamification, as well as dealing with new challenges with respect to source protection in the face of increased surveillance and intermediaries like Facebook and Google and reporting on culturally sensitive subjects(World Editors Forum, 2015).</p>
<p>The dynamics of these shifts in different countries may be shaped by several factors including the availability of human and financial resources, and pace of adoption of new technologies by the readers. In markets like Japan, complexities of the existing newspaper trade in the country act as a deterrent to technological change (Villi and Hayashi, 2014). Given the pace at which the media ecology of the web evolves; this transition is an ongoing process characterised by experiments in business, marketing and editorial strategies. A good example of such an experiment is last week’s decision by leading Indian newspapers, to make their content unavailable to those consumers who had ad-blocking software installed.</p>
<p>Such a shift also demands that we ask new questions of news in journalism. In his paper on studying computational and algorithmic journalism, C. W. Anderson tackles how sociologists and media scholars can frame inquiries related to journalism, given its computational turn (Anderson, 2012). He suggests using the added lens of ‘technology’ and ‘institutions and fields’ to Michael Schudson’s (Schudson, 2010) typology on the sociology of news which approaches the study of news from economic, political, cultural and organisational approaches. While most of these are self-explanatory, by institutions and fields, he refers to the ‘field of journalism’ as a whole and the different actors that shape it. This frame will examine the cultural power struggles that occur within the field and the way these struggles shape newsroom practises and news content (Anderson, 2012). Anderson adds that it is imperative to understand that the dynamics of the field of journalism are closely connected to nearby fields which now include computer science, web development and digital advertising.</p>
<p>We adopted a similar approach for our study. We began our inquiry by asking questions about how the emergence of digital technologies and the Internet are changing the process of producing news and how news organisations are rising up to the challenges posed by the digital space: what technologies and software are being used in the production and distribution of news in India, how are these technologies and softwares influencing the process of news production and distribution, how are the everyday practices and roles with respect to journalistic and editorial work transforming with their transition to digital, how do media agencies conceptualise and measure online viewership, and how do these metrics impact journalistic and editorial practices.</p>
<p>These questions led us to explore how leading legacy print newspapers across three language markets - English, Hindi and Malayalam - are making the transition from producing news stories exclusively for print to producing multimedia stories for the highly competitive and and diverse media ecology of the web.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Research Plan</h2>
<p>As already mentioned, the study is divided into two thematic clusters: <strong>work of journalism</strong> and <strong>newsroom practises</strong>.</p>
<p>The former will include asking questions related to strategies and skills of information gathering and validation, methods and tools of communicating a news story in an online-first (or simultaneously print and online) environment, personal engagements with audiences via social media websites, new methods of performance assessment and sources and practices of learning and capacity building.</p>
<p>The latter will explore how choice/emphasis of content and reportage is being re-shaped by the digital environment by inquiring into changes in editorial responsibilities, dynamics of decision making, news-making workflows, technical diversity of the work force, and interaction between news producers within an increasingly convergent newsroom.</p>
<p>This being a pilot study, we will conduct intensive interviews with journalists, editors, and management personnel associated with one newspaper in each language market: 1) <strong>Hindustan Times</strong> in English, 2) <strong>Dainik Jagran</strong> in Hindi, and 3) <strong>Malayala Manorama</strong> in Malayalam. We selected these three languages due to their large market sizes and geographic distribution, and selected the newspapers for either their pioneering efforts in adopting digital technologies, or their dominant position in terms of circulation.</p>
<p>The research team includes Zeenab Aneez and Sumandro Chattapadhyay from CIS, and RISJ Director of Research Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Vibodh Parthasarathi from CCMG, Jamia Millia Islamia, will contribute to the study as an advisor.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Anderson, Christopher W. 2013. ‘Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism’. <em>New Media & Society</em> 15 (7): 1005-1021.</p>
<p>Bajaj, Ambrish. 2016. “Indian news sites lost 100 million page views and $500K in three weeks - and had no clue why” <a href="http://factordaily.com/indian-news-sites-lost-100-million-page-views-500k-three-weeks-no-clue/">http://factordaily.com/indian-news-sites-lost-100-million-page-views-500k-three-weeks-no-clue/</a>.</p>
<p>Chattopadhyay, Saayan. 2012. ‘Online Journalism and Election Reporting in India’. <em>Journalism Practice</em> 6 (3): 337-48. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663596.</p>
<p>Coddington, Mark. 2014. ‘Defending Judgment and Context in “original Reporting”: Journalists’ Construction of Newswork in a Networked Age’. <em>Journalism</em> 15 (6): 678–95.</p>
<p>– 2015. ‘The Wall Becomes a Curtain: Revisiting Journalism’s News–business Boundary’. <em>Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices, and Participation</em>. New York: Routledge. [forthcoming]. Accessed from
<a href="http://markcoddington.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/CoddingtonFINAL.NewReferences.docx">http://markcoddington.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/CoddingtonFINAL.NewReferences.docx</a>.</p>
<p>Diakopoulos, Nicholas, and Mor Naaman. 2011. ‘Towards Quality Discourse in Online News Comments’. In <em>Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work</em>, 133–42. ACM. <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958844">http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958844</a>.</p>
<p>Diakopoulos, Nicholas, Mor Naaman, and Funda Kivran-Swaine. 2010. ‘Diamonds in the Rough: Social Media Visual Analytics for Journalistic Inquiry’. In Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2010 IEEE Symposium on, 115–22. IEEE. <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5652922">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5652922</a>.</p>
<p>Hermida, Alfred. 2010. ‘Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.’ <em>Journalism Practice</em>. Special Issue on the Future of Journalism. 4 (3): 297-308. doi:10.1080/17512781003640703.</p>
<p>Jalarajan, Sony, Rohini Sreekumar, and Nithin Kalorth. 2014. ‘“Tweeting” the News: Twitter Journalism as a New Age Crowd News Disseminator in India’. <a href="http://euacademic.org/UploadArticle/317.pdf">http://euacademic.org/UploadArticle/317.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Kilman, Larry. 2015. ‘World Press Trends: Newspaper Revenues Shift To New Sources - WAN-IFRA’. World Press Trends. June 1. <a href="http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends-newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources">http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends-newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources</a>.</p>
<p>K. J., Shashidar. 2016. ‘Hindustan Times has appointed a Mobile Editor’. Published online on Medianama.com. <a href="http://www.medianama.com/2016/07/223-hindustan-times-has-appointed-a-mobile-editor/">http://www.medianama.com/2016/07/223-hindustan-times-has-appointed-a-mobile-editor/</a>.</p>
<p>Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, Frank Esser, and David Levy. 2013. ‘Comparative Perspectives on the Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy’. <em>The International Journal of Press/Politics</em> 18 (4): 383-91. doi:10.1177/1940161213497130.</p>
<p>Örnebring, Henrik. 2010. ‘Technology and Journalism-as-Labour: Historical Perspectives.’ <em>Journalism</em>. February. 11 (1): 57-74. doi: 10.1177/1464884909350644.</p>
<p>Panda, Jayanta K. 2014. ‘Impact of Media Convergence on Journalism: A Theoretical Perspective’. <em>Pragyaan</em>, 14.</p>
<p>Paulussen, Steve and Pieter Ugille. 2008. ‘User Generated Content in the Newsroom: Professional and Organisational Constraints on Participatory Journalism.’ <em>Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture</em>. 5(2): 24-41.</p>
<p>Royal, Cindy. 2010. ‘The Journalist as Programmer: A Case Study of The New York Times Interactive News Technology Department.’ Presented at the International Symposium in Online Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin, April 20. Accessed from <a href="https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2010/papers/Royal10.pdf">https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2010/papers/Royal10.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Schudson, Michael. 2010. ‘Political Observatories, Databases * News in the Emerging Ecology of Public Information’. <em>Daedalus</em>. 139(2): 100–109. doi:10.1162/daed.2010.139.2.100.</p>
<p>Scott, Ben. 2005. ‘A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism.’ <em>Television & New Media</em>. February. 6(1): 89-126. doi: 10.1177/1527476403255824.</p>
<p>Sen, Arijit and Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2016. <em>Digital Journalism Start-Ups in India</em>. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Accessed from: <a href="http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital%20Journalism%20Start-ups%20in%20India_0.pdf">http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital%20Journalism%20Start-ups%20in%20India_0.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>‘Nine top #TrendsinNewsrooms’. 2015. WAN-IFRA blog. <a href="http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/06/02/nine-top-trendsinnewsrooms-of-2015">http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/06/02/nine-top-trendsinnewsrooms-of-2015</a>.</p>
<p>Villi, M., and K. Hayashi. 2014. ‘“The Mission Is to Keep This Industry Intact”: Digital Transition in the Japanese Newspaper Industry’. In 64th Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference, Seattle, WA, 22-26 May.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study</a>
</p>
No publisherzeenabDigital NewsDigital KnowledgeResearchDigital MediaResearchers at Work2016-07-20T11:43:53ZBlog EntryHow are Indian Newspapers Adapting to the Rise of Digital Media?
