Centre for Internet and Society

Exploring the Digital Landscape: An Overview

sneha — 2014-04-14T15:48:30Z

One component of the Digital Humanities mapping exercise was a series of six research projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore over November 2013-March 2014. These studies attempted to chart various aspects of the digital landscape in India today, with a focus on emerging forms of humanistic enquiry engendered by the Internet and new digital technologies. This blog post presents a broad overview of some of the key learnings from these projects.

The six research studies commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS as part of the collaborative exercise to map the Digital Humanities (DH) were formulated within a broad rubric of exploring changes at the intersection of youth, technology and higher education in India. Apart from existing questions about the digital divide, and the possibilities of increased connectivity and availability of new sources of information due to proliferation of digital tools and access to the Internet, the projects also tried to address in some way the problem of understanding and formulating a research enquiry about the ‘digital’ itself. The digital as a mode of existence or being, or a new ‘social’ or as discussed in the earlier blog-posts, is essentially a premise of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world. While the studies focus largely on youth and higher education and so are located with a certain context, they do attempt to address larger questions about understanding the digital landscape in India today, with reference to new and changing practices of interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the humanities.

Just to recapitulate from an earlier blog-post; the following were the studies commissioned:

Survey of Printed Digitised Materials in Bengali – an extensive survey and report of printed digitized materials in Bengali across a few selected themes. The objective of this exercise is to map the nature of available digitized materials and explore possibilities of their use in the higher education classroom.
Researcher: Saidul Haque, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Confessions in the Digital Age – looks at the rising trend of ‘confession pages’ on social media, most of which are located in an educational context, and explores the manner in which the digital space and its assumed anonymity has reconfigured this practice and the interaction between youth and technology.
Researcher: Rimi Nandy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Queer Expression in the Online Space – this study explores the concept of digital citizenship with a focus on how youth from the LGBTQ community engage with digital technologies such as social media, mobile phones and radio to negotiate questions of identity politics, activism and citizenship in cyberspace.
Researcher: Ditilekha Sharma, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Creating Knowledge: Mapping the nature of Content and Processes on the English Wikipedia - analyses the nature of content produced on Wikipedia, with a focus on the representation of women and gender-related topics to explore if online knowledge platforms contain and perpetuate a systemic gender-bias.
Researcher: Sohnee Harshey, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
From the Streets to the Web: Feminist Activism on Social Media– an ethnographic exploration of social media platforms to explore how feminist activists have engaged with digital technology and if this has allowed for a redefinition of political organization and new forms of activism within the movement.
Researcher: Sujatha Subramanian, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

This exercise was also an attempt to build on some of the learnings from a four-year programme undertaken by HEIRA-CSCS titled ‘Pathways to Higher Education (supported by the Ford Foundation), which looked at the problem of quality of access in higher education for students from disadvantaged sections of society, particularly with respect to the digital and linguistic divide. The emphasis therefore was on understanding how young people, who are known as digital natives, negotiate with these rapidly changing modes of communication and learning. The projects therefore are located in institutional spaces and primarily address the demographic of 18 – 35 years, although there are exceptions as in the case of the studies on Wikipedia and the Bengali archival materials. Most of the studies draw from conventional methods of humanities and social sciences research, largely consisting of ethnographic and textual analysis, interviews and surveys. Adapting these methods to the digital domain, or rather formulating new research questions and methodology that is adequate to understand the nuances of the digital sphere was one of the key challenges of this exercise. Some of the learning outcomes from these studies may be summarized under the following themes:

The Emergence of the (Digital) Public Sphere

The advent of the internet and digital technologies has largely been considered enabling, in terms of what it allows you to do and be both in the real and virtual worlds. The growth of online activism in the last couple of years is indicative of this change to a large extent. This has been particularly true of traditional forms of activism that have now adopted the digital space, such as the LGBTQ or feminist movements. A majority of the respondents in the studies focussing on these two themes have endorsed the positive aspect of activism in the online space, in terms of organising people and connecting civil society and the community, and bringing these issues into the mainstream. Most felt that the internet offers a space, and a relatively safe one at that, to talk about issues related to sexuality and gender. Not only in terms of its potential to garner large numbers, disseminate information and create wider transnational networks, the online space can now also be seen as the space where the activism originates, rather than merely supplementing or facilitating traditional on-the-ground movements. As such, the digital has evolved into an alternate critical public sphere were the discourse around identity, citizenship, and socio-political participation has become more varied, even if not yet adequately nuanced.

