The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
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Rethinking Conditions of Access
https://cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access
<b>P. P. Sneha explores the possibilities of redefining the idea of access through the channels of education and learning. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The advent and pervasive growth of the internet and digital technologies in the last couple of decades have caused several changes in the way we now imagine education and processes of learning, both within and outside the classroom. The increasing use of digital tools, platforms and methods in classroom pedagogy, and the access for students to resources through online and collaborative repositories such as Wikipedia have led to a change in not just teaching practices, but also in the learning environment, which has now become more open, iterative and participatory in nature. While increased access to the internet may be one factor contributing to this change, the conditions of such access – how it is made available, to whom and for what purpose – still remain contentious. As per recent statistics, India has more than 200 million internet users, but as several studies on online users have illustrated, the numbers are hardly indicative of the nature of online engagement. The problem of the ‘digital divide’, though much debated and addressed, still persists in India, as in several other countries, with lack of infrastructure and low broadband speed being two among several reasons for the slow move in bridging this gap.</p>
<div><a class="hasimg" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/digital_inclusion_index_map_thumb.jpg"><img src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/digital_inclusion_index_map_thumb.jpg" alt="null" height="199" width="335" /><img class="himage" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/digital_inclusion_index_map_thumb-bw.jpg" alt="null" height="199" width="335" /></a></div>
<div>Last year, the Digital Inclusion Index map indicated India as only BRICS country ‘at extreme risk’ on the ‘digital divide’</div>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The problem of the digital divide itself has largely been understood as one of access to the internet and/or broadly digital technologies, but the conditions of this access, in terms of the nature of its use and adaptability to a dynamic and ever-changing technological landscape is something that needs to be looked at critically, in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the problem itself, and its inherent conflicts. The technological landscape we inhabit today is quite diverse, and rather multi-layered, as a result of which conditions of access also differ across spaces and in degrees. The problematisation, therefore, will need to be more qualitative and nuanced, to take into account several variables spread over social, cultural and economic categories.</p>
<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-4133" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/quote-internet-speed-ps-1.png" alt="quote internet speed ps 1" height="580" width="195" /></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The assumption of the internet, as an open and accessible, therefore neutral space, has also been questioned time and again, with the latest debates around net neutrality being illustrative of this conflict. Though there is a growing interest in exploring and using the democratic potential that the internet offers, as demonstrated by several forms of online social activism and the growth of open access digital knowledge repositories and public archival spaces, there are also pertinent concerns about privacy, accessibility and the quality of online interaction and content. A large part of this uncertainty and the conflicts we see around access and regulation may be attributed to the fact that the nature of the internet, or the digital itself as concept, method or space has not been adequately explored or theorised. As a public sphere, it often reprises certain systemic forms of injustice and marginalisation seen offline, and conflates them with notions pertaining to the personal. As such, social, economic and linguistic barriers mediate the access we have to certain kinds and forms of discourse online, thereby making physical access the first step towards being part of the labyrinthian world that is the internet.</p>
<div><a class="hasimg" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/maharashtra_farmers_computers_20060821.jpg"><img src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/maharashtra_farmers_computers_20060821.jpg" alt="null" height="231" width="335" /><img class="himage" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/maharashtra_farmers_computers_20060821-bw.jpg" alt="null" height="231" width="335" /></a></div>
<div>How can e-learning start, when the general access is very fragmented?</div>
<p style="text-align: justify;">These conflicts are present in the classroom and other spaces and processes of learning as well, where traditionally there has been resistance to the use of technology, and particularly the internet as it is seen as a disturbance or a deterrent to learning. But technology has always been a part of the classroom, and now with the mobile phone becoming ubiquitous, it is indeed difficult to imagine that a student who has access to such a device would be disconnected from the internet, or not look toward other digital tools and methods to engage with, for educational or recreational purposes. However, indeed, how much of this engagement is effectively connected to learning is still a bone of contention, and is yet to be explored adequately.</p>
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<p><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-4134" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/quote-internet-speed-ps-2.png" alt="quote internet speed ps 2" height="430" width="195" /></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">What are the changes in the learning environment that the advent of digital technologies has produced? What challenges do they pose for both teachers and students? And what are the possible solutions that these areas of research are opening up? A more integrated and inclusive approach in designing methods and tools for use in the classroom could be one way of making issues and conflicts in this space more transparent. Several efforts in education technology and experiments in digital learning have focused precisely on this aspect. The sheer visibility and vastness of the internet offers several possibilities in terms of access to materials, tools and resources online. Several large-scale efforts in digitisation made by both the state and public organisations are attempts to utilise this potential, and they speak of the growing interest in making material available online for both classroom teaching and research.</p>
<div><a class="hasimg" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024.jpg"><img src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024.jpg" alt="null" height="587" width="335" /><img class="himage" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024-bw.jpg" alt="null" height="587" width="335" /></a></div>