https://cis-india.org/raw/how-are-indian-newspapers-adapting-to-the-rise-of-digital-media
<b>How are Indian newspapers adapting to the transition to digital news production, distribution, and consumption? How are they changing their journalistic work, their newsroom organisations, and their distribution strategies as digital media become more important? These are the questions we are pursuing in a joint pilot project with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Cross-posted from the <a href="http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/new-project-how-are-indian-newspapers-adapting-rise-digital-media">Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism</a></em>.</p>
<hr />
<p>The Indian newspaper market is vibrant and diverse, and rising print circulation has so far shielded it from the digital disruption the industry has faced in many high income countries.</p>
<p>But internet access and use is rapidly growing in India, driven especially, by cheap smartphones and mobile web access. And both attention and advertising is moving to digital media.</p>
<p><em>How are Indian newspapers adapting to this change? How are they changing their journalistic work, their newsroom organisations, and their distribution strategies as digital media become more important?</em> These are the questions we are pursuing in a joint pilot project with the <a href="http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/">Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism</a>, University of Oxford.</p>
<p>As part of the project we are interviewing editors and journalists working with newspapers in English, Hindi and Malayalam (one newspaper for each language) to better understand how different Indian newspapers are adapting to the rise of digital media.</p>
<p>The study will result in a joint report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford that we hope will help Indian journalists and newspapers as they navigate their digital transition, their colleagues elsewhere in the world facing similar issues, and academics and media policy makers keen to understand how the development of digital media—and the ways in which other actors respond to these developments—are reshaping our information environment.</p>
<p>We expect to publish the report in December 2016. The research team includes <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/people/our-team#zeenab">Zeenab Aneez</a> and <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/people/our-team#sumandro">Sumandro Chattapadhyay</a> from CIS, and RISJ Director of Research <a href="http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-rasmus-kleis-nielsen-director-research">Rasmus Kleis Nielsen</a>. <a href="http://jmi.ac.in/aboutjamia/centres/media-governance/faculty-members/Mr_Vibodh_Parthasarathi-1620">Vibodh Parthasarathi</a> from CCMG, Jamia Millia Islamia, will contribute to the study as an advisor.</p>
<p>The project builds on a recently completed study of <a href="http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/digital-journalism-start-ups-india">"Digital Journalism Start-Ups in India"</a> conducted by Arijit Sen and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/how-are-indian-newspapers-adapting-to-the-rise-of-digital-media'>https://cis-india.org/raw/how-are-indian-newspapers-adapting-to-the-rise-of-digital-media</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroDigital NewsJournalismDigital KnowledgeResearchDigital MediaResearchers at Work2016-07-06T14:28:13ZBlog EntryData for Governance, Governance of Data, and Data Anxieties
https://cis-india.org/raw/data-for-governance-governance-of-data-and-data-anxieties
<b>The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) organised a panel discussion on 'The Data Explosion – How the Internet of Things will Affect Media Freedom and Communication Systems?' at Deutsche Welle's Global Media Forum 2016, held in Bonn, Germany during June 13-15, 2016. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited as one of the panelists.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction to the Panel</h2>
<p>The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) will result in a vast network of Internet-connected devices that generate enormous volumes of data about human behavior and interactions. This data explosion will potentially reshape how media organizations both collect and report news, while at the same time fundamentally shifting how communications networks are organized worldwide. Yet currently most of the discussion about the IoT has focused on its spread in developed countries via the popularization of Internet-connected consumer devices.</p>
<p>In this panel we will discuss how the IoT may develop differently in the Global South and how it could present either a threat to open access to data and information, or an opportunity to improve media systems worldwide. We will also examine the impact of the data explosion in developing countries and what mechanisms need to be created in order to ensure the huge new mountain of data is used and governed responsibly.</p>
<p>The discussants were Carlos Affonso Souza (Director, <a href="http://itsrio.org/en/">Institute for Technology and Society</a> of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Lorena Jaume-Palasi (Director for Communications, <a href="http://www.eurodig.org/">European Dialogue on Internet Governance, or EuroDIG</a>, Switzerland), and Sumandro Chattapadhyay (Research Director, the Centre for Internet and Society, India); and the conversation was led by Mark Nelson (Senior Director, <a href="http://www.cima.ned.org/">Center for International Media Assistance, or CIMA</a>, USA).</p>
<p><em>Source: <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/the-data-explosion-how-the-internet-of-things-will-affect-media-freedom-and-communication-systems/a-19116102">Deutsche Welle</a></em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Audio Recording</h2>
<iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/269045180&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" height="166" width="100%"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<h2>Things/Writings I have Mentioned</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://aqicn.org/map/world/">Air Pollution in World: Real-time Air Quality Index Visual Map</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://openenvironment.indiaopendata.com/#/airowl/">India Open Data Association - AirOwl</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://openenvironment.indiaopendata.com/#/dashboard/">India Open Data Association - Open Environment Data Project</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://scroll.in/article/805909/in-rajasthan-there-is-unrest-at-the-ration-shop-because-of-error-ridden-aadhaar">Anumeha Yadav - 'In Rajasthan, there is ‘unrest at the ration shop’ because of error-ridden Aadhaar'</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://thewire.in/2016/05/16/before-geospatial-bill-a-long-history-of-killing-the-map-in-order-to-protect-the-territory-36453/">Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Adya Garg - 'Before Geospatial Bill: A Long History of Killing the Map in Order to Protect the Territory'</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://savethemap.in/">Save the Map</a>.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/data-for-governance-governance-of-data-and-data-anxieties'>https://cis-india.org/raw/data-for-governance-governance-of-data-and-data-anxieties</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroDigital NewsGeospatial Information Regulation BillUIDData SystemsDigital KnowledgeResearchAadhaarResearchers at Work2016-07-03T05:59:48ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the final section. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <strong>Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</strong></p>
<hr />
<h2>Concluding Thoughts</h2>
<p>This exercise in mapping ‘digital humanities’ in India has brought to the fore several learnings and challenges, especially in trying to locate the domain of enquiry even as our understanding of what constitutes new objects, methods and forms of research and pedagogy constantly undergo change and redefinition. As some of the people interviewed in the course of this study remarked, DH, with its interdisciplinary approach and porous boundaries is like a moving target that becomes increasingly difficult to define as it is constantly evolving into something new, which then adds another dimension to what is already understood about the field. This is not to say that there is a consensus on what is DH, globally or in India, but just to emphasise that the object or domain of enquiry is not fixed, or demarcated clearly.</p>
<p>Even as I wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the ‘field’ – if there is such a thing – is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world. What it does for us immediately is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the ‘digital’, and what may be new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large, post the advent of the digital. This study therefore is not interested in the question of whether there is a field called DH in India, but rather in what questions are raised by and for DH and DH-like projects by a range of practices and scholarship in the humanities post the digital.</p>
<p>We began with the understanding that DH is a new space of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and practice with several possibilities for thinking about the nature of the intersection of the humanities and technology. The term was a little more than a found term of sorts, in the context of this study, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The history of the term in the context of “humanities computing” in the Anglo-American context has helped in locating and defining the field globally within the ambit of certain kinds of practices and scholarship in the contemporary moment. In India, this has been relatively complex endeavour, given that DH, or engagements with humanities-after-digital and/or with digital-through-humanities come out of a different chequered history of humanities and technology. As most of the literature around DH even globally has pointed out, the problem with arriving at a definition is ontological, more than epistemological. The conditions of its emergence and existence are yet to be completely understood, although if one is to take into account the larger history of science and technology studies or the more recent cyber culture and digital culture studies, these ‘epistemic shifts’ have been in the making for some time now. In India particularly, where a clear picture of the ‘field’ as such is still to emerge in the form of a theorisation of its key concerns, it is only through a practice-mapping that one may locate what are at best certain discursive shifts in the way we understand content, structures and methods in the humanities, within the context of the digital. These changes may be visible across only a few domains – particularly in the multi-layered technological landscape in India, and lack a wider consensus in terms of whether they really constitute a larger epistemic shift or new direction of thought. The first couple of chapters in this report tried to lay out ways of understanding the current state of ‘digitality’ that India is in, and the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise or understand it better. The layered technological and media landscape that we inhabit today, where both the analogue and digital co-exist serving various purposes, and access and usage are still contentious points of debate, provides an interesting and dynamic context to understand what are new practices of humanities research and scholarship today.</p>
<p>The fundamental premise of the nature of the digital and its relation to the human subject still lacks adequate exploration which would be required to define the contours of the field. The inherited separation of humanities and technology further makes this a complex space to negotiate, when the term may now actually indicate the need to decode the rather tenuous relationship between the two supposedly separate domains. If one may locate the question even earlier, the separation of the natural and social sciences lies above this segregation of disciplines, and needs further exploration. There is a need therefore to understand the growth of a ‘technologised’ history of humanities to examine whether this almost forced coming together of two historically separated domains may in itself be something novel, or create new and qualitatively different kinds of practices for humanities. Even so, the disciplinary contexts of the usage of the term DH in India open up certain questions of ontology and method more broadly for humanities research and practice in the digital space. These include changes in the nature of cultural artifacts brought about by digitisation, in a landscape where the analogue and digital co-exist but also are in a state of transition from the first to the second. One example is the digitisation of objects like film posters, lobby cards and other paraphernalia around a film text, which although analogue objects, can now be layered onto a digital film object in online archivel like Indiancine.ma, thus also changing the object or opening it up for more questions. The digital object or image, is a new object of study that also demands a different kind of analysis. The change in the nature of the archival object and the challenges to archival practice are some of the related questions stemming from this context. As mentioned by Dr. Indira Chowdhury in the chapter on archival practice, oral history archives and the practice of creating and maintaining them is fraught with many challenges because of a change in the archival object itself. A digital audio file has its own protocols of storage, retrieval and use, given the problems of format and technological obsolescence. Further the classification of such files, its copies in different formats, and their preservation also demands changes in archival practice. This points to some of the larger challenges that have emerged for archival practice in India today, which include – storage and preservation of materials, cross-referencing and meta-data standards, conditions and structures of access, roles and forms of curation, re-usage of archival materials in research and pedagogy, and the constraints to digitization of archival materials, particularly in terms of rare materials and those in Indian languages. The challenge of working with materials in Indian languages (see section on Data as Text) are several, and will form one of the significant areas of work in DH.</p>
<p>The question of methodology comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. The proliferation of new disciplines and conflict over methodology is not new, the Gulbenkian Commission report published in 1996 titled ‘Open the Social Sciences’ documents some of these and other concerns with the growth and segregation of disciplines, and the debates it generated both internally, seen in the rise of cultural studies, and in the natural sciences as complexity studies as well (Wallerstein et al 1996). At present DH seems to be a combination and creative appropriation of methodologies drawn from different disciplines and creative practices. The change in the methodology of the humanities and social sciences itself as no longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH as well. This has raised several methodological questions, as outlined by some of the people interviewed in the study. The foremost is the challenge in rethinking the notion of the text as a digitally mediated object, and the blurring of boundaries between film, audio and print and archival materials as they are transformed into digital objects. The existing methods of reading these texts then are inadequate. An example is the Bichitra variorum at Jadavpur University, or online archives like Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, where you need new tools to navigate the vast corpus of material on these platforms, and to work with them. The notion of text and textual analysis also demands some rethinking in the light of new terms such as ‘distant reading’ that have come up in the DH discourse. Bichitra and Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma would facilitate some form of such ‘distant reading’ as they involve a method of reading the print or film text using a large number of texts, something possible only with a computer, but also with other kinds of ancillary material, like marginalia, errata, posters, pamphlets and lobby cards of a film. This brings up not just new ways of contextualizing the digital object, but also asking questions of it in terms of its material aspects. Working with collaborative online archives, while creating a new analytical and creative space for work using different kinds of film and film-related material, also pose questions of authorship and privacy. The lack of better transcription tools and other methods to work with sound in the digital space, has posed significant methodological challenges in oral history work as well, as outlined in earlier sections of this report.</p>
<p>The use of computational methods for humanities research is one of the important shifts that forms part of the growth of DH in India, although there is very little work being done in this area in academic spaces except for a few institutions. The Tagore variorum and the online film archives Indiacine.ma and Pad.ma are two examples in this study that have done some work with computational tools and a large corpus of material. The collation guide in Bichitra, and the use of different tools and filters in the film archives like Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been able to add another dimension to the analysis of humanities texts, but whether they help ask any qualitatively new questions still remains open to debate. The other spaces studied as part of this report, such as work on digitisation and archives at the School of Cultural Texts, Centre for Public History, or SPARROW, or media art work at CAMP, have been more engaged with exploring what the digital turn has meant for certain humanities research. Some of the more recent courses offered in DH, such as the master’s programme at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, and the certificate course at University of Pune, do engage with some form of building or ‘material making’, by offering workshops and some practical sessions, as well as topics like data mining, and textual computing. As such the skills and infrastructure needed to work with large data sets and new technologised processes of interpretation and visualisation still remain outside the ambit of the mainstream humanities. Through an exploration of allied fields such as media, archival practice, design and education technology, the study tries to locate how certain practices in these areas inform what we understand of DH today.</p>
<p>The archive, media and now to a certain extent art and design have become the sites for most of the discussions around DH in India, primarily because of the nature of institutions and people who have engaged with the question so far. Archival practice has seen a vast change with the onset of digitisation, and the growth of more public and collaborative archival spaces will also bring forth new questions and concepts around the nature of the archive and its imagination as a dynamic space of knowledge production. The Centre for Public History at the Srishti School focuses on some of these questions, by trying to build more collaborative, online and public archival spaces, and involving in the process a rather diverse group of practitioners and researchers. The objective is also to make not only archives, but history, and oral histories as a discipline more accessible, and dynamic. he notion of the archive as a metaphor, and the possibility of looking at the archive as a database are some new questions which would inform the growth of DH in India. The growth of an open, distributive and collaborative archive, such as Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma also asks questions about the changes in film as an archival object, in its transition to the digital space. The availability of the film text for study, and the layering of different kinds of ancillary material around the film, such as posters, advertisements, literature and errata, opens up possibilities of reading the film text differently. At a more abstract level, the nature of the text as an unstable object itself, now increasingly being mediated and negotiated in different ways through digital spaces, tools and methods would be one way of locating an object of enquiry in DH and tracing its connection to the humanities, which are essentially still seen as ‘text-based disciplines’.</p>