While most of the studies endorse the democratising potential of the internet and digital technology, particularly that of mobile phones which have made these networks and resources accessible to a larger cross-section of people, many have also speak about the replication of several forms of systemic injustice and marginalisation that exist in the real world in the online space. The project on the gender-gap on Wikipedia cites examples of such a politics of exclusion in the knowledge-making process, not just with respect to content on Wikipedia, but also in the inclusion of women in the process of content-generation. Respondents in the other two projects on activism also spoke of instances of gendered violence and abuse, often a repercussion of being vocal online, thus highlighting the problematic duality of the condition of being visible and vulnerable. The imperative of creating safe online spaces to voice opinions, show solidarity or express dissent has been stressed by a majority of respondents in these studies.

Being Digital: Visibility and Accessibility

Moving from the question of doing to being, a paradox about the online space has been the way in which it accords a certain hyper-visibility, and increasingly makes invisible people and discourses, many a time not by choice. The option of anonymity accorded by the online space has been important for many voices of dissent to find expression, and for non-normative discourse to become visible in mainstream debates. However, the problems of anonymity can be several, as seen in the case of the study on the Facebook confessions. ‘Performance’ is an important aspect of these confessions; whether it is in the nature of a comment on another person or a representation of the self. The creation and performance of identities has been a significant component of studies on digital and cyber culture studies. The internet as facilitating performance of a certain gendered identity, while also in some ways obscuring certain others – as in the case of the marginalisation of lesbian, bisexual or transsexual individuals within the queer community is a case in point. Further the visibility accorded to issues in the online space is also conditional, in terms of what gets viewed, discussed and acted upon. The Wikipedia study discusses this in terms of a ‘covert alliance-building’ of editors or consensus on what goes up online.

Another positive attribute of the online space as reiterated by most people in the projects was that of increased accessibility - to networks, people and resources. But as is evident from the earlier paragraph, such accessibility often comes with a caveat - the conditions of the access are also as important. In the case of the survey on Bengali materials, the availability of a large corpus of materials in various spaces and the efforts to digitse them is an insufficient measure given the poor accessibility to such digitised materials available online, due to issues of copyright, metadata, technological support and lack of subject expertise. Accessibility is an important aspect of being digital as understood in the project on mapping the digital classroom. While students in most undergraduate classrooms have access to digital devices in one form or the other, the use of these devices in learning is contingent upon several factors such as student and teacher competence and comfort, and the ease to adapt to changing teaching-learning environments given cultural and linguistic divides. More importantly, the perception of the internet or digital technologies as a tool to merely facilitate communication or learning, rather than a space of critical engagement is the predominant understanding, with few notable exceptions.

New Knowledge-making Practices

Combining the being and doing in the online space are the new modes of knowledge formation engendered by this medium. The Wikipedia is illustrative of the process of collaborative knowledge production, and the politics inherent therein. The problems and challenges of digitisation and archival practice as evident in the study of the Bengali digitised materials is also an example of this knowledge vs information conundrum. However the connect with higher education, as in the availability of scholarly materials in regional languages in the latter case, and the need to acknowledge non-traditional sources as scholarly as in the former, are some of the immediate challenges identified by these studies. The model of annotations and referencing, as made possible by collaborative and dynamic knowledge repositories is an important concern of the DH debate as well, in terms of questioning existing hierarchies of authorship and expertise.

The bringing in of non-normative discourse on sexuality and gender into the mainstream, and the emergence of new issues in some sense has also been facilitated by the online space to some extent, even if within certain exclusive communities or spaces. An example of this is in terms of narratives of pleasure in feminist discussions, which seem to have found a space online but not so much in debates otherwise seen in India.

