Centre for Internet and Society

Mapping Digital Humanities in India - Concluding Thoughts

sneha-pp — 2015-11-13T05:36:10Z

This final blog post on the mapping exercise undertaken by CIS-RAW summarises some of the key concepts and terms that have emerged as significant in the discourse around Digital Humanities in India.

The present exercise in mapping Digital Humanities (henceforth DH) in India has brought to the fore several learnings, and challenges in trying to locate the domain of enquiry even as our understanding of what constitutes new objects, methods and forms of research and pedagogy constantly undergo change and redefinition. Even as we wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the 'field' as such is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world and the term itself is yet to find a resonance in many quarters, other than a few institutions and a number of individuals. However, what it does do for us immediately, is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the 'digital', and what may be the new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large.

We began with the understanding that DH is a new space of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and practice with several possibilities for thinking about the nature of the intersection of the humanities and technology. The term was a little more than a found name of sorts, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The ubiquitous history of the term in humanities computing in the Anglo-American context has helped in locating and defining the field globally within the ambit of certain kinds of practices and scholarship in the contemporary moment. As most of the literature around DH even globally has pointed out, the problem with arriving at a definition is ontological, more than epistemological. The conditions of its emergence and existence are yet to be completely understood, although if one is to take into account the larger history of science and technology studies or even cyber/digital culture studies, these 'epistemic shifts' have been in the making for some time now. In India particularly, where a clear picture of the 'field' as such is still to emerge in the form of a theorisation of its key concerns, areas of focus or object of enquiry, it is only through a practice-mapping that one may locate what are at best certain discursive shifts in the way we understand content, structures and methods in the humanities, within the context of the digital. The fundamental premise of the nature of the digital and its relation to the human subject still lacks adequate exploration which would be required to define the contours of the field. The inherited separation of humanities and technology further makes this a complex space to negotiate, when the term may now actually indicate the need to decode the rather tenuous relationship between the two supposedly separate domains.

The question of methodology then comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. At present it looks like a combination and creative appropriation of methodologies drawn from different disciplines and creative practices. The change in the methodology of the humanities and social sciences itself as now longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH. The practice itself is still evolving, and while DH in the Anglo-American context can trace a history in humanities computing, with now an active interest in other spaces where the digital is an inherent part of the discourse, in India there has been little work in mainstream academic spaces such as universities or research centres, and some interest from the information and technology sector. As such the skills and infrastructure needed to work with large data sets and new technologised processes of interpretation and visualisation still remain outside the ambit of the mainstream humanities. This mapping exercise largely relied on interviews as part of its methodology, without any engagement with the actual practice, mainly because of a lack of consensus on what constitutes DH practice. However, through an exploration of allied fields such as media, archival practice, design and education technology, the study tries to locate how certain practices in these areas inform what we understand of DH today.

The archive, media and now to a certain extent art and design have become the sites for most of the discussions around DH in India, primarily because of the nature of institutions and people who have engaged with the question so far. Archival practice has seen a vast change with the onset of digitisation, and the growth of more public and collaborative archival spaces will also bring forth new questions and concepts around the nature of the archive and its imagination as a dynamic space of knowledge production. At a more abstract level, the nature of the text as an unstable object itself, now increasingly being mediated and negotiated in different ways through digital spaces, tools and methods would be one way of locating an object of enquiry in DH and tracing its connection to the humanities, which are essentially still seen as 'text-based disciplines'. What has been a definite shift is the emphasis on process which has become an important point of enquiry, and one of the many axes around which the discourse around DH is constructed. The rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, including traditional methods of teaching-learning, and the emergence of new tools and methods such as visualisation, data mapping, distant reading and design-thinking at a larger level would be some of the interesting prospects of enquiry in the field. The method of DH is however, necessarily collaborative and distributed at the same time, as evidenced by its practice in these various areas and disciplines.

While in the Anglo-American context the predominant narrative or raison d'etre of DH seems to be the so-called 'crisis' in the humanities, it may after all be just one of reasons, and not a primary cause, at least in the Indian context. Moreover, in a paradoxical sense the emergence of DH has been seen as endangering the future of the traditional humanities, in terms of a move away from certain conventional methods and forms of research and pedagogy. While this may be relevant to our understanding of the emergence of DH, understanding the emergence of the field as resolving a crisis also renders the discourse into a uni-dimensional, problem-solving approach, thus making invisible other factors, such as the technologised history of the humanities or several other factors that have contributed to these changes. The complex and somewhere problematic history of science and technology in India and the growth of the IT sector also forms part of this context, and will inform the manner in which DH grows as a concept, area of enquiry or even as a discipline. DH is yet another manifestation of changes that we have seen in the existing objects, processes, spaces and figures of learning, particularly the open, collaborative and participatory nature of knowledge production and dissemination that has come about with the advent of the internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what where earlier considered unifying notions for the university, namely that of reason and culture, which have now moved towards an idea of excellence based on a certain techno-bureaucratic impulse, as noted by Bill Readings in his work on the rise of the post-modern university[1].

If one may try to locate within this the debates around DH, the subject of this new discourse around the digital is also now rather unclear. One could explore the notion of the digital humanist, or in a more abstract manner the digital subject as one example of this lack of clarity or the distance between the practice and the subject, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, with English Department at the University of Jadavpur says, it is difficult to identify such a category of scholars, although a person who is able to situate his work in the digital space with the same kind of ease and confidence that people of a different generation could do in manuscripts and books would perhaps fit this description, and he is sure that such a person may be found. For example someone who knows Shakespeare well and can write a programme, and he is sure a day will come when this is a possibility. It is a familiarity in which the inherent distance between these two pursuits becomes lesser - DH is at that moment - a composite of these two approaches rather than the difference.

While many scholars concur with this explanation, others find the term misleading - humanities scholars do not call themselves 'humanists'. Also, by virtue of being a digital subject, anybody engaged with some form of digital practice is already a digital humanist of some sort. The problem also is in the rather unclear nature of the practice, all of which is not unanimously identified as DH, as a result of which not many scholars would want to identify with the term. As Patrik