<p>What has been a definite shift is the emphasis on process which has become an important point of enquiry, and one of the many axes around which DH is constructed. The rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, including traditional methods of teaching-learning, and the emergence of new tools and methods such as visualisation, data mapping, distant reading and design-thinking at a larger level would be some of the interesting prospects of enquiry in the field. Though there is little conversation in the above areas in DH in India (even among the institutions and people mentioned in this study), and some work in other fields like the natural sciences, media and communication, its seems to not be part of the larger discourse developing around DH yet. The collation tool developed for the Tagore variorum, or the editing and annotation tools used in Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are some examples of the tools and methods presently used in what could be DH or DH-like work in India. The method of DH is however, necessarily collaborative and distributed at the same time, as evidenced by its practice in these various areas and disciplines. A lot of the work done on both these platforms has been through collaboration among people across diverse domains of expertise, in the arts and humanities and technological fields. As the description of the variorum suggests, it needed the expertise of people from Computer Science, Library and Information Sciences, English and Bengali departments to set up such a platform. The method of using or working with Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma is necessarily collaborative and distributed, because everything from the primary film material to the annotations and editing is in some way user-generated, as the archive itself is open to different groups of people ranging from the film enthusiast to the film studies scholar.</p>
<p>The complex and somewhere problematic history of science and technology in India and the growth of the IT sector also forms part of this context, and will inform the manner in which DH grows as a concept, area of enquiry or even as a discipline. DH is yet another manifestation of changes that we have seen in the existing objects, processes, spaces and figures of learning, particularly the open, collaborative and participatory nature of knowledge production and dissemination that has come about with the advent of internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what were earlier considered unifying notions for the university, and the humanities as disciplines founded on the ideas of reason and culture. The idea proposed by Bill Readings that the university is no longer concerned with the production of a radical or liberal subject is also an important one, as it points to a further question of the nature of the subject produced, and who the process of knowledge production is to be aimed at (Readings 1997). If one may extend this argument to DH, the subject of this new discourse around the digital is also now rather unclear.</p>
<p>One could explore the notion of the 'digital humanist,' or in a more abstract manner the digital subject as one example of this lack of clarity, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars, DH and otherwise. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta says, it is difficult to identify such a category of scholars, although a person who is able to situate his work in the digital space with the same kind of ease and confidence that people of a different generation could do in manuscripts and books would perhaps fit this description, and he is sure that such a person may be found. For example someone who knows Shakespeare well and can write a programme, and he is sure a day will come when this is a possibility. It is a familiarity in which the inherent distance between these two pursuits becomes lesser – DH is at that moment - a composite of these two approaches rather than the difference. While many scholars concur with this explanation, others find the term misleading – humanities scholars do not call themselves ‘humanists’. Also, by virtue of being a digital subject, anybody engaged with some form of digital practice is already a digital humanist of some sort. The problem also is in the rather unclear nature of the practice, all of which is not unanimously identified as DH, as a result of which not many scholars would want to identify with the term. This poses another question about the skills required of a humanities scholar in the near future, will she have to learn how to code etc. Additionally there is also a concern, as pointed out by some scholars, about the loss of criticality as a result of a relying on algorithms to work with a corpus of texts, among other things.</p>
<p>However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. This is also indicative of the larger changes in the landscape of work in the humanities, whether creative, academic or pedagogic. With the advent of the internet and new digital technologies, the nature of cultural artifacts has also been altered significantly, thus demanding a new mode of enquiry and analysis, which often goes beyond interpretation and representation. How these digital objects are constituted, are they ever complete or finished, such as the text in the variorum or the film in the archive which continue to take on layer upon layer of annotation to generate a plethora of meanings, are related questions. They pose a challenge to the existing methods of the humanities, and along with the distributed, collaborative, and networked structures of practice and research that the internet has engendered, they have opened up several possibilities for the humanities. DH, with its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and different kinds of knowledge drawn from a diverse set of practices definitely opens up space for a new mode of questioning; whether all of these different modes of questioning can coalesce as a new discipline or interdisciplinary field in itself will remain to be seen.</p>
<p>More importantly, it also indicates the changes taking place in the university system in India, which is trying to address multiple anxieties at a larger political and the every-day administrative levels, reflected in problems with quality, equity and access to education (Misra and Singh 2015; Academics for Creative Reforms 2015). The digital turn has been one of the sources of concern, as it has pushed for the need to rethink the role of technology, particularly internet, in teaching and learning practices, both within and outside the classroom. The internet, and the different challenges posed by it in terms of methods, objects and contexts of learning, has contributed greatly to the emergence of some of the digital practices discussed in this study, which also take some of the questions they pose about knowledge production, pedagogy or scholarship, outside the ambit of the classroom or university space. The emergence of DH can be seen as a coming together of these anxieties in some manner, and perhaps indicative of a distinct ontological basis for such a discipline or area of study in India. This is not to conflate the discourse with the narrative of a ‘crisis’ in the university (something that exists in the Anglo-American context of DH) but rather to highlight the changes that it is undergoing, where the internet and digital technologies continue to play a crucial role. In the absence of a history or established traditions for the growth of disciplines like media studies, software/internet studies or digital cultural studies in India, apart from the work done by research programmes like the Sarai programme at CSDS, it is imperative to ask if the emergence of DH is then a push to trace such a history, to understand better its ontological and political stake, and more importantly to explore what the ‘digital’ means not just for the humanities, but for a larger processes of knowledge production today.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Academics for Creative Reforms ‘What Is To Be Done About Indian Universities? In <em>Economic and Political Weekly</em>, Vol. 50, Issue No. 24, 13 Jun, 2015.</p>
<p>Misra, Rajesh and Supriya Singh ‘Continuum of Ignorance in Indian Universities’ in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 48, 28 Nov, 2015</p>
<p>Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997</p>
<p>Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. California: Stanford University Press, 1996, <a href="http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm">http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchEducation TechnologyDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T04:48:27ZBlog EntryNew Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice
https://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the sixth among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <strong>New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</strong></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>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, in India. As the previous sections may have illustrated, most of the prominent initiatives around DH in India have largely been within the university context, or have at least focused around the university as the centre of the processes of knowledge production, and emphasise a move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, and 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 topics, which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide or even accommodate. These include tools for working with digitisation processes, digital archives, and the use of computational methods in the study of cultural artifacts. Thus processes such as topic modelling, data visualisation, cultural analytics, sentiment analysis and several more become increasingly prominent in discussions about DH. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a particular kind of teaching-learning 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.</p>
<p>Wikipedia and internet-based sources of information are entering classrooms with the proliferation of gadgets and tools, and with this there is a tendency towards adopting 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’ (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010) – 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 in the global discourse on DH is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ <strong>[1]</strong>: people with training in the humanities who now inhabit what earlier seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. But 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 are 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 within 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. While the DH discourse in India has developed mostly within the university space, given its multidisciplinary interests and methods, it is often seen as bearing potential in terms of working outside the academic norm. Through an examination of changes in teaching-learning methods, creative and critical practices that come about with the adoption of the digital, it may be useful to explore whether it indeed opens up such alternate modes of humanities practice and how it informs the way we do DH in India; as practitioners, researchers, students, teachers or the lay person. The growth of the internet and digital tools and technologies has led to many changes in teaching-learning practices, and engendered new methods and forms of humanities practice, all of which may now be found within the university or academic space. It is therefore imperative to examine these new modes of research and practice, to arrive a better understanding of the changes in and possibilities available for humanities work after the digital. The notion of the ‘alternate’ is also an important concern here, and the emergence of these new modes of humanities practice help unpack and understand this term better.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Technology in the Classroom</h2>
<p>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 new and alternate knowledge-making practices. India is also still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition, and the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the university circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research, where one may see DH–related work being done. What remains an important part of the discourse in the context of the university is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom.</p>
<p>The use of technology in education 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 <strong>[2]</strong>. However, the digital divide still persists, as a result of which many initiatives come with problems of their own, the most important being the lack of connection among practice, content and pedagogy <strong>[3]</strong>. Vikram Vincent, a doctoral scholar in the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, attributes this to a problem of understanding technology itself and what it can do for learning. He looks at technology as an extension of the human body and not something alien to it. Over the course of his research, he has found that the prevalent attitude to the use of technology in the classroom, particularly in early ICTs in education projects, has been more techno-centric rather than learner-centric, which is not the most effective approach <strong>[4]</strong>. Technology has always been around in some form or the other, from drawing on walls to the blackboard to now the smart board; it has always been in the classroom. How you choose to use it determines the outcomes, and one needs to ensure that the learning environment evolves with the new technology that is introduced, because it does not happen automatically but over a period of time.</p>
<p>The Wikipedia India Education programme pilot project, implemented in Pune in 2011 is an example of the number of challenges that the introduction of a new technology in the classroom brought forth, in terms of skills, content and pedagogy <strong>[5]</strong>. The need to focus on the educational component of the technology, the improvement of skills of the learner in writing, research and communication, rather than on the tool itself has been an important learning from the programme, even as it continues in a different university today. As Vincent adds further, the problem arises with looking at technology as a disruptive element or merely a tool to aid learning, which prevents institutions from envisioning a more holistic model of learning that takes some amount of time and effort. This also requires the appropriate stimulus and other conditions such as training of teachers, access to resources and training in certain required skills, addressing barriers of language and so forth, which is a feature of some programmes, such as the IT @ school in Kerala which have seen a measure of success <strong>[6]</strong>. Vincent further mentions examples of programmes he has been part of, some of them under the MHRD-NMEICT initiative which focussed on the teaching-learning process rather than the technology itself, key to which is building teacher capacity to use new and already available resources better <strong>[7]</strong>. These would be crucial steps to take before envisioning a model of teaching-learning that is premised largely on digital technologies and the internet.</p>
<p>While educational technology is a separate field in itself which looks at better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology <strong>[8]</strong>, it does form part of the context, or landscape in India within which DH would perhaps develop as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach.</p>
<p>Another predominant discourse that informs DH is that of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) which is often used as a rather broad, catch-all term, and has been variously defined and used by different groups and stakeholders across domains (Saith et al, 2008). ICT4D is premised largely around the question of access, and seeks to bridge the digital divide in terms of knowledge, resources, people and infrastructure, among other things. This has also been an intensely debated term, given its social and political implications, particularly in the manner in which it informs a larger discourse on development, technology and globalisation in the global South.(Sundaram, 2005) It is important to understand whether DH has been posited as making an intervention into these 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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Towards a Digital Pedagogy</h2>
<p>Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University is positive about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies. According to him, while a media or film studies department would be close to the concerns of DH, and use some form of digital technology such as video clips or blogs as part of coursework, it is particularly important to see what change it has brought about 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 that he sees a vast change now. Many researchers, many of his students also, have found this a useful part of the research process, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms and tools like Academia or Scalar <strong>[9]</strong>. 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 for teaching-learning practices.</p>
<p>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, and more recently Srishti School of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore. The change is recent, as several researchers have pointed out. There have always been concerns about privacy and regulation of content, whether on a university archive or its network. The enthusiasm towards ‘anything digital is good’ is relatively new, and comes from a larger (and sometimes rather utopian) development discourse focussed around modernity and technology. Curricularisation 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, and both modes exist simultaneously - but the rate of change is faster with the digital 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 threat to the disciplines themselves, but to see if it has 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.</p>
<p>The development of courses on DH in three universities in India, and the manner in which the field has been ‘curricularised’ so to say, would be an indication of its specific academic concerns in the Indian context, and the disciplinary challenges and questions that it may throw up for the teaching-learning process. Expectedly, the three courses mobilise a set of resources and expertise that the schools have built over the course of many years. In doing so they also foray into areas that existing humanities courses at the university may not have explored enough, within their own disciplinary framework. For example the course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at Jadavpur University <strong>[10]</strong> comprises of components on software studies and digital music preservation, building on work done at the large archives at the School of Cultural Texts and Records. Similarly, the course at Presidency University <strong>[11]</strong> has components on storytelling in digital media through video games, while the course at Srishti <strong>[12]</strong> has a focus on design practice and critical making amongst other interests. The courses therefore follow a decidedly interdisciplinary framework, which no doubt interesting, also makes curriculum development and course assessment a challenge. While the ‘digital’ aspect of ‘DH’ forms a significant part of these explorations, the manner in which it is being studied is an important point of focus – whether as a condition, space, concept or object, rather than just a set of tools and methods that facilitate the enquiry of the humanities. Digitisation significantly alters the cultural artifact, and there is a need to understand and theorise this digital object better. As Padmini Ray Murray points out, the digital is one way to mediate the material object, particularly those that are not textual, since that kind of experiential access can only be provided by the digital, especially in the case of archival objects. A critical understanding of the digital needs to therefore be a key aspect of such an enquiry in DH.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Alternate Spaces of Humanities Practice</h2>