Changes in learning and pedagogic practice are an important aspect of new knowledge-making practices, and as mentioned earlier this is apparent in classrooms today given that students and faculty recognise the potential of digital technologies. However, the primacy of textual material in most classrooms, and a certain reluctance to engage with digital media and texts on the part of faculty and students in a substantive way is an attribute of the classroom today. Indeed, ways of reading and writing have changed with the onslaught of technology; as the study on confessions demonstrates communication on social media and mobile phones have evolved a different linguistic forms, both in English and regional languages. This and the problem of an information clutter, or ‘excess’, without the option of verifiability in most cases, is one of the major concerns of faculty with regard to technology.

While the projects in themselves may have only indirectly contributed to our understanding of DH, the process of formulating these questions and trying to find some answers to them have been insightful, particularly with respect to the problems with understanding technology, the importance of form and process, and the growth of alternative spaces of learning, all which are relevant to the DH discourse. For some reflections on the individual projects, see the guest posts by the researchers on CIS-RAW; the complete research reports are available at http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira/irps/heira/documents

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

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

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:48:16Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sneha — 2014-04-14T07:12:32Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confession in the Digital Age

sneha — 2014-04-14T07:06:11Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Digital Humanities Discourse: The Knowledge Question on the Wikipedia

sneha — 2014-04-04T06:34:14Z

The emergence of alternative modes and spaces of knowledge production has been a core concern of the Digital Humanities, particularly with respect to the collaborative or public archive. Wikipedia, as a collaborative knowledge repository indicates a shift in the ways of imagining knowledge as dynamic and ever-changing, thus bringing to the fore questions of authorship and authenticity, which are also questions for the Digital Humanities. In this guest blog post, Sohnee Harshey presents a reflection on her research study on the gender-gap on Wikipedia, and the politics of collaborative knowledge production.

The problems of Wikipedia are not entirely unknown. The Wikipedia Editors Survey Report, 2011 revealed that around 91% of the contributor base of Wikipedia is male and Wikipedia acknowledges the non-neutrality of its articles resulting from a ‘systemic bias’. Some would ask: what is the problem with negligible female participation on a volunteer-based online encyclopaedia?

The Wikipedia has come to be our point of reference for everyday queries. It has become a popular source even for those in the higher education system-for quick information and even as a starting point for academic writing. With the increased rate of distribution and access, it is necessary that the content on this platform must not get caught up in societal hierarchies and prejudices. Visibility on the Wikipedia inadvertently also confirms that a topic is something worth knowing. The converse is also true. The specific composition of the contributors is reflected in the topics on which more articles are written, often representing certain cultures and points of view more than others. The greater problem is ‘how’ certain topics are written about and the social prejudices that are ingrained therein.

Attempting to examine the resultant discourse of knowledge production, my plan was to look at content pertaining to women, in India, on the English Wikipedia. Alongside, I proposed to interview active Wikipedians to understand the process of deliberation while creating content and their opinion on the gender gap. For the content, I chose to pick three themes in which systemic sexism was likely to be most deep rooted- Violence against Women, Women and the Law and Women in the Public Sphere. I did so based on the following pointers:

a) the commonplace understanding of and attitudes towards women and their roles,

b) taking forward the discussion and debate around women’s rights especially with increased reporting of crimes against women in the national news, and

c) the need to highlight contributions of women artists and performers, in the public sphere which has traditionally been a ‘male’ domain.

In the first theme, my intention was to get an idea of what issues are raised in the article, what is described and how and what is the intention of this description as obvious to the first time reader. In the second, I attempted to look at how the rights of women are communicated to a heterogeneous audience through entries on existing and/or prospective Acts and legislations. In the third, I selected entries on Indian female folk artists, female actors, classical dancers and television personalities to note the quality of articles, the presence or absence of information and perspectives on life stories. I also attempted to trace an editing history in some cases reflecting popular interest in these topics as well as drawing attention to the subtle creation of a discourse. In all of these, I also looked at the kind of references used to get an idea of the knowledge-network.

While it would be unfair to make generalizations about the Wikipedia based on this small sample, I find it pertinent to make certain observations. Firstly, as Wikipedia continues to grow as a source of knowledge, one must raise critical questions about what its source of information is. The question of the ‘knowledge loop’ becomes important here-what information is used to constitute a Wikipedia entry, what is the ‘truth claim’ of the sources (especially newspapers, in the case of celebrities) and how does the Wikipedia entry in turn also inform these sources or even a research paper like mine?