<div>The MOOCs are slowly challenging the universities<a title="MOOCs vs. Universities" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024.jpg" target="_blank">. See the image full screen</a></div>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is an example of the fervour of online platforms of learning, which provide students across the world with an access to teaching and course material from some of the best institutions. However, there have been, at least in their earlier versions, several critiques of these platforms, as well, precisely because they replicate a certain classroom teaching model that is not accessible to students everywhere. This urges us to revisit the premise of such structures.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The ‘digital turn’ in the last couple of decades has engendered several changes in the way knowledge is now produced, disseminated and consumed by people located in different areas. It has also created a need to constantly rethink existing systems of learning we have in place, to plug the gaps that develop between people, skills and resources. It is only through more attempts to problematise the notion of access qualitatively, and to better understand the role of digital technologies and the internet in terms of changes in learning environments, that we may be able to understand and utilise its potential to the best.</p>
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<div style="text-align: justify;" class="hyphenate"><strong>P.P. Sneha</strong> works with the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. She has a Master’s degree in English, and has previously worked in the area of higher education. This essay is a reflection on some of the learnings from projects on the quality of access to higher education and a mapping of the digital landscape and the growth of Digital Humanities in India, conducted by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (with support from the Ford Foundation), and the CIS. The original post can be <a class="external-link" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/internet-slowdown-day/">read here</a>.</div>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access'>https://cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access</a>
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No publisher
sneha
Digital Knowledge
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Research
Digital Humanities
Researchers at Work
2015-11-13T05:35:00Z
Blog Entry
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Digital Humanities and the Alt-Academy
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy
<b>The emergence of Digital Humanities (DH) has been contemporaneous to the ‘crisis’ in the humanities, spurred by changing social and economic conditions which have urged us to rethink traditional methods, locations and concepts of research and pedagogy. This blog post examines the emergence of the phenomenon of the alt-academy in the West, and examines the nuances and possibilities of such a space in the Indian context.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As some of the previous <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition">blog posts</a> have illustrated, most of the prominent debates around DH have largely been within the university context, or have least focussed around the university as the centre, and therefore emphasise the move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, or at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and areas which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a specific kind of teachinglearning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The notion of a ‘digital classroom’ has been made possible by the proliferation of new digital tools and the internet; with increased access to open access archives and dynamic knowledge repositories such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>, there is a move towards a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ <a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> —– not only in terms of people but also spaces, methods and objects of learning — to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ <a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> who now inhabit what previously seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. However, it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that is now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters to the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. It may be useful to explore this change further to arrive at some idea of whether such a space exists in the Indian context, and how it informs the way we conceptualise DH; as practitioners, researchers, teachers or the lay person.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster these new and alternate knowledge-making practices.While the early DH debates in the Anglo-American context seemed to be dominated by certain disciplines like English, media studies and computational and information sciences, practitioners and researchers alike have branched out significantly, with research focussing more on questions of data-mining, mapping and visualisation with an increasing focus on processes and design, and using a diverse range of texts or objects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In India, which significantly borrows the discourse from the same context, and also is still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition to the digital, the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the academic circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research (some discussed in the earlier blog posts as well), which would be likely spaces where one may see DH–related work being done. An important part of the discourse in the context of education is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom. Educational or instructional technology has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom, and this has been supported by several large-scale digitisation projects as well but the digital divide still persists, as a result of which these initiatives come with a peculiar set of problems of their own (as discussed in the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment">earlier blog post</a> on archival practice) the most important being the lack of connection among such practices, research and pedagogy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While education technology is a separate field which works on better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology, it does form part of the context within which DH is to develop either as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach, and the two areas are very often conflated in some parts of the discourse in India. While moving beyond the ICTs debate — which is premised primarily around access to knowledge, DH has been posited as making an intervention into prevailing systems of knowledge — so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 style="text-align: justify;">Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University speaks about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies, particularly in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research, which he sees even with his students now, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms like Academia.edu or <a href="http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/">Scalar,</a> that he finds a vast change. It not only makes the process more transparent but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Curriculum development in DH comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets — we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital — but the rate of change is faster than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities (thus also seen as a threat to the disciplines themselves), and having its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What this essentially refers to is the alternate modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders. Wikipedia is an existing example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, <a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says: “The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and a historical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an <em>inherent </em>quality but a <em>transitive </em>one 6<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> 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?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of practices and occupations are but alternatives — from alternative medicine to education — to the already established system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The attempts to subsume these alternate practices, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question. Another aspect of this is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which therefore prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. By extension then, the term DH itself therefore may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of knowledge production have been brought to the foreground, which have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> References: </strong></p>