<p>While these are the developments within academia or the university space, there are a number of spaces outside this circle that have also been asking similar questions, and producing new kinds of scholarship and research around these ideas. The Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma archives have not only served as rich repository of material on film and video, used by scholars and film enthusiasts alike, but also as a pedagogic tool in spaces like the Media Lab at Jadavpur University. Through an innovative fellowship programme, Pad.ma has supported research and film making using the archive as a platform. An interesting example here would be a documentary film on power plants in Chhattisgarh made by Sunil Kumar. Available as a film treatment/script on Pad.ma, Kumar’s work is based on research in mainly two districts of Chhattisgarh, where he met and spoke with people, collected documents and shot several hours of video, which he then published in the form of 80 footage series on Pad.ma <strong>[13]</strong>. There are several other examples on Pad.ma, such as the video-art project on the Radia tapes, and the work on "perfume arts" in Bangalore <strong>[14]</strong>. The Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) through its workshops on oral and visual history has tried to engage with the more pedagogic aspects of the archive <strong>[15]</strong>. While the possibilities are many, the uptake of such platforms in universities has been slow, due to issues that range from lack of internet connectivity to a discomfort or unfamiliarity with the internet and other kinds of technology. This eventually relegates initiatives like these to the space of an alternate, extracurricular or outlier, even though they seem to be asking the same questions as the mainstream institutions and doing similar work.</p>
<p>What this also refers to is the space for new modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders or even brings to the fore in already existing practices. With these however, also come the questions about the legitimacy of these forms and methods of knowledge production, as seen in the rather polarised positions around DH in its global discourse. The Wikipedia is one 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 (2011) describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the 15th -18th 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:</p>
<blockquote>The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical 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 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?</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 prominent practices and occupations are but alternatives - from alternative medicine to education - to the already established or mainstream system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now. The attempts to subsume these alternate practices under a unifying term such as DH, 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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Humanities and Technology: A Twinned History</h2>
<p>Another factor in this reduced visibility of the alternate and now re-emergence is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. Therefore by extension then, the term DH itself may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. David Berry (2012) in his essay on the computational turn speaks of possibilities that computationality, and specifically new software and code offer in terms of unifying multiple kinds of knowledge in the university. He says that:</p>
<blockquote>In trying to understand the digital humanities our first step might be to problematize computationality, so that we are able to think critically about how knowledge in the 21st century is transformed into information through computational techniques, particularly within software. It is interesting that at a time when the idea of the university is itself under serious rethinking and renegotiation, digital technologies are transforming our ability to use and understand information outside of these traditional knowledge structures. This is connected to wider challenges to the traditional narratives that served as unifying ideas for the university and, with their decline, has led to difficulty in justifying and legitimating the postmodern university vis-à-vis government funding. (5)</blockquote>
<p>Berry therefore indicates that this turn towards computationality is the result of an emerging need to demonstrate the relevance of the university structure to processes of knowledge production, therefore reiterating the ‘crisis’ argument. The notion of the postmodern university has been examined in detail by Bill Readings, who Berry quotes in his paper. Readings (1997) is sceptical of the term postmodern, preferring instead the idea of a post historical university, which is divested from the notion of the nation-state and further culture as a unifying idea, and is moving towards a notion of excellence that he sees as techno-bureaucratic, a result of several factors including globalisation and the fact that processes of knowledge production and institutionalisation are no longer centred around a liberal subject. If the demonstrated project of the university has changed, the emergence of such new discourse, and specifically concepts and terms such as the ‘alt – academy’ has relevance to how one may now imagine new spaces, objects, processes and figures of knowledge itself.</p>
<p>The significance of the university system to knowledge production has been a recurring point of much debate and discussion in India. Although not explicitly stated as a crisis in humanities by the people interviewed, there are problems of content, pedagogy, infrastructure, and vision that continue to plague higher education at large <strong>[16]</strong>, and very often technological fixes are seen as a solution to these, in some part due to the imagination of a techno-democracy as described in the introduction to this report. As Berry points out then, computationality is a promise, or possibility to do things differently, which is then also inherently assumed to be a way of doing things better. The computational possibilities of DH still need to be explored, but how much of these contribute qualitatively to addressing or even furthering certain disciplinary concerns, still remains an open question. As Jan and Sebastian point out from their experience of working on Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma, the computational aspects of the archives are still to be developed, as there are still restrictions in terms of speed and feasibility (see chapter on infrastructure <strong>[17]</strong>); the kind of new questions it produces for cinema studies at large will remain a contention. Further, as Padmini Ray Murray observes, drawing on archival material, or data to develop new computational hypotheses would be a direction to work towards, as not much work has been done in this respect in India (See chapter on archives <strong>[18]</strong>). The challenges with computationality then demand, as Berry argues, a more critical exploration of the term itself, and in fact can be extended to a critical analysis of the state of digitality more broadly.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Final Notes</h2>
<p>The problems with the crisis in the humanities and the contribution of technology to these changes could be located to this change in what has traditionally been seen as the space of culture and reason, which has now moved on to something else, a notion of excellence in Readings’ example, thereby changing the questions at the centre as well. 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 humanities practice have been brought to the foreground, but 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. Some of the questions or points or focus that open up are as follows:</p>
<ol><li>The role of extra-institutional/non-academic or alternate spaces in humanities practice, and in producing and creating new kinds of knowledge.</li>
<li>The increased visibility of new objects and methods within informal and marginal spaces of knowledge production. This demands different, and often innovative methods of enquiry, and whether they alter disciplinary modes of humanities practice and research.</li>
<li>The notion of a moving away from established modes of humanities practice, research and scholarship (therefore the question of a ‘crisis’) which would open up a larger debate around the authority of knowledge.</li>
<li>The ontological and epistemological stake of DH, in short the kinds of new questions it enables us to ask.</li></ol>
<p>As important and visible as the idea of the alternate is in DH, it also presents the mainstream itself as fractured space that imbibes several contradictions of the practices in question, which cannot be confined to these watertight silos of formal/informal, academic or creative. Nevertheless, the mainstream spaces remain crucial for widening and deepening creative digital practice and research in arts and humanities disciplines, and will be the spaces to watch to understand the development of a substantive DH discourse in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> For more on this see: Nowviskie, Bethany, (Ed.) Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011, <a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars">http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars</a>, last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> The largest and most ambitious has been the Ministry of Human Resources and Development’s National Mission in Education through ICT programme (NMEICT), started in 2009. See: http://mhrd.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-0 Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> To stay with the example of the NMEICT, an evaluation of the programme pointed out several challenges to technology-enabled learning, namely in the areas of connectivity, content, and pedagogy. See <a href="http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf">http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more see this position paper by the NCERT on education technology in India: <a href="http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf">http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See an evaluation report on the programme by Tory Read: <a href="http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/">http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59">http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> For more on these projects see: <a href="http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87">http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: Spector, J. Michael. <em>Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives</em>. New York: Routledge, 2015; and Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) <em>Opening up Education</em>. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf">https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf</a>. Also see: <a href="http://ciet.nic.in/">http://ciet.nic.in/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.academia.edu/">https://www.academia.edu/</a> and <a href="http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/">http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html">http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities">http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script">http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/texts">http://pad.ma/texts</a> Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sparrowonline.org/">http://www.sparrowonline.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> See the report of 'The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education: by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development: <a href="http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf">http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf</a>; and Roy, Kum Kum, "Decoding 'New Education Policy,'" <em>Economic and Political Weekly</em>, Vol. 50, Issue No. 19, May 09, 2015, <a href="http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html">http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html</a>, last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[18]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn." <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2012 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440. Last Accessed April 12, 2016.</p>
<p>Davidson, Cathy N and David Theo. Goldberg. <em>The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age</em>. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.</p>
<p>Iiyoshi, Toru and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) <em>Opening up Education</em>. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.</p>
<p>Liang, Lawrence. "A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century." In <em>Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader</em>. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (Eds). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.</p>
<p>Readings, Bill. <em>The University in Ruins</em>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Saith, A, M. Vijayabaskar and V. Gayathri. <em>ICTs and Indian Social Change</em>. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008.</p>
<p>Spector, J. Michael. <em>Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives</em>. New York: Routledge, 2015.</p>
<p>Sundaram, Ravi. "Developmentalism Redux." In <em>Incommunicado Reader</em>. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (Eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice'>https://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T04:45:25ZBlog EntryStudying Digital Creative Industries in India: Initial Questions
https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions
<b>This brief overview of the discourse around creative industries is an attempt to explore some ways of identifying what could be digital creative industries in India, and the questions they raise and problematize for us in terms of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity and labour. The term ‘creative industries’ has been around for a while now, but with the advent of the digital, and with interest from different sectors, especially with a focus on policy and economic development, it would be essential to critically examine the discourse around the term, and see where it may be changing to open up new possibilities, particularly for the arts, humanities and design.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>The term ‘creative industries’ has been popular for more than two decades now, and continues to remain an important sector for research and development, as indicated by several shifts in policy and public discourse in the last few years. A significant move has been the foregrounding of creativity and knowledge as important resources for economic growth and social well–being. The term has a connection with the older and more specific term ‘cultural industries’, with its origins in the Frankfurt School <strong>[1]</strong> of theory, but has developed as part of a larger discourse around the creative economy/knowledge economy. First used in Australia in 1994 as part of a report titled Creative Nation <strong>[2]</strong>, it became more widely recognized in the following years with the setting up of the Creative Industries Task Force by the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 1997.The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) <strong>[3]</strong> was perhaps the most prominent global effort in recognizing and taking steps towards fostering the growth of creativity and cultural production as part of sustainable development.</p>
<p>Following this there have been several other initiatives across the world, most noticeably in the Anglo-American context, that have built upon this framework to ease and facilitate cross-cultural flows and diversity in the circulation of information, labour and goods. Increasingly, the attempt now is to understand the relevance of these efforts in the digital age, where several advancements in technology and the ubiquitous presence of the internet continue to determine the creation, circulation and consumption of cultural commodities. This blog post is an attempt to outline some initial thoughts on what could be the possibilities of studying ‘digital’ creative industries in India. The digital is an inherent aspect of much cultural and creative expression today, given the steady transition from analogue to digital and the increased presence of internet in almost every domain. What would constitute creative digital industries in the present moment, how do they determine the larger course of cultural production, and pose new questions for labour, commodities, creativity and technology more broadly are some of the questions explored here.</p>
<p>According to the UN Creative Economy Report 2010 <strong>[4]</strong> the creative industries:</p>
<ul>
<li>are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs;</li>
<li>constitute a set of knowledge-based activities, focused on but not limited to arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights;</li>
<li>comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives;</li>
<li>stand at the crossroads of the artisan, services and industrial sectors; and</li>
<li>constitute a new dynamic sector in world trade.</li></ul>
<p>As the report mentions, these are ‘evolving’ concepts and definitions, and just the number of areas that can come within the purview of the creative industries has increased greatly in the last decade. The report classifies creative industries under four different models as illustrated here:</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/CIS-RAW_CreativeIndustriesClassification_CER2010.png" alt="Classification of creative industries." />
<h6>Source: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">UN Creative Economy Report 2010</a>.</h6>
<p> </p>
<h3>Creative Industries in India</h3>
<p>In India, there has been a keen interest in the potential of creativity as a resource, although creative industries may not be a popularly used term. From a policy perspective it is largely in terms of opportunities for economic growth, and more recently the potential for innovation and entrepreneurship, as seen in the Niti Aayog report presented in 2015 <strong>[5]</strong>, which says that:</p>
<blockquote>the committee proposes using digital platforms to encourage innovation, reforming the educational system to encourage creativity and upskilling workers to make them more employable, improving the ease of doing business, and strengthening intellectual property rights. Finally, the committee also proposes a number of measures to change cultural biases and attitudes towards entrepreneurship in the long-term, including attaching entrepreneurship to large scale economic and social programs, promoting new high-potential sectors via the government’s “Make in India” campaign, fostering a culture of coordination and collaboration, attempting to redefine cultural notions of success, and tying entrepreneurship with the social inclusion agenda.</blockquote>
<p>The report therefore reflects an interest in harnessing creativity or creative labour as a significant factor in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and in some sense also expanding the scope of such entrepreneurship by tying it with social inclusion and encouraging collaboration. What this also has implications then is for educational reform, capacity-building and upskilling for increased employability and better livelihoods, something that requires a systemic and focused effort spread over time. The report also explicitly speaks of strengthening an existing intellectual property regime, which also has been a rather dominant framework for the creative industries discourse from a policy perspective. While there is a need to focus on growth and innovation, a perceived objective of IP, the easy conflation of the two is problematic. Further, the role of IPR in fostering innovation and socio-economic development, as reflected in the draft National IPR policy (2014) <strong>[6]</strong> is contentious, as responses to the draft have pointed out <strong>[7]</strong>. It would also be imperative to understand better the ‘cultural notions of success’ and how these would also impact the creative industries discourse in India.</p>
<p>As part of a large research initiative titled <em>Culture: Industries and Diversity in Asia</em> (CIDASIA) <strong>[8]</strong> spread over two years, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Bangalore worked on some of the pertinent questions that emerged out of the creative industries discourse in India and the sub-continent. In a report produced as part of this initiative creative industries are described as:</p>
<blockquote>[T]he vast sector that has emerged with the arrival of modern technologies (emphasis as in the original) and forms of mass reproduction since the colonial period. This sector has now become an important site of intervention for both governments such as in UK, Australia and India and international agencies such as the United Nations.</blockquote>
<p>Further, about the programme the report says:</p>