Wikipedia’s editing feature is one of its biggest strengths. Information is updated in real time, vandalism is contained and content is discussed at great lengths, if necessary (albeit after it has been put up). While the possibility of continuous editing may bring in various perspectives, the whole exercise remains one of attempting to get ‘closest to the truth’. Moreover, if a user accesses this online encyclopaedia at a certain point in its ongoing editing history and finds for example, that the introductory paragraph about a female artist has a statement on her failed marriage, does that not negatively inform that individual’s perspective on the artist and is that not a problem?

Though ostensibly Wikipedia Category Pages list topics in alphabetical order, eliminating any systemic hierarchies about which topics are more worth knowing, I see the links in the Wikipedia entries in the form of the ‘See Also’ headings as an example of the creation of a discourse. For example, what am I expected to want to read after reading an entry on a rape case? More rape cases, or legislations, or feminist theory? What an article links to therefore, is what is first-considered worthy enough to be known, second-remains in public memory and third-becomes the definition for knowledge on that subject.

Though the respondents in this study say that there is no covert alliance-building process while editing or creating entries, it seems obvious that the ‘consensus’ that they talk about becomes not so much a question of what is right and should be included as per a moral guideline, but more of how many editors’ support one gets on the viewpoint one is advocating for.

Keeping these issues in mind, it seems important to me to critically look at the educative function that Wikipedia has begun to play, especially in students’ lives. While the ‘information function’ is laudable, it must be remembered that the organization of content on Wikipedia, as it exists today needs reworking at multiple levels if one has to challenge hegemonic knowledge practices and bring in content sensitive to the needs of marginalised groups. The inclusion of more and more women editors on Wikipedia then is not THE solution, but a necessary starting point.

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-discourse-knowledge-question-on-wikipedia

A Queer Digital Humanities Experience

sneha — 2014-04-04T06:30:52Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:47:27Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Humanities in India- Mapping Changes at the Intersection of Youth, Technology and Higher Education

sneha — 2014-03-05T12:21:52Z

As part of the collaborative exercise on mapping the field of Digital Humanities in India, a series of short-term research projects were commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore in November 2013. A day-long workshop was organized at CIS on January 28, 2014 to discuss the learning from these projects and explore questions for further engagement with the field.

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS, in collaboration with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore has initiated a short-term project to map the nature of work being done in the field of Digital Humanities (DH) in India. The mapping exercise comprises of conversations with key people working in higher education, digital technology, media, digitization and archival practice and other allied fields, and an overview of institutions and research undertaken in DH in India. The project also includes a series of short-term commissioned research studies on emerging digital habits, socio-political participation, citizenship and identity politics and new modes of research and pedagogy in the humanities in India. A brief description of the studies is as follows:

LGBT Youth and Digital Citizenship – this study explores the concept of digital citizenship with a focus on how youth from the LGBT community engage with digital technologies such as social media, mobile phones and radio to negotiate questions of identity politics, activism and citizenship in cyberspace.
- Researcher: Ditilekha Sharma, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Mapping the nature of Content on Wikipedia - analyses the nature of content produced on Wikipedia, with a focus on the representation of women and gender-related topics to explore if online knowledge platforms contain and perpetuate a systemic gender-bias.
- Researcher: Sohnee Harshey, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Feminist Activism and Use of Social Media – an ethnographic exploration of social media platforms to explore how feminist activists have engaged with digital technology and if this has allowed for a redefinition of political organization and new forms of activism within the movement.
- Researcher: Sujatha Subramanian, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Confessions in the Digital Age – looks at the rising trend of ‘confession pages’ on social media, most of which are located in an educational context, and explores the manner in which the digital space and its assumed anonymity has reconfigured this practice and the interaction between youth and technology.
- Researcher: Rimi Nandy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Survey of Digitised Materials in Bengali – an extensive survey and report of printed digitized materials in Bengali across a few selected themes. The objective of this exercise is to map the nature of available digitized materials and explore possibilities of their use in the higher education classroom.
- Researcher: Saidul Haque, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Mapping the Digital Classroom - maps the changes in classroom teaching-learning practice with the advent of digital technology – how do students and teachers respond to the use of digital content and technology in the classroom, how are these resources/tools accessed, used and shared and what are the changes necessitated in curricula and pedagogy as a result.
- Researchers: Shrikanth BR, Jain University, Sushmitha Sridhara, independent researcher and Vijeta Kumar, St. Joseph’s College of Arts and Sciences, Bangalore