<ol>
<li># Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 Accessed July 27, 2014 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/ </li>
<li>Davidson, Cathy N. & David Theo Goldberg, <em> The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) ( Cambridge: </em> MIT Press, 2010) Accessed March 15, 2014 http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-thinking</li>
<li>See Liang, Lawrence “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15<sup>th</sup> to the 18<sup>th </sup>century” in INC Reader#7 Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011, p.50-62 </li></ol>
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<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> . See Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo. Goldberg, <em> The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning Cambridge: </em> <em> </em> MIT Press, 2010</p>
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<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> . For more on this see # Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/</p>
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<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> . See Lawrence Liang, “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15<sup>th</sup> to the 18<sup>th</sup> Century” in INC Reader#7Critical Point ofView: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011</p>
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<div id="ftn4">
<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> Adrian John’s as quoted in Liang. See Adrian Johns, <em>The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making</em>, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy</a>
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No publisher
sneha
Digital Knowledge
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Research
Digital Humanities
Researchers at Work
2015-11-13T05:29:48Z
Blog Entry
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Reading from a Distance — Data as Text
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance
<b>The advent of new digital technologies and the internet has redefined practices of reading and writing, and the notion of textuality which is a fundamental aspect of humanities research and scholarship. This blog post looks at some of the debates around the notion of text as object, method and practice, to understand how it has changed in the digital context. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on Digital Humanities, given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding (see <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml">TEI</a>) to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of apps such as Storify or Scoop it have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation. But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts. The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts ‘ <em>massively addressable at different levels of scale</em>’ as suggested by Micheal Witmore. According to him “Addressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction”. This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, “textuality is addressability” and further...this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event”. What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book.<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content, process etc seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the ‘text’ through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces. One example of such a digital text perhaps is the hypertext<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a>. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited in some sense as the ideal text. Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the post-structural notion of what comprises an open text as it were, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 <a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a>. So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, his book Graphs, Maps and Trees talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an ‘abstract model of literary history’. He describes this approach as ‘within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study’...He further says, “Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a <em>specific kind of knowledge: </em>fewer elements<em>, </em>hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.” The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can ‘facilitate’ this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods. An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of ‘ <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php">Bichitra’</a>, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore varioum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as understood in the field of computing is data that is so vast or complex that it cannot be processed by existing database management tools or processing applications<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a>. But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text - and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later American New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a form of cultural and literary production. <a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by including corpora, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper. Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content. <a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question one may ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions. This is an interesting use of the term, given that the suggestion to use quantitative methods such as clustering and pattern recognition in fields that are premised on close reading and interpretation is itself a provocative one and has implications for content. The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if the Digital Humanities can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> References: </strong></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, “Texts”, Planned Obsolescence – Publishing, Technology and Future of the Academy, New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. pp.89 – 119.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Kirschenbaum, M.G, “The Remaking of Reading: Data Mining and the Digital Humanities”, Conference proceedings; National Science Foundation Symposium on Next Generation of Data Mining and Cyber-Enabled Discovery for Innovation, Balitmore, October 10-12, 2007, <a class="external-link" href="http://www. cs. umbc. edu/hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum. pdf">http://www. cs. umbc. edu/hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum. pdf</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Landow, George. P, Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, Balitmore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992 pp 2-12</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso: London and New York, 2005. p.1</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Whitmore, Michael , “Text: A Massively Addressable Object”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Wilkens, Mathew, “Canons,Close Reading and the Evolution of Method” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></li></ol>