<blockquote>The initiative attempts to assess the viability of international and government policies for cultural and creative industries and thus lay the groundwork for a hitherto unprecedented intervention of philanthropic organizations in the domain. We specifically focus on culture industries through the node of ‘livelihoods’ that we see as inextricably tied to this sector.</blockquote>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>There were several learnings from these initiatives about the nature of creative industries (audio-visual media including film and television), the conflation and overlap with culture industries (including craft and legacy industries) and the complex relationship between the two, and how the latter benefits from the first. The question of livelihoods, particularly those of non-citizens, or the migrant is an important one, for it highlights the cultural visibility of these industries, and more importantly establishes the presence of an underground economy that produces goods of high economic value, using cheap labour. Policy reforms, especially with respect to IPR and any regulation of these industries would need to take into account these features. The convergence of difference forms of cultural production with the growth of new media technologies, in particular is a pertinent question. Along with growing concerns around piracy, growth of new kinds of content, exclusivity and distribution become important factors here. The availability of capital and technology, and a growing global presence has also changed dramatically the nature of several creative industries, such as media, entertainment and advertising, but also brought with it challenges of finding creative and sustainable business models <strong>[9]</strong>. The problem of cultural impenetrability, or the difficulty of certain commodities to find a market in certain countries was also brought up as part of a study on the Korean wave in India. The translation of cultural worth into economic value, here studied through an examination of the cinema as cultural object, produced interesting observations in addressing the commodification of these objects and understanding the problem of value in this context <strong>[10]</strong>. The role of technology in the growth of the creative industries was an inherent aspect of all these studies, with factors such as context, conditions and quality of access, and the need to understand the problem of the 'last mile' as a conceptual and cultural problem, rather than a technological one, being emphasized in these findings <strong>[11]</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Creative Labour?</h3>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study also critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>In the last decade alone, the internet and digital technologies have grown at an exponential pace in India. Creative industries have been driven greatly by advancements in technology, and the role of the digital here then becomes an important aspect of the discourse, in terms of either a space, object or context. The term itself has drawn different kinds of criticism, beginning with the juxtaposition of creativity and industry, or the ‘economisation of culture’, as another product of contemporary capitalism, a critique that stems from the Frankfurt School. The problems are several, as outlined here by Andrew Ross <strong>[12]</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>It may be too early to predict the ultimate fate of the paradigm. But sceptics have already prepared the way for its demise:: it will not generate jobs; it is a recipe for magnifying patterns of class polarisation; its function as a cover for the corporate intellectual property (IP) grab will become all too apparent; its urban development focus will price out the very creatives on whose labour it depends; its reliance on self-promoting rhetoric runs far in advance of its proven impact; its cookie-cutter approach to economic development does violence to regional specificity; its adoption of an instrumental value of creativity will cheapen the true worth of artistic creation.2 Still others are inclined simply to see the new policy rubric as ‘old wine in new bottles’ – a glib production of spin-happy New Labourites, hot for naked marketization but mindful of the need for socially acceptable dress. For those who take a longer, more orthodox Marxist view, the turn toward creative industries is surely a further symptom of an accumulation regime at the end of its effective rule, spent as a productive force, awash in financial speculation, and obsessed with imagery, rhetoric and display.</blockquote>
<p>Similar concerns may be highlighted in the Indian context as well, where the employability of many in creative fields of work, which often fall under the informal or unorganized sector, has always been fraught with uncertainty. The access to cultural and social capital also defines the discourse in a certain manner, as largely urban-centric and focused around a particular class. Education, training and capacity-building efforts in creative fields, and access to these are an important factor that requires further exploration. As reflected in the discussions above, the prevalent imagination of cultural and creative industries still focusses on IPR and socio-economic development of certain sectors of the knowledge economy, therefore making invisible other kinds of labour. The appropriation of the term itself to focus on innovation in certain sectors, at the cost of others, and streamlining and regulation of these in some way would be another aspect of concern. More importantly, the definition of creativity, as beyond skilling for certain kinds of work also needs to be emphasized in these discussions.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Key Questions</h3>
<p>Whether these are still pertinent criticisms now is a question, and more importantly, what would be new ways to frame the creative industries debate today would be a relevant starting point of engagement. The following are some questions that could be useful in mapping the creative industries discourse and how it could be thought about today, post the digital turn:</p>
<ol><li>What are digital creative industries? Is it possible to identify a smaller subset of industries that would come within the purview of this term, or is it another entry point into the creative industries discourse in India, where the digital is all pervasive? What are new kinds of creative industries that are heavily and/or purely reliant on the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Does the digital add a new perspective/dimension to how we theorise the notion of creative labour, because of the manner in which it affects, or determines creative expressions in the present, on the internet and more broadly in the digital? More importantly, do we need to critically think about a definition of creativity itself, today within the digital context? How do we then understand questions of precarity in working conditions, innovation and entrepreneurship in this space?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Who is the creative subject? Is it possible to understand such a subject outside of the very Eurocentric discourse around creativity and ‘creation’, which paints the creator as hegemonic in some sense? Another new way to reframe the livelihoods question is to understand the creative worker/knowledge worker, and how to think of these distinctions. What are the new ways to understand this debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>The discourse around creative industries has largely been framed within the context of the intellectual property rights, and as a method to ensure the stability of the IPR regime. Given the changes, and many nuances to the IPR debates in the last few years, and the growth of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement, it would be useful to understand the growth of creative digital industries in this context.<br /><br /></li>
<li>What does this tell us about a growing digital economy in India? Creative industries would raise interesting questions about the fostering of a digital economy in India, and the many ways in which it determines cultural production in the rest of the world.<br /><br /></li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,' 1944. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm">https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994">http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html">http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf">http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf">http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> For more on this see: 'Comments on the First Draft Of The National IPR Policy' submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society, 2015 <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf</a>, and 'SpicyIP Tidbit: New IPR Policy in 2 months' by Balaji Subramanian, SpicyIP, October 2015, <a href="http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html">http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1">http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> S. Ananth, 'Business of Culture in India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong>'When The Host Arrived: A Report on the Problems and Prospects for the Exchange of Popular Cultural Commodities with India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong>Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 'The Last Cultural Mile' (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011) <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old">http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Andrew Ross, 'Nice Work of You Can get it: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy,' in <em>MyCreativity Reader</em>. Eds. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions'>https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital EconomyDigital KnowledgeResearchCreative IndustriesResearchers at Work2016-03-18T13:55:56ZBlog EntryLiving in the Archival Moment
https://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fifth among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <strong>Living in the Archival Moment</strong></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, Walter Benjamin (1968: 59-67) dwells upon the many nuances of the art of collecting (books in this particular case), on everything from the sometimes impulsive acquisition to the processes of careful selection and classification which go into creating a library. "Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects" (67) he says, and this becomes important given the many ways in which we can acquire books today, as well as the problems of copyright, authorship and authority over meaning and knowledge that become a bone of contention in the digital age. The collector defines the nature of the object here, because he lives in and through them. While describing the personal process that is collecting, Benjamin is also aware that it may not be a process that will last as it is - a foreboding of the age when the impulse to collect, hoard and categorise has only grown tremendously due to increased access to books owing to the internet, but also where the figure of the collector seems to have been slowly effaced, thus presenting a ‘chaos of memories’ (60) in unarranged collections spread over several hard disks instead of book shelves. The figure of the collector, and the idea of ‘ownership’ emerge as an important trope in understanding the notion of order, or rather disorder of the art of collecting in the digital space.</p>
<p>This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in DH - the archive - particularly as it occupies a predominant space in the imagination of the field in India, and processes of knowledge production and the history of disciplines in general. The influx of digital technologies into the archival space in the last decade has been an impetus for the large scale digitisation of material, but it has also thrown up several challenges for traditional archival practice, including the preservation of analogue material, the problems of categorising and interpreting large volumes of data, and the gradual disappearance or re-definition of the traditional figure of the collector – a concern echoed across several spaces extending from private online archival efforts to large collaborative knowledge repositories like the Wikipedia. With the questions that DH seems to have posed to traditional notions of authorship or subject expertise, the 'digital humanist', when we imagine such a person, can be seen as a reinvention of this figure of the collector - a curator of materials and traces, here of course, digital traces.</p>
<p>The concept of the archive has been important to knowledge production and particularly the development of academic disciplines; whether driven by concerns of the state or the impulses of the market, there have been different ways of defining and understanding the archive, not only as a documentary record of history, but as a metaphor for collective memory and remembrance which includes technology in its very imagination. One of the most elaborate formulations of the archive has been in the work of Jacques Derrida, where apart from proposing the death and preservation drives as primary to the archival impulse, he also highlights the process of archivisation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory (1995). Michel Foucault in his concept of the archive looks at it as "a system of discursivity which establishes the possibility of what can be said," <strong>[1]</strong> thus pointing to the archive as a space not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of knowledge creation. There is today a consensus, at least in its academic understanding that archives cannot be relegated to being self-contained linear spaces of objective historical record, but that archival practice itself has political implications in terms of how collective memory and history, or as indicated by Foucault, histories are preserved and retold through a process of careful selection. Disciplines themselves may therefore be seen as archives of knowledge, and one may stretch this analogy to say that they may also appear as self-contained spaces with restrictions on entry for different ways of remembering and reading. More importantly, the question of what constitutes the archive and what objects or materials may be archived reflects a larger debate about problems with the definition of disciplines and shifting disciplinary boundaries <strong>[2]</strong>. With the shift to the digital archive, new questions about access, sharing and collaboration have emerged, as illustrated by the number of new archival spaces that have emerged, and growth of expansive archives such at the Walt Whitman, Rossetti and Blake archives in the West (Drucker 2011). However, as is apparent, the conditions of access to such archives and their interpretation have not been problematised enough, if at all, particularly with respect to how they contribute to generating new kinds of knowledge or scholarship.</p>
<p>While DH debates in the West have focussed quite significantly on archives and the possibilities that digital collections have now opened up research and creative practice involving archival material, in the Indian context it is the 'incompleteness of the archive' that still seems to be a bone of contention. Some of the scholars and practitioners interviewed as part of this study see archive creation as one of the key questions of DH as it has emerged in India, and the possibilities and challenges that this brings to the fore, (particularly in terms of access to rare materials and extending these debates to regional languages) as something that the field will need to contend with at some point. The role of digital technologies in fostering this activity of archive-building is stressed in these debates. In an earlier monograph titled Archives and Access produced as part of CIS-RAW, Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto trace a material history of archival practice in India, specifically looking at conflicts and debates surrounding state and colonial archives, and the politics of access, preservation and digitisation (2011). The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to the now within the reach of the individual, engendered by increased access to technology, and the ‘publicness’ that the visual nature of the internet fosters. However they also talk of the possibility of continuing forms of state or market control over the archive precisely through the internet and digital technologies, with the nature of individual access and use again being mediated through digitisation. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer with the archives at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata who was also part of the Archives and Access project, and has been part of some early conversations on DH in India, speaks about this change <strong>[3]</strong>. Even twenty years ago, it was difficult to define the archive, as it was considered the prerogative of the state, and this defined the nature of archival practice and management as well. From there it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved some issues of preserving content and the problems of physically accessing archives to a large extent, it may not always be the best option, as the archival or analogue material needs to be in good condition so as to make for good digitised copies, thus emphasising the need for more effective methods and better training in preservation practices. Also, as he point out, digitisation may be able to capture and preserve the content of an artifact, but not its form, which is equally important. He therefore rues the fact that even with technological advancements, there is still a lack of interest in archival practice, and often institutional mandates determine the archival agenda which may not be in the interest of generating more research and scholarship around material, as this is the only way to keep the archive alive.</p>
<p>The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, has been an important shift here, with their focus on archiving the personal and the everyday, he says, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. While on the subject of private collections and personal narratives, Dr. C S Lakshmi, writer and academic who is director of the Mumbai-based Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) <strong>[4]</strong>, has particular concerns about digitalisation making large amounts of information available for consumption online, particularly with respect to women. While digitisation is an effective tool for preservation and offers several possibilities for documentation, unmediated access is problematic and often a breach of privacy. There is so much information out there that the digital sphere makes available, sometimes this excessive communication also contributes to certain silences and obscures or makes invisible people and their stories. So very often its not a question of just making information available to people. What are you making available, how much are you making available and to whom, for what purpose - these are all important questions that contour the notion of access and need to be addressed according to Dr. Lakshmi. Curation therefore emerges as an important process. The publicness or hyper-visibility that the visual nature of the internet and digital technologies accords to the archive is seen tied to a narrative of loss here, and against the rhetoric of preservation which is still in many spaces deemed to be the primary function and imagination of the archive. What this sets up is also a conflict between the possibilities of open access and sharing of material, and concerns of privacy, and the need to find a space where both these seemingly contradictory ends meet.</p>