HEIRA-CSCS has engaged with some of the above questions as part a four-year project titled ‘Pathways to Higher Education (supported by the Ford Foundation), which looked at the problem of quality of access in higher education for students from disadvantaged sections of society. The present collaborative mapping exercise aims to build on some of the learnings from this project, particularly with respect to the linguistic and digital divide in higher education. The short-term research studies were commissioned by HEIRA as part of this initiative, to be conducted across multiple locations in India over a period of two-three months beginning from Nov/Dec 2013.

Workshop on Digital Humanities

With the objective of bringing together the above researchers, other stakeholders in DH and higher education, and the larger team at HEIRA-CSCS and CIS for a discussion on the projects and to explore future directions, a day-long workshop was organized at CIS on January 28, 2014. The workshop included detailed discussions and feedback on the research projects, as well as a larger group discussion on questions and themes pertinent to digital humanities research in the Indian context.

A key concern was that of defining the field itself, and the problems of conflating DH with the existing fields of research such as cyber culture or digital culture studies. The need to directly address the question of technology itself was also seen as pertinent to research in digital humanities, in terms of method and content. This brought up related questions such as how one imagines the internet or the larger digital space, what it enables and the modes of representation that are already available, and the new conceptions of the self, citizenship, activism and forms of identity that are generated in this space. More importantly, does technology change the way in which some of these questions are asked was a crucial point of discussion.

The possibilities of these modes of learning being introduced in the classroom and whether they can transform traditional teaching-learning practices were also discussed to some extent. This was particularly taken up in relation to Wikipedia as a collaborative knowledge repository, along with the larger debates around representation of knowledge and questions related to politics and activism around or generated by alternative knowledge practices. The importance of the ‘link’ as a deeper conceptual category (here in the context of the internet, say the hyperlink), and the possibility of it becoming a site of politics itself was a suggestion that came up in the discussion. The de-territorialisation of knowledge that a discursive space like Wikipedia allows is important in understanding and further problematising knowledge production practices, which would form a key aspect of DH research. The importance of distinguishing information from knowledge was also emphasized, and more pertinently, the problems of attribution of an authority to knowledge that has been collaboratively produced and with verification were other questions taken up for discussion. Wikipedia then could be seen as an incipient form of knowledge, wherein verification is inherent in the technology that is used in the process of knowledge production. The possibility of using the data that Wikipedia can generate to then reframe some of these questions were also discussed to some extent. The notion of data, or rather ‘big social data’ and how that can be used to now study cultural and social practices is a central premise in DH, and it was generally agreed that this needs to be addressed in a substantive manner in future engagement with these questions.

A related question was that of the archive, and more specifically the model of the collaborative and public archive that is becomingly increasingly prevalent given the proliferation of gadgets and new technologies of digitization. While this is a positive move with respect to preservation of materials, particularly in regional languages, accessibility to these materials online, and more importantly their use in scholarship still continues to be a problem, which needs to be urgently addressed. Digitisation needs to therefore make the material more flexible and active – our imagination of the archive also needs to follow an ‘outward logic’ of producing new layers of knowledge around material rather than an inward one of just preservation.

The workshop also addressed some very pragmatic concerns related to methodology and the manner in which one frames a research enquiry about the digital space - including sketching the domain of enquiry and formulating research questions that can adequately explore and capture the nuances of changing social-cultural practices in the digital realm. While the problem of defining DH as a new domain of enquiry still remains, the discussions helped bring to the fore what could be pertinent and substantive areas of further engagement in the field.

Click here to find the workshop schedule.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-in-india-mapping-changes-at-intersection-of-youth-technology-higher-education