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<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> For more on cluster analysis and algorithms see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> See Witmore, 2012. pp 324 - 327</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as “a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” ( As quoted in Landow, 1991. pp 2-12)</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> Barthes, 1977. pp 155 - 164</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5">[5]</a> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a> See Wilkens (2012). pp 249-252</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a> See Fitzpatrick (2011), pp 89 -119</p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance</a>
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Digital Knowledge
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Research
Digital Humanities
Researchers at Work
2015-11-13T05:29:12Z
Blog Entry
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Living in the Archival Moment
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment
<b>The archive has been and continues to be a key concept in Digital Humanities discourse, particularly in India. The importance of the archive to knowledge production in the Humanities, the implication of changes in archival practice with the advent of electronic publishing and digitisation, and the focus on curation as a critical and creative process are some aspects of the debate that this blog post looks at. </b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, published in 1968, Walter Benjamin 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. This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in Digital Humanities - 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 the Digital Humanities 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 style="text-align: justify;">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 archiviation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory. 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’,<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a>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, <em>histories</em> 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.<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a>The issue of access is what several archival and digitisation projects in the early phase of Digital Humanities in the West seemingly sought to address, by ‘opening up’ and animating the archive in some sense through the use of digital technologies, which has allowed one to envisage a model of the networked or conceptual archive developed through a process of sharing and collaboration. 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. (For more on a theoretical overview of the concept and function of the archive, see the post on ‘Archive Practice and Digital Humanities’ by Sara Morais).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the focus of Digital Humanities debates in the West now seem to primarily encompass methods of visualising data that the archive is an important source for, in the Indian context it is the ‘incompleteness of the archive’ that still seems to be a bone of contention. Many scholars and practitioners we spoke to see archive creation as one of the key questions of Digital Humanities 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, Dr. Aparna Balachandran and Dr. 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. The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to now being 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, speaks about this change. From a time even twenty years ago, when it was difficult to define the archive, it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved 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 preservation. The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, have also been important in this shift to archiving the personal and the everyday, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies also 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, Professor of English and director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University 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 Digital Humanities 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 digital humanities 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, historian and faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Media and Design, Bangalore and the Centre for Public History (CPH) 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. 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. One of the approaches of Digital Humanities may be address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 style="text-align: justify;">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, who also initiated the Sarai programme 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 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, like the Pad.ma archive for example which 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, the Indian Memory project and Osianama. 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’. 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 a crucial question. Arjun Appadurai, in an essay titled ‘Archive and Aspiration’, which was also reproduced as part of a research art project,<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a> traces the growth of the migrant archive and how electronic mediation shapes collective memory and aspiration. He points out that ‘The archive as a deliberate project is based on the recognition that all documentation is a form of intervention and, thus, that documentation does not simply precede intervention, but is its first step. Since all archives are collections of documents (whether graphic, artifactual or recorded in other forms), this means that the archive is always a meta-intervention. This further means that archives are not only about memory (and the trace or record) but about the work of the imagination, about some sort of social project. These projects seemed, for a while, to have become largely bureaucratic instruments in the hands of the state, but today we are once again reminded that the archive is an everyday tool. Through the experience of the migrant, we can see how archives are conscious sites of debate and desire. And with the arrival of electronic forms of mediation, we can see more clearly that collective memory is interactively designed and socially produced." In another essay reproduced as part of the same project, Wolfgang Ernst talks about the change in the notion of archive from ‘archival space’ to ‘archival time’, in a digital culture, in which the key is the dynamics of the permanent transmission of data. Cyberspace or the internet, according to Ernst produces a new kind of memory culture, which is devoid of organisational memory that is essentially the premise of the traditional text-based archive. He says "In cyber ‘space’ the notion of the archive has already become an anachronistic, hindering metaphor; it should rather be described in topological, mathematical or geometrical terms, replacing emphatic memory by transfer (data migration) in permanence. The old rule that only what has been stored can be located is no longer applicable.13 Beyond the archive in its old ‘archontic’ quality, the Internet generates, in this sense, a new memory culture. Digitalization of analogous stored material means trans-archivization. Linked to the Internet rather than to traditional state bureaucracies, there is no organizational memory any more but a definition by circulating states, constructive rather than re-constructive. Assuming that the matter of memory is really only an effect of the application of techniques of recall, there is no memory. The networked data bases mark the beginning of a relationship to knowledge that dissolves the hierarchy associated with the classical archive."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One can therefore trace the definite shift in the concept and nature of the archive from being a static repository to a critical intervention and creative exercise, and technology being quite integral to its imagination. Most significantly perhaps, the change has been one from the notion of record to that of affect. Archive-building as an affective practice, which 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, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The notion of the archive or as in this case data as an affective object becomes pertinent here. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data or big social 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. The matter of immediate import here would then be the changes in modes of reading and writing that are brought about by the proliferation of and engagement with big social data. How do we read data, what are changes in reading practices, how do they affect writing and visualisation and what is the nature of the reader thus constructed form some of the areas of exploration for the Digital Humanities, and will be taken up in the forthcoming blogs.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004), p.18.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. Ibid.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. Archive Public is a research art project that looks at bringing together archival art and solidarity actions. See http://archivepublic.wordpress.com/ for more on this.</p>
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<h2>References</h2>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking My Library”, in Illuminations, trans.Harry Zohn, Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schoken Books (1969) pp 59 - 67.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Derrida, Jacques: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (1995).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Manoff, Marlene:” Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.”<em> </em>In: <em>Libraries and the Academy</em>, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2004), pp. 9–25. Copyright © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 21218. accessed May 5, 2014 :<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/35687/4.1manoff.pdf?sequence=1">http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/35687/4.1manoff.pdf?sequence=1.</a></li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>
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Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Research
Digital Humanities
Researchers at Work
2015-11-13T05:27:34Z
Blog Entry
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Digital Humanities and the Problem of Definition
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition
<b>The Digital Humanities as a field that still eludes definition has been the subject of much discourse and writing. This blog post looks at this issue as one of trying to approach the field from a disciplinary lens, and the challenges that this may pose to the attempts at a definition. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Much has been said and written about the Digital Humanities as an emergent field or domain of enquiry; the plethora of departments being set up all across the world, well mostly the developed world is testimony to the claimed innovative and generative potential of the field. However, as outlined in the earlier blog-post, the problem of definition still persists. As Mathew Kirschenbaum points out, the growing literature around the ‘what is Digital Humanities’ question may well be a genre in itself.<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1] </a>While the predominant narrative seems to be in terms of defining what Digital Humanities, or to take it a step back, what the ‘digital’ allows you to do, with respect to enabling or facilitating certain kinds of research and pedagogy, a pertinent question still is that of what it allows you to ‘be’. Digital Humanities has been alternatively called a method, practice and field of enquiry, but scholars and practitioners in many instances have stopped short of fully embracing it as a discipline. This is an interesting development given the rapid pace of its institutionalisation - from being located in existing Humanities or Computational Sciences or Media Studies departments it has now claimed functional institutional spaces of its own, with not just interdisciplinary research and teaching but also other creative and innovative knowledge-making practices. The field is slowly gaining credence in India as well, with several institutions pursuing questions around core questions within the fold of Digital Humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">So is the disciplinary lens inadequate to understand this phenomenon, or is it too early for a field still considered in some ways rather incipient. The growth of the academic discipline itself is something of a fraught endeavour; as debates around the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thought have established. To put it in a very simple manner, the story of academic disciplines is that of training in reason.<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Andrew Cutrofello says “In academia, a discipline is defined by its methodological rigor and the clear boundaries of its field of inquiry. Methods or fields are criticized as being "fuzzy" when they are suspected of lacking a discipline. In a more straightforwardly Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary power of academic disciplines can be located in their methods for producing docile bodies of different sorts.”<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a> The problem with defining Digital humanities may lie in it not conforming to precisely this notion of the academic discipline, and changing notions of the function of critique when mediated through the digital.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However a prevalent mode of understanding Digital Humanities has been in terms of the disciplinary concerns it raises for the humanities themselves; this works with the assumption that it is in fact a newer, improved version or extension of the humanities. The present mapping exercise too began with the disciplinary lens, but instead of enquiring about what the Digital Humanities is, it looked at what the ‘digital’ has brought to, changed or appropriated in terms of existing disciplinary concerns within the humanities. If one has to look at the digital itself as a state of being or existence, then one needs to understand this new techno-social paradigm much better. Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University in Kolkata sees this as a useful way of going about the problem of trying to arrive at a definition of the field — one is to understand the history of the term, from its inherited definition in the Anglo-American context, and the second is to distinguish it from what he calls the current state of ‘digitality’ — where all cultural objects are being now being conceived of as ‘digital’ objects. In the Indian context, the question of digitality also becomes important from the perspective of technological obsolescence - where there is resistance to discontinuing or phasing out the use of certain kinds of technology; either for lack of access to better ones or simply because one finds other uses for it. Prof. Dasgupta interestingly terms this a ‘culture of reuse’, one example of this being the typewriter which for all practical purposes has been displaced by the computer, but still finds favour with several people in their everyday lives. The question of livelihood is still connected to some of these technologies, so much so that they are very much a part of channels of cultural production and circulation, and even when they cease to become useful they have value as cultural artefacts. We therefore inhabit at the same time, different worlds, or as he calls it ‘a multi-layered technological sphere’. The variedness of this space, and the complexities or ‘degrees of use’ of certain technologies or technological objects is what further determines the nature of this space. This complicates the questions of access to technology or the ‘digital divide’ which have been and still are some of the primary approaches to understanding technology, particularly in the Global South. The need of the hour is to be able to distinguish between this current state of digitality that we are in, and what is meant by the Digital Humanities. It may after all be a set of methodologies rather than a subject or discipline in itself — the question is how it would help us understand the ‘digital’ itself much better and the new kinds of enquiries it may then facilitate about this space we now inhabit.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One of the important points of departure, from the traditional humanities and later humanities computing itself as mentioned in the earlier blog, has been the blurring of boundaries between content, method and object/s of enquiry. The ‘process’ has become important, as illustrated by the iterative nature of most Digital Humanities projects and the discourse itself which emphasises the ‘making’ and ‘doing’ aspects of research as much as the content itself. Tool-building as a critical activity rather than as mere facilitation is an important part of the knowledge-making process in the field. In conjunction with this, Dr. Moinak Biswas, at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, thinks that the biggest changes have been in terms of the collaborative nature of knowledge production, based on voluntarily sharing or creating new content through digital platforms and archives, and crucially the possibility of now imagining creative and analytical work as not separate practices, but within in a single space and time. He cites an example from film, where ‘image’ making and critical practice can both be combined on one platform, like the online archive <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">Indiancine.ma</a> or the <a href="http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=7">Vectors</a> journal for example to produce new layers of meaning around existing texts. The aspect of critique is important here, given that the consistent criticism about the field has been the ambiguity of its social undertaking; its critical or political standpoint or challenge to existing theoretical paradigms. Most of the interest around the term has been in very instrumental terms, as a facilitator or enabler of certain kinds of digital practice. Alan Liu further explains this in what he sees as the role of the Digital Humanities in cultural criticism when he says, “Beyond acting in an instrumental role, the digital humanities can most profoundly advocate for the humanities by helping to broaden the very idea of instrumentalism, technological, and otherwise. This could be its unique contribution to cultural criticism’’.<a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4] </a>While the move away from computational analysis as a technique to facilitate humanities research is quite apparent, the disciplinary concerns here still seem to be latched onto those of the traditional humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While reiterating some of these core questions within Digital Humanities; Dr. Souvik Mukherjee and Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, at the Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata speak of the problem of locating the field in India, where work is presently only being done in a few small pockets. The lack of a precise definition, or location within an established disciplinary context are some reasons why a lot of work that could come within the ambit of Digital Humanities is not being acknowledged as such; conversely it also leads to the problem of projects on digitisation or studies of digital cultures/cyber cultures being easily conflated with Digital Humanities. Related to this also is the absence of self-identifying ‘digital humanists’ (a problem outlined in the earlier blog, which will be explored in detail further in this series). More importantly, the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise around questions of the digital is also an obstacle to understanding what the field entails and the many possibilities it may offer in the Indian context. This is a problem not just of the Digital Humanities, but in general for modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities that have adopted Western theoretical constructs. One could also locate in some sense the present crisis in disciplines within this problem. Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai explicate this very issue when they talk about the absence of ‘experience as an important category of the act of theorising’ because of the privileging of ideas in Western constructs of experience. This is also reflective of the bifurcation between theory and praxis in traditional social sciences or humanities epistemological frameworks which borrow heavily from the West. Digital Humanities while still to arrive at a core disciplinary concern, seems to point towards the problem of this very demarcation by addressing the aspect of practice as a very focal point of its discourse.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Even from diverse disciplinary perspectives, at present the understanding of Digital Humanities is that it facilitates new modes of humanistic enquiry, or enables one to ask questions that could not be asked earlier. As Prof. Dasgupta reiterates, it is no longer possible to imagine humanities scholarship outside of the ‘digital’ as such, as that is the world we inhabit. However, while some of the key conceptual questions for the humanities may remain the same, it is the mode of questioning that has undergone a change — we need to re-learn questioning or question-making within this new digital sphere, which is in some sense also a critical and disciplinary challenge. While this does not resolve the problem of definition, it does provide a useful route into thinking of what would be questions of Digital Humanities, particularly in the Indian context.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">References:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;">