<p>The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies contributes to a 'problem of excess', and that is where curation and building new kinds of tools come in as a critical and creative exercise. Dr. Amlan Dasgupta reiterates this opinion. He talks about the internet as fostering an 'age of altruism', where the proliferation of technological gadgets has brought about a culture of voluntarily sharing materials online. This of course challenges notions of authority and brings forth the problems of the unarranged library which Benjamin’s essay also points towards, but the archive can be used as a metaphor to understand how notions of authorship and authority are being challenged as is apparent in the DH discourse. The theory-practice divide is also something that ails this particular domain like many others; not only is there an inadequate understanding of how to access and use the archive on the part of students and researchers alike, but there is a lack of standardisation of the practice of archive management and the science itself, in terms of metadata, problems of ownership and copyright, and most importantly inadequate infrastructure, training and expertise on preservation of analogue materials. While it may not be within the ambit of DH to address all of these questions, the renewed interest in archival practice and the diversification of its modes is something is that would continue to be an integral aspect of its practice. In fact what digitisation has also led to is diversity in the modes of documentation itself, and the larger process of archiving, which has important implications for the kinds of questions one may ask within certain disciplinary formations, history being an important example. The nature of material in the archive is never quite the same, so is the manner of working with and interpreting them. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, who has been engaged with archival practice herself, and is now working on setting up oral history archives through the Centre for Public History, speaks of the changes that digital technologies have produced in studying oral history, specifically in terms of recording and interpretation of interviews. The mode of documentation, particularly the digital, adds a new layer to the manner in which the voice, sounds or even silence is recorded or interpreted. She refers to Alessandro Portelli’s work on oral history, which talks about the nuances of the sound, such as tone, volume and speed of speaking which are all bearers of meaning and can tell you so much about what the person is trying to say, but can never be fully translated into the written word.(2006, 32-42) Although there are still some basic but crucial obstacles such as with transcription, the digital space may allow for tools that help with more nuanced interpretation of recorded material, and large volumes of it; a possibility that CPH is looking into at the moment. There are several institutions in India who want to set up their archives, most of their materials include many hours of interviews, with many people at a time and transcription is a problem, because it takes time, and there is still no software to aid or completely automate this process effectively. One of the approaches of DH may be to address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material using digital tools.</p>
<p>The digital archive is one space where many of these questions about the process of archive-creation and the separation between preservation and production that is often made in the existing discourse come into conflict, thus inflating the definition of the term much more. New technologies of publishing, the proliferation of electronic databases and growth of networks that in turn encourage production and the increasing amount of born-digital materials then present new questions for the concept of the archive and scholarship.</p>
<p>The role of technology has been significant in the development of the concept of the archive; in fact the archive, in its very nature would be a technological object, or a space where one can trace a history of the disciplines in relation to technology. The introduction of the digital has added yet another dimension to this question. Dr. Ravi Sundaram, Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and one of the co-initiators of the Sarai programme at the Centre for Developing Societies (CSDS) <strong>[5]</strong>, speaks of how the advent of the digital has brought about several shifts in the imagination of the archive, which he sees as two distinct phases. Sarai was one of the early models of a concept driven, networked archive, based on a culture of 'mailing lists' that built conversations around topics which in themselves constituted the archive. The shifts came with Web 2.0 with which archiving the everyday became a possibility, given the access to inexpensive gadgets and the pervasiveness of social media. While the model of the networked, curated and public archive still has valence today, a significant next step would be to see how one can extend these questions to thinking differently about the archive, by developing new protocols for entering, sharing and circulation of material, and producing new knowledge or concepts around these ideas. This would be crucial in terms of generating research and scholarship around the archive itself as a concept, and realising the full potential of network-generated information. Another pertinent question is that of information and technology infrastructure, which is a political question as well. The investment on infrastructure for the archive is determined by different kinds of interests and will play an important role in how archival efforts will ultimately develop. As Dr. Sundaram reiterates, the point to note is that new archival efforts are not only general repositories, but critical interventions in themselves. They foster new kinds of visibilities. The Pad.ma archive <strong>[6]</strong>, for example, works with existing footage and reinvents or adds new layers of meaning to it through annotations and citations. This also opens up possibilities for new kinds of questions to be asked about existing material. Private archival efforts, many initiated by individuals are also becoming more niche and specific, driven by a specific research agenda, public interest in conservation or as critical and creative interventions in a particular area. Some examples of this are the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma <strong>[7]</strong>, the Indian Memory Project <strong>[8]</strong>, and Osianama <strong>[9]</strong>. In some of these examples, the archive may be used as more of a metaphor rather than a description or classificatory term, because of the layers of meaning that they generate around an existing object or 'trace'.</p>
<p>They are also reflective of a different milieu that came about with the digital turn in India. Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker who set up the artist’s studio and collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[10]</strong>, and is also part of the team behind the Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma platforms, speaks of the various factors that contributed to the setting up these two online archival spaces. As artists for them the larger concern was the ever-changing electronic media or technological landscape, as seen in some of their earlier projects such as Russel TV, which involved creating content around media ecologies and intellectual property in a sort of pro-piracy, and access to knowledge framework. The focus for them was the ecology or the landscape, and within that the sharp point was where there were irregularities and inequalities and there was a need to redistribute things in a certain way. Pad.ma grew out of a larger idea of understanding this changing milieu around the early 2000s, where the digital had already become pervasive – filmmakers were editing on a laptop or desktop computer, they had access to the internet and DIY tools, resources were cheaper and more accessible as the internet was opening up a world of possibilities. Therefore, as the team realised, if there was to be an archive of the contemporary, it had to be digital or visual, or video specifically, and located online. This was also the time when the independent filmmaker had become a prominent figure and the challenges and advantages of sharing unused and raw footage became quite possible and apparent with a platform like Pad.ma. The archive was created as something contemporary, non-state and non-canonical, with a wide range of stakeholders and contributors ranging across NGOs, activists, independent filmmakers to individuals with an interest in film and video. There were however several difficulties as well, chiefly in getting people to share material, issues of privacy, and a resistance to the use of this platform as a pedagogic and academic resource, which over the years have come down with the people becoming more open to using material on the platform as primary texts, and the development of more tools for editing and annotations. Indiancine.ma that way is more of a traditional form of film studies, but with more possibilities now for working with the film text.</p>
<p>However, while entering the digital space may have enabled more sharing and dissemination of material, how much of these efforts also make their way into larger civil society and policy debates, scholarship and pedagogy is still a crucial question. Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been used by students, in media and film in particular but the efforts remain niche and restricted to certain disciplines only. Some part of this comes from a resistance to the film or a certain kind of text as academic, and therefore scholarly or relevant to a larger cross-section of research. This also stems from a predominant imagination of the archive as a static, linear repository. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha, film and cultural studies scholar, who was part of the team that created Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, points out, the distinction between the archive as a repository space and an interpretive space is one that needs to be made clearly, and archives are clearly a form of the later. In fact the idea of the digital as a permanent medium is false, and it should not be the solution to problems of storage and preservation. Further, in a lot of expansive archives, whether digital or physical, it is seen that only up to five percent of the material is used, and more often than not it is the same five percent! This is because most people do know about the existence of certain kinds of material which is buried deep within the archive, and therefore do not access it. The emphasis of archival practice, and particularly in the time of the digital archive where space is not seen as a constraint, yet, should be to enliven the archive to ensure that material from the 'dead space of the archive' is made more searchable and accessible for use.</p>
<p>Curation then comes back again as an important aspect of the archive, even in the time of the digital. Indira Chowdhury sees this as one of the main shifts from the traditional archive, where the curator or the archivist performed the role of a custodian or gatekeeper who grants restricted access to the archive only to researchers or scholars. Now with the advent of the internet and shift to the digital, it’s more about collaboration, and adding to the archive, and this has encouraged a diversity of users, and uses of the archive. This comes with its own problems however, such as with metadata standards for instance, and particularly questions of format which become important from the perspective of technological obsolescence (as discussed in the earlier chapter). The digital archive has made practitioners think about what they are archiving, for whom and what purpose, and in what formats, but these questions also go back to the traditional archive, and in fact are dependent on how we think about and defined the archive itself, then and now how we imagine the virtual archive. These are as she says, questions that may be routed through technology, but not necessarily about technology. Also, even with the traditional archive, making material accessible and usable was a concern, and this is where the archivist or custodian played an important role. She speaks about using pre-digital archives, where there are handwritten descriptions of material, all meticulously preserved, indexed and cross-referenced, and you know what material to look for because the archivist knew what was in the archive and how to find it. She speaks of her own experience of setting up the archives at TIFR, which was not digital then, but has been digitised now, and even though she has not been associated with them for a while now she still gets the occasional email requesting help to find something in the archive, because she knows the material. A lot of the new digital archives therefore, despite their huge collection which are also searchable, need archivists and assistants who oversee the organisation of material, because those cross-references and connections have just not been made (often it is not humanly possible because of the sheer volume of data), which is really what the historians will look for, and that is the challenge here.</p>
<p>Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the Centre for Public History, also sees this as a problem of not imagining the archive as a database, but as this legacy where content is being held together under this one overarching frame. She finds that there is a metanarrative that is created at the level of the database, because of the context in which the archive becomes a database – the historical / institutional questions, and what is being used to create the archive. A point of divergence however could be that it’s easier to lie with the archive, because with the database there is the empirical identifier, so the truth claim is better. This is something that Dr. Chowdhury agrees upon as well, as she finds that because archives have the potential of being multilayered, and are therefore complex, verification is difficult; it’s only another scholar who will check the materials referenced or used by one – and the interpretation would change, and this had implications for the way the archive generates scholarship. Another difference is pulling data from the archive in a way that it allows the making of computational hypotheses about other possibilities, which is the heart of DH – such as topic modelling and algorithmic shortcuts to crunch through data to posit some hypothetical claims. She feels that in India at the moment we are not doing in enough with the archive as database, which also restricts its many possibilities. Even in terms of access to the archive, which the digital archive is supposed to make easier, it comes with certain conditions, such as copyrights, privacy and even different kinds of Creative Commons licenses for open source content. It also depends on what Dr. Ray Murray describes as the ‘flavour of the archive’, something particularly relevant to a lot of new private archival spaces like the Indian Memory Project, or Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, which focussed on 'building the archive', as opposed to working with an existing archive of material. As such these are somewhat ephemeral archives, always in the making, and where the digital intersects clearly with the archival space is in terms of finding an audience for it; the internet creates these niche spaces of interest, so you find that people want to access such spaces, and do it differently from the traditional archive, as the varied nature and functionalities of these two examples demonstrate.</p>
<p>What the long discussion seems to illustrate then is the gradual shift of the archive to become something of a metaphor, as the way the archive has been previously imagined, and its functions have changed with the advent of the internet. As Wolfgang Ernst asks:</p>
<blockquote>Does the archive become metaphorical in multimedia space? This is a plea for archiving the term archive itself for the description of multimedia storage processes. Digital archaeology, though, is not a case for future generations but has to be performed in the present already. In the age of digitalizability, that is, when we have the option of storing all kinds of information, a paradoxical phenomenon appears: cyberspace has no memory. (Ernst 2013: 138)</blockquote>
<p>What Ernst suggests is that the Internet forms a different kind of multimedia archive, or anarchive, or is a phantasm, which differs from the printed of state archives because “the archive is a given, well-defined lot; the Internet, on the contrary, is a collection not just of unforeseen texts but of sound and images as well, an <em>anarchive</em> of sensory data for which no genuine archival culture has been developed so far in the occident” (139). The internet, in documenting the discontinuities and ‘disorder’ of the history of multimedia forms thus gives rise to a new memory culture, and this is important to the process of understanding how new archival spaces are being created, and theorised.</p>
<p>Archive-building has an impact on how knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated is a crucial aspect of meaning-making practices. Related to this is another issue in terms of the amount of data that is available in the archives by the sheer amount of material that it can now hold, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data; accessing or interpreting such large volumes of information would require critical tools and new kinds of architecture. These shifts also relocate the figure of the collector from traditional practices to new ways of visualising collections and the art of collecting itself, which are now beyond the scope of the human subject. As illustrated by practices such as distant reading, it is now humanly difficult to read, and process such large volumes of data that the digital archive now makes available to us. What this then throws up as questions for archival practice, and DH of course, is the new modes by which knowledge is produced through access to such corpora – for instance the impact such changes have on history, its reading and writing, the growth of public history and the role of the internet archive in fostering its growth. On a much broader level, it also points towards the implications of this shift for pedagogy and scholarship in the humanities, in the digital age, questions which will be discussed in the next chapter.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Michel Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004: 18).</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Ibid.</p>
<p><strong>[3] </strong>A session on 'Digital Humanities and the State of the Archives in South Asia' was conducted by Prof. Abhijit Bhattacharya and his team as part of a workshop on research methodology in Women's Studies, held at Tezpur University between April 6-7, 2010.See http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sparrowonline.org/" target="_blank">http://www.sparrowonline.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://sarai.net/" target="_blank">http://sarai.net/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/" target="_blank">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/" target="_blank">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/" target="_blank">http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://osianama.com/" target="_blank">http://osianama.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/" target="_blank">http://studio.camp/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p> </p>
<p>Balachandran, Aparna, and Rochelle Pinto.<em>Archives and Access. </em>Bangalore: The Centre for Internet and Society, 2011</p>
<p>Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" In<em> Illuminations</em>, edited by Hannah Arendt.Translated by Harry Zohn, 59-67.New York: Schoken Books, 1968</p>
<p>Derrida, Jacques.<em> Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.</em>Translated by Eric Prenowitz.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna. "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarshi<em>p" </em>In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, edited by M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.Accessed December 11, 2015.<a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a></p>
Ernst, Wolfgang. "Discontinuities:Does the Archive become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?" In <em>Digital Memory and the Archive, e</em>dited by Jussi Parikka, 113 - 140.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013
<p></p>
<p></p>
Manoff,
M. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” <em>Portal:
Libraries and the Academy, </em>Vol.4, No.1 (2005): 9-25.Accessed December 10,
2015. <a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687">http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687</a>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText">Portelli, Alessandro
"What makes oral history different?”. In <em>The Oral History Reader</em>, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair
Thomson, 32-42. London: Routledge, 2006.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment'>https://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:08:22ZBlog EntryThe Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities
https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fourth among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <strong>The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</strong></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In an article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly describing the emergence of the term cyberinfrastructure, Patrik Svensson speaks of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the humanities, pointing towards a seemingly new found interest and investment in resources and tools for humanities research, pedagogy and publication in many universities and other knowledge institutions (Svensson 2011). Though the term has not been significantly used otherwise, it is interesting to note the implications of such a statement in the context of other such important ‘turns’ in the history of ideas, such as the linguistic or cultural turn. Particularly in the predominant debates around digital humanities, which are largely Anglo-American, infrastructure is an important and inherent component of any thinking around this area, as it derives many of its theoretical and practical concerns from a history of humanities computing. A lot of early work in DH was done in in the area of digital archives and knowledge repositories, such as The Walt Whitman Archive, Rossetti and Blake archives (Gold and Groom 2011, Drucker 2011), where digitization and algorithmic querying were important developments in terms of imagining and opening up the archive. From there to seemingly complex projects on data mapping, visualization, distant reading and cultural analytics, which require parsing through a huge corpora of humanities data, the growth of infrastructure has been a key aspect of these developments, although this many not be emphasized in the early literature about the field. The use of computational methods and the move towards the use of big data in the humanities has been an important change in terms of objects of the enquiry and methodology, and infrastructure is an essential condition of both these changes.</p>
<p>Like with other disciplines the nature of infrastructure and resources available to the humanities – in the form of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and now online repositories, language laboratories, and bibliographic, writing and editing tools and software – have also in some manner influenced the nature or scope of questions that could be asked of an object or text. It is therefore useful to explore the influence of infrastructure at a very conceptual level, in terms of what new ways of enquiry have been made possible with digital technologies and the internet. Now with new tools that can parse many pages of text at a go, or an algorithm that can derive patterns from a data set of images, video or other cultural artifacts, the scope of the enquiry seems to have increased exponentially, as much literature around DH suggests (Berry 2011). Indeed this point is also a bone of contention for many traditional humanities scholars, as it not only seems to be a technologically deterministic notion, but also one that takes away from more conventional methods of humanities research, which are based on close reading and interpretation of texts. In the Indian context however, these possibilities still seem distant owing to several gaps in terms of requirements of infrastructure, resources and material. In many institutions, the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in the form of libraries, classroom teaching-learning resources and access to the internet and other digital tools for the humanities continues to remain a problem. Existing institutional infrastructure is lesser that what is required, and mostly outdated.</p>
<p>This conflict over whether new tools and resources for the humanities is taking away or adding to humanities research is better understood in the light of how the concept of infrastructure has been understood, and specifically in the context of communication and research. Brian Larkin (2008) describes infrastructures as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense”. He talks about both technical (such as transport, telecommunications, urban planning, energy and water) and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as the knowledge of a language, or cultural style and religious learnings. He therefore defines infrastructure as “this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” This definition opens out the understanding of the term a little more, for it brings within the ambit different kinds of goods – such as knowledge, and proposes that infrastructure has the power to bind people within collectivities, thus emphasizing both its limitations as well as potentialities.</p>
The notion of infrastructure as not being neutral to culture is further emphasized when Larkin talks about its mediating capacities, brought about by a layering of new technologies over old ones. "Infrastructures…mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of infrastructures themselves" (Ibid.: 6). Thus the understanding of infrastructures as merely a means of the execution of ideas is one of the obstacles in terms of imagining them as more central to the work of the humanities. Often, the notion of infrastructure has been understood in terms of the institutional infrastructure in place, and not in terms of the smaller networks, tools or resources that build it, which are often located at the level of individuals. Ownership is a key aspect of the problem here, because the ownership of such infrastructure is largely with the state or large corporate entities, and not something within the ambit of small and private institutions or even individuals, and this often mandates the manner of their use. Indeed in the case of DH, there are certain kinds of technologies and resources that cannot be replicated easily at all, as such it is something that needs investment from the state and large knowledge institutions such as the university. Another problem, as rightly identified by Svensson is that the imagination of research infrastructures has been primarily in terms of the needs of the natural sciences, as a result of which resources, tools and materials for the humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment. Thus not only is there a challenge in terms of the availability of infrastructure, but also with respect to the optimum utilization of what is available.
<p> </p>
<p>Some of the practitioners and scholars interviewed as part of this mapping have also repeatedly brought up a number of concerns about (or the lack of) infrastructure they have had to use, modify and develop as part of their projects and research. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore finds it rather ironic that a city like Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal has such little thinking in the humanities. There are of course several reasons for this, she says, and in many places infrastructure development is restricted for certain reasons, like for example in Kashmir, where the use of internet and mobile phones is regulated strictly due to security concerns. The key question of course is to have more of a dialogue between places to ensure that they are not functioning in isolation. She also emphasizes that the problems are also at a more basic level, like with transcription for example <strong>[1]</strong>. The advent of the digital has brought with it several new possibilities, but she also talks about the many misconceptions that seem to be prevalent with regard to the digital, particularly in terms of preservation and storage capacity. The question of format is of great importance and a determining factor in much of research that mobilizes digital technologies. As part of her work on archiving oral histories, she has often had to emphasize that there are specific formats for a digital oral archive. As she says:</p>
<blockquote>You should not switch to say MP3 just because it’s cheaper, more convenient and a lighter file. I often have people arguing that I just bought a recorder, it gives me a clear recording [in the MP3 format] etc. If you were to archive that file you would find that within a few years you begin to lose data on that file. The digital archive has also made people think a lot more about what they are preserving, in what format. These are things you then teach yourself, you do not archive in certain formats, or rely on an archive of MP3 files, because every time you copy them onto something it would have lost a little bit of its description. So these are things that make the historian more oriented, you think a lot more about what you are doing.</blockquote>
<p>She therefore warns against these presumptions that a digital archive will resolve completely problems of space and preservation, as a change in format can easily render your data inaccessible and essentially useless. The idea of ‘loss of data’ and lack of space is something easily missed, as there a notion of the digital being an endless space, but that too comes at a cost. As Jonathan Sterne (2013) explains in his work on the MP3 as a cultural artifactiv, it is a format that works through compression and elimination of excess sound, which eventually greatly affects the quality of the sound object itself. The notion of the digital rendering a certain quality of sound, and by implication generating a ‘better’ digital artifact itself, is therefore highly debatable.</p>
<p>There are other considerations to bear in mind as well. As Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the CPH points out, the context of such work in the global south is very different, and lack of good infrastructure is definitely one of the major problems. There are issues of bandwidth, problems such as surveillance, and issues with regulation of internet access, now the issue of network neutrality and so on, all of which have implications for possible digital humanities work and specifically work on digital archives. A significant challenge she sees is that we don't have mechanisms to translate between/ from Indian languages. She says that:</p>
<blockquote>It would be amazing to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages which at the moment is an impossibility. This is where a place like Bangalore comes into the picture... We need to pull on resources that are being pioneered in places like the IITs, or institutions here working with natural language processing...technologies that we cannot in a humanities context create, but pull those in to use them for humanities research. But the questions that we are asking are necessarily quite different, from what we have in the West.</blockquote>
<p>The problem with Indian languages brings out the problems that are specific to the global south and therefore the infrastructure needs of humanities research work. Padmini Murray mentions Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University as an effective illustration of the challenges faced by researchers working in languages other than English. She explains “The very level of creating the code for Bichitra was different, because it had to be done from scratch. Finding a set of reliable Bangla characters is difficult because the ligatures get mixed up, so they created a character set from scratch to create Bichitra, and for Prabhed [the collation software] which works within it.” The problem of a lack of standardization for Indic language inputs is therefore an immediate practical concern for archival work in different languages in India <strong>[2]</strong>.</p>
<p>Indiancine.ma <strong>[3]</strong>, an online archive of Indian film, has similarly been experimenting with different ways of reading and annotating film text, with a focus right now on films that are out of copyright. It uses an open-source platform named Pandor/a <strong>[4]</strong> for media archives, which helps to organise and manage large, decentralized collections of video, to collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations, and to archive as a desktop-class web application. The editing tool enables a user to pause, cut and annotate a particular scene or sequence in the film according to a time code, thus creating enormous new possibilities in terms of how we engage with the film text at several levels. The different ways of organising content through different filters also helps map content in unique ways and read them. According to Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert, who are part of the team that developed the archive and its predecessor Pad.ma <strong>[5]</strong>, Indiancine.ma is a work in progress, and it will always be, so as to allow new opportunities to present themselves with every change in the software and tools being used. They are particular about the archive being open to a variety of users and uses – that is, it is not only a tool or space of publication for humanities researchers, but is also a software project, a resource for a film fan club, and many other things as it is open to interpretation. It is meant for people to build together and have conversations across domains and disciplines. In their work with people from both the humanities and sciences, they do see a void or gap between domains, and reiterate that it is very difficult for people to have a conversation across their disciplinary moorings. Infrastructure development has also become divided across these lines, and suffers from a kind of tunnel vision which often prevents it from being developed in response to the needs of the communities it is meant to address. As Sebastian recollects the experience of creating Pad.ma, a similar online video archive using the same platform, Pandor/a, he speaks of collaborating with people from a non-technology background, at the artists collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[6]</strong>, and how the lack of a hierarchy between technologists and non-technologists only contributed to making these projects better. A lot of the early software projects in India suffered due to this distance between people from technology and non-technology backgrounds, and the lack of a common language for them to communicate. Both Sebastian and Jan themselves come with training and experience in diverse areas, ranging from philosophy and visual arts to software development, and believe that their contribution to this archive is more conceptual than technological. They also see the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) culture, then a rather incipient movement in India when they had just begun work on these projects, as one that can foster more conversations and collaborative work in technology and research in India. When they had started out of course, it was very difficult to convince people to use free and open source software, or even get filmmakers to release their footage for an open access platform like Pad.ma. CAMP was one of the few spaces then that had this open source culture, and it encouraged people to collaborate extensively, across areas of expertise. As Sebastian says “You deal with a relatively complex informatics system, but you are fully aware that you can modify and change things, and deal with them in a transparent way, which is great.” Both claim that nobody owns Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma, but everybody looks after it in a way, because they all use it differently depending on their interests, and this nurtures and builds the platform in different ways. The availability of this somewhat outside/alternate space for collaboration, and working within the open source context has been instrumental in the growth of these two online open access archives.</p>
<p>The computational aspects of Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and even Bichitra to some extent is may be something to look forward to for researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of such research with these platforms. Given that both are essentially large corpora of material, introducing new algorithmic tools to work with them is not a distant possibility, something that has also been the core of a lot of DH work in the Anglo-American context. Jan and Sebastian have tried this already with one of their earlier projects, 0xdb <strong>[7]</strong>, which is another online archive of cinema, by running a color recognition algorithm on it. There is an instance of face detection and speech recognition software that could be run on this platform, with interesting results. The existing filters on Indiacine.ma also make it possible to search for images or sequences based on colour and object recognition. For instance, an interesting experiment is to search for ‘telephone’ in the archive, which pulls up images containing telephones from across the entire corpus, outlining an interesting trajectory of the use of the instrument. While helpful in terms of querying and searching over a large corpus, they also emphasize the need to be able to make sense of it in a meaningful way. As Jan says “Most of this software is developed really as a means of control, in the area of surveillance etc., and not for exploring; it is more of a content identifying tool rather than to discover things. Clustering or referencing credits are other possibilities, but its more statistical analysis of the footage; are they really adding anything qualitative to cinema studies is still an open question”. Given this disjuncture in what these tools are developed for and how they are finally used, a point of concern is whether the research questions are also driven by the possibilities and limitations of the software itself. While that remains a broader question, Sebastian feels that more than a software, this is a new digital eco-system itself, and using these platforms in different ways, in fact even beyond what they were imagined for, will drive the technology in new directions. The limitation of computational tools as he sees now is really the speed, and given the expenses involved, they may not be feasible to implement and expect results anytime soon.</p>
<p>Both the above platforms demonstrate a certain ability to read texts both closely, as well as from a distance through the use of algorithmic tools, thus demonstrating the possibilities of analysis afforded by the infrastructure it has been built with. More importantly, they also highlight the limits of such tools and resources due to several challenges posed by the material itself. In the case of Bichitra, the problems of developing a code for Bengali characters has put forth a number of technological challenges; a pointer towards one among many problems for archiving materials in Indian languages. Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are more symptomatic of the context in which new technologies can develop today given the support and space for collaboration and conversations across domains of expertise. The problems of format and technological obsolescence brought up by scholars at CPH is an important one; while colluding with proprietary software is inevitable in some cases, as suggested by the practitioners and researchers behind these platforms, keeping back-ups of material and being able to migrate out of a digital platform at any given point is also extremely essential. Such flexibility of material, and immense interoperability – across domains, formats and social-cultural contexts including language is something that researchers in DH, or for that matter in any field that actively engages with the internet and digital technologies would look for in the infrastructure that they build for research, scholarship and pedagogy. Infrastructure continues to remain a critical aspect knowledge production and dissemination, and it is imperative now more than ever, that it is addressed at the conceptual level of any research intervention involving digital technologies and knowledge production.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See section on <em>Archives</em> for a more detailed discussion on this issue: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See the section on <em>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</em> for more on this: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="https://pan.do/ra">https://pan.do/ra</a></p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">http://pad.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/">http://studio.camp/</a></p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">https://0xdb.org/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2011. <a href="http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440">http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440</a>.</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a>.</p>
<p>Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5</a>.</p>
<p>Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In <em>Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria</em>. London: Duke University Press, 2008</p>
<p>Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' <em>New Media and Society</em>. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006</p>
<p>Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities'>https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:07:06ZBlog EntryReading from a Distance – Data as Text
https://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the third among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <strong>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</strong></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on DH given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding <strong>[1]</strong> to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of social media such as Storify <strong>[2]</strong> or Scoop-it <strong>[3]</strong> have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm <strong>[4]</strong>. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation (Wieseltier 2013). But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts.
<p> </p>
<p>The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts '<em>massively addressable at different levels of scale</em>' as suggested by Michael Witmore (Witmore 2012: 324-327, emphasis as in the original). According to him: "[A]ddressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction" (Ibid. 325). This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, "textuality is addressability and further ... this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event" (Ibid. 326). What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book (Ibid. 327).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Of Texts and Hypertextuality</h2>
<p>An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of 'Bichitra' <strong>[5]</strong>, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore variorum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation. Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri <strong>[6]</strong>, Professor Emeritus, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata has been part of the process of setting up this variorum. According to him the most novel aspects of this platform, or as he calls it - 'integrated knowledge site' - are to do with these functions of cross-referencing and integration. The bibliography is a hyperlinked structure, which connects to all the different digital versions of a particular text (the most being 20 versions of a single poem). The notion of a bibliography has always evoked hypertextuality – the possibility to link and cross - reference texts, but with the advent of the digital, this possibility has been fully realized, as seen in the case of the hypertext <strong>[7]</strong>. For collation, the project team developed a unique software, titled 'Prabhed,' (meaning difference in Bengali) that helps to assemble text at three levels (a) chapter in novel, act/scene in drama, canto in poem; (b) para in novel or other prose, speech in drama, stanza in poem; (c) individual words.. For instance, you can choose a particular section of a book, poem or play - and compare its occurrences across different editions and versions of the work to note their matches and differences. If two paragraphs have been removed from one chapter, and put into another, that can be traced through the collation software. If a particular word has been omitted in a later edition, or if certain lines have been rearranged in a poem, these changes can be tracked <strong>[8]</strong>. What makes the search engine 'integrated' is not simply that it can search all Tagore's works in one go, but that it links up with the bibliography and thereby with the actual text of the works. It is interesting to note here the different changes that the text undergoes to become available for study on a digital platform, where it is amenable to intense searching and querying of this kind. It is now possible to search across a large corpus of texts, for minute changes in words or sentences, and ask questions of these in terms of their usage, instances and contexts of their occurrence, thus facilitating a kind of enquiry previously never undertaken in textual studies.</p>
<p>The project however is not without its challenges, as Prof. Chaudhuri further outlines. Working with Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India. In Bengali some work has been done in the form of a scientifically designed keyboard software called Avro, which stores all the conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics <strong>[9]</strong>. Developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned material in Indian languages remains a crucial issue for most digitization and archival initiatives in India. Other issues include the problem of vowel markers appearing before the consonants, even if phonetically they follow and are keyed in afterwards. To get the font and keyboard software to recognize this is a big challenge. The third challenge, especially in the case of works printed from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, is that there are vast differences in spelling; the same word can be spelt in different ways, and as there is no lexicon, one may not do any kind of general search. There is also the issue of a high degree of inflection in the language. A word may have a suffix (or, <em>vibhakti</em>) attached to it to indicate the case: one for the subject of the sentence, another for the object, another for the possessive case and so on. These are multiplied by the different forms of the verbs. The development of a lexicon in Bengali would be one of the ways to resolve many of these issues. However, as most people can only see and interact with the digital interface of Bichitra, and not really understand the process behind it, or the amount of work involved in making the platform work the way it does, funding for research and development, maintenance and sustainability is difficult to obtain. Backroom file management, which includes both paper and digital files remains a big but largely invisible task on such a platform. The total number of files generated from Bichitra is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, and many of these are offline files which would not even go on to the website. Hence while uploading the files, the basic groundwork for a retrieval system for different files serving different functions had already been laid, including the creation of a bibliography, which was a huge exercise in itself. The process of making text available as hypertext is labor that is invisibilized, and is rarely or never available to the end user.</p>
<p>Prof. Chaudhuri also speaks of ways in which the notion of textuality has been rendered differently through the use of the internet and digital technologies. Digital or electronic text has helped theorize better the notion of a fluid text - the fact that a text is never complete, but only bound between the covers of a book at a given point of several processes that are technological as well as social. The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change in the last several decades. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content and process seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the 'text' through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces.</p>
<p>Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker, further espouses this thought when she talks about the new possibilities of textual analysis of film that are now possible, particularly in terms of temporal control, first with the DVD, then the internet and now with online archival platforms like Indiancine.ma <strong>[10]</strong> and the Public Access Digital Media Archive, or Pad.ma <strong>[11]</strong>. The first is an online archive of Indian film from the pre-copyright era (so effectively before 1955), while the second is an archive of found and archival footage, images sound clips and unfinished films <strong>[12]</strong>. Both platforms allow the user to search through an array of material, view/listen to them download or embed them as links. They make available to users not just an online database for storage and retrieval but also a space to work with a range of materials in multiple video and audio formats and themes through annotations and referencing. The annotation tool is perhaps the most innovative aspect of these platforms, wherein a user can pause, isolate a section of a sequence and annotate it using a range of options and filters. The annotations are textual, in the form of comments, commentary and marginalia (in the case of Pad.ma) and can also link to other paraphernalia around the film object, such as posters, images, advertisements and other literature. Users can also contextualize material by adding transcripts, descriptions, events, keywords, and even locating the events in the video on a map. These have brought to the fore several questions on relevance, accessibility and ownership, as in the case of raw footage from films, and opened up possibilities for such materials to be re-contextualized by the reader in different ways. This layering of annotations around the film object also creates a new research object, or text that then necessitates new methods of studying it as well. As opposed to the earlier practice of the researcher/critic having to watch the film first and then comment or analyse it, and relying on memory to generate the scholarship, it is now possible to pause, analyse or read and come back to the film and annotate the text in several ways. What does this do to the film text - the process documenting the form is new, not cinema as a form itself – is a question that comes up quite prominently here. The computational aspect also is important here, given the vast amount of footage that is now available, which then requires better lexical indexing to compute and manage large data sets. This has been a constant endeavour with Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma as well.</p>
<p>As in the case of film, what becomes prominent here is the move to a digital text of some sort. One such example of a digital text perhaps is the hypertext. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited as the 'ideal text' by Barthes (Landow 2006: 2). Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the possibilities of multilinearity of a text that can be realised in the digital, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture. As such it is only the narrative, and not the form itself that is multi-linear in hypertext fiction.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Textual Criticism in the Digital</h2>
<p>But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the 'text' is manifested through practices of reading and writing (Barthes 1977). So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, in his book <em>Graphs, Maps and Trees</em> talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an 'abstract model of literary history' (Moretti 2005: 1). He describes this approach as "within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study." He further says, "Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a <em>specific kind of knowledge</em>: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005: 1, emphasis as in original). The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can 'facilitate' this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods of reading.</p>
<p>As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as not just a reference to volume but also its other aspects of data such as velocity, scope, and granularity among others significantly increases the ambit of what the term covers, with implications for new epistemologies and modes of research (Kitchin 2014). But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text – and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a certain form of cultural and literary production (Wilkens 2012). Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by working with corpora as opposed to select texts, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper (Fitzpatrik 2011). Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc. acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content (Ibid.). More importantly, it also points towards a change and diversity in the disciplinary method. Where close reading was once the only method by which a text became completely accessible to the reader, it is now possible to approach it through a set of processes, thus urging us to rethink the method of enquiry itself.</p>
<p>Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question we may still need to ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading (quoted earlier in this chapter) suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions (Kirschenbaum XXXX: 3). The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if DH can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located. The digital text, owing to the possibilities of ‘massive addressability,’ mentioned earlier is now more fluid and socialized. The renewed focus on the textual is most apparent in this manner of imagining the text, using the metaphor of a highly interlinked, networked and shared text. It also puts forth important questions then of how we understand technology a certain way, especially in the context of language and representation as an important factor of understanding new textual objects. Is technology a tool for textual analysis, or is it in inherent to our understanding of the nature of the text? Is the development of these methods of enquiry shaped by certain disciplinary requirements, and do they also challenge or create new conflicts for traditional methods of enquiry? The growth in the study of different media objects, such as video and cinema, and the advent of areas such as media studies, oral history, media archaeologies has further prompted concerns regarding the study of the digital object in these disciplines, and a rethinking of how we understand the notion of the text.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation." See: <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/">http://www.tei-c.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://storify.com/">https://storify.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.scoop.it/">http://www.scoop.it/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more on text mining see Lisa Guernsey in 'Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom,' in The New York Times, October 16, 2003 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print</a>. For more on data mining, distant reading, and the changing nature of reading practices see Matthew Kirschenbaum in 'The Remaking of Reading,' <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Interview with author, July 30, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as "a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." As quoted in George Landow, <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 2-12.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Bichitra, 'Collation Guide,' accessed on September 17, 2015, <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Omicron Lab, accessed September 17, 2015. <a href="https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html">https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> For more on these platforms see the section on DH institutions in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text". In <em>Image, Music, Text</em>. London: Fontana Press, 1977.</p>
<p>Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Texts" in <em>Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy</em>. New York: New York University Press, 2011.</p>
<p>Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "The Remaking of Reading". <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/%7Ehillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob. 'Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,' <em>Big Data & Society</em>, 2014, April–June, pp. 1–12, DOI: 10.1177/2053951714528481.</p>
<p>Landow, George. <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Moretti, Franco. <em>Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History</em>, Verso, 2005.</p>
<p>Wieseltier, Leon, 'Crimes Against Humanities,' The New Republic, September 3, 2013, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism">http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism</a>.</p>
<p>Wilkens, Mathew. "Canons, Close Reading and the Evolution of Method". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities </em> Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.</p>
<p>Witmore, Michael. "Text: A Massively Addressable Object". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text'>https://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:58ZBlog Entry