<li style="text-align: justify;">Cutrofello, Andrew, “Practicing Philosophy as a Discipline of Resistance’’ Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance State University of New York Press: 1994 pp 116 - 136.</li>
<li>Kirshchenbaum, Mark “What is Digital Humanities and What is it Doing in English Departments”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 4-11, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></li>
<li>Liu, Alan in “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 492 – 502 <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></li>
<li>Guru, Gopal and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp 1-8.</li></ol>
<div id="_mcePaste"> </div>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. See Mark Kirshchenbaum “What is Digital Humanities and What is it Doing in English Departments”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ) <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. This is a rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see ‘Conflict of the Faculties' (1798) by Immanuel Kant and ‘Discipline and Punish' (1975) by Michel Foucault. For more on Kant’s essay see <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/the-conflict-of-konigsberg" class="external-link">The Conflict of Konigsberg</a> by Anirudh Sridhar.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. See Andrew Cutrofello in ‘Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance (State University of New York Press, 1994).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>]. See Alan Liu in “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Note: This blog post draws primarily from conversations with faculty at <a class="external-link" href="http://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">Jadavpur University</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.presiuniv.ac.in/web/">Presidency University, Kolkata</a>, both of whom offer courses on Digital Humanities.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition</a>
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Featured
Researchers at Work
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Digital Humanities
2015-03-30T12:47:49Z
Blog Entry
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‘Doing’ Digital Humanities: Reflections on a project on Online Feminism in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities
<b>A core concern of Digital Humanities research has been that of method. The existing discourse around the field of DH assumes a move away from traditional humanities and social sciences research methods to more open, collaborative and iterative forms of scholarship spanning some conventional and other not so conventional practices and spaces. In this guest blog post, Sujatha Subramanian reflects upon her experience of undertaking a research study on online feminist activism in India and its various challenges. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">When the chance to do a research project on Digital Humanities presented itself, I deliberated over the possible topics I could explore. As a student of Media and Cultural Studies, I have on previous occasions studied digital technology and online spaces. Those studies, however, were simply “social sciences” research. I had little understanding of what Digital Humanities as a discipline entailed. While I admit that I am still unable to come up with a concrete definition of the same, the process of conducting the research and the DH workshop organised at CIS led to some clarity about the field and methods of Digital Humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Before beginning the research I asked myself what could I, a feminist media scholar, learn from Digital Humanities and how could I contribute to the same. I wondered if the lack of familiarity with technological skills such as design, statistics and coding- knowledge that I saw as prerequisite to Digital Humanities- meant that I couldn’t really engage with the field of Digital Humanities. While grappling with this question, I chanced upon the #TransformDH project. At the heart of the project is the question- “How can digital humanities benefit from more diverse critical paradigms, including race/ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies?” <a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a></p>
<p>In a blogpost titled “Queer Studies and the Digital Humanities”,<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> the author states,</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify;" class="quoted">"...a lot of queer/critical ethnic studies/similar scholars also lack access to the resources that make it easier to combine digital and humanities work. That might not only mean physical access and training in technology, but also the time to add yet another interdisciplinary element to a project...my experience suggests that many, many politicized queers and people of color engaged in scholarly work in and out of the academy do use digital tools and think critically about them and even create them; they just don’t necessarily do so under the sign of the digital humanities."</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As someone who used the space of Facebook to initiate conversations around feminist issues and was actively engaged in fighting the sexism entrenched in social media spaces, was I then already “doing” digital humanities? I reflected that since feminist activism finds such little space in mainstream media, a worthwhile Digital Humanities project could be to document and archive the contemporary feminist movement and the ways in which it is transforming our understanding of the digital space. As part of the project, I explored how feminist activists have revolutionised digital spaces for the creation of alternative public spheres, constituted of not just women but also other marginalised communities. The project gave me the opportunity to study the inclusions and exclusions facilitated by the digital space, with questions of gender, sexuality, class, caste and disability as central to the enquiry. The project also raised questions regarding popular assumptions of digital space as a disembodied, liberatory space free of power relations by exploring gendered and sexualised violence that these feminist activists face.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the political vision of my project was clear, my methodological skills needed a little honing. The DH workshop organised at CIS was of great help in this regard. The feedback received at the workshop was instrumental in recognising the importance of “big data”. As a feminist researcher, life histories, personal narratives and stories remain important sources of knowledge for me. However, in studying social movements and their impact, the limitations of such methodological tools are revealed. Understanding how a feminist activist with 11,000 followers on Twitter offers important insight into public discourse is contingent on the ability to analyse such data. The workshop also helped me in realising that in my definition of activism, I had precluded many feminist engagements with digital technology, including the efforts of feminist Wikipedians, feminist gamers and feminist encounters with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). While these remain the shortcomings of my project, the workshop helped in foregrounding the scope for collaboration that lies at the heart of all our projects. A discussion of my project alongside Ditilekha’s project on LGBT Youth and Digital Citizenship brought to fore the intersections as well as the different activist strategies employed by the two movements in their use of social media. Sohnee’s project on the gender gap on Wikipedia underlines that an important aspect of working towards a feminist epistemology, and changing the relations of power that characterise technology, are issues of access and participation. Rimi’s use of a text mining tool to analyse the different patterns of language on confessions pages highlighted the value of such technological tools in socio-cultural analysis. The workshop which brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, helped in highlighting shared concerns of methodology, content and political visions and prompted discussions on innovative approaches to conducting research. This attempt at collaborative knowledge production- whether it is the constant communication between the research scholars through email, the workshop with the scholars and the mentors or even the dissemination of our reports on an open access site- has been the essence of my engagement with Digital Humanities. The ethos of collaboration as central to Digital Humanities is reflected in Joan Shaffer’s definition of Digital Humanities as “...a community interested in collaborative projects and sharing knowledge across disciplines." <a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3] </a>This ethos of learning from fellow researchers and working together to create accessible knowledge is something that I shall carry forward to my future research endeavours.</p>
<hr />
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. <a class="external-link" href="http://transformdh.org/2012/01/">http://transformdh.org/2012/01/</a></p>
<p>[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. <a class="external-link" href="http://www.queergeektheory.org/2011/10/conference-thoughts-queer-studies-and-the-digital-humanities/">http://www.queergeektheory.org/2011/10/conference-thoughts-queer-studies-and-the-digital-humanities/</a></p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. <a class="external-link" href="http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/members/echoln/profile/">http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/members/echoln/profile/</a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Sujatha Subramanian is an M.Phil. Scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research study was part of a series of six projects commissioned by </strong><a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira"><strong>HEIRA-CSCS,</strong></a><strong> Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See </strong><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-in-india-mapping-changes-at-intersection-of-youth-technology-higher-education"><strong>here</strong></a><strong> for more on this initiative.</strong></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities</a>
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Researchers at Work
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Digital Humanities
2015-03-30T12:48:16Z
Blog Entry
-
A Question of Digital Humanities
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities
<b>The emergence of digital humanities as a new field of interdisciplinary research enquiry has also seen growth in literature around the problem of its definition. This blog-post lays out some of the conceptual frameworks for the mapping exercise taken up by CIS to look at digital humanities in India. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The ‘digital turn’ has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. The digital humanities have emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technology and the human subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the digital humanities discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. However, digital humanities is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The question of what is digital humanities has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of digital humanities – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the ‘digital’ itself as integral to humanistic enquiry. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions <em>for</em> the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s <em>of</em> digital humanities. David Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that ‘what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities.’<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in a series of posts over the next couple of weeks. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested frameworks, which we hope will inform also larger concerns of the digital humanities programme at CIS:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the ‘Nature of the book’, ‘any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another”<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a>The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this ‘technologised history’ of the humanities. Can the digital humanities therefore be an attempt to bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with digital humanities practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core digital humanities concerns, they are not all ‘digital humanists’ or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not digital humanities – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most digital humanities research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in digital humanities – where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno -social subject<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3] </a> as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and digital humanities. This comes with the perception of digital humanities being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities to reinvent themselves by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. Digital humanities has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching digital humanities as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of digital humanities in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying the digital humanities works with or tries to address this particular formulation of the digital humanities.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Locating these concerns in India, where the field of digital humanities is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on digital humanities still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says “Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others.”<a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The digital humanities then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates digital humanities from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of digital humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of these thoughts a little further and with a focus on the Indian context. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and digital humanities. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. Dave Parry “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ) <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp.3</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, <em>The Technosocial subject: cities, cyborgs and cyberspace</em> Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository@Inflibnet, Web, March 7, 2014.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>]. Latour, Bruno . "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means." Trans. Couze Venn <em>Theory Culture Society</em> . (2002): 247-260. Sage<em>. </em>Web, March 4, 2014 URL> <a href="http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf">http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a>
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Researchers at Work
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Digital Humanities
2015-03-30T12:47:27Z
Blog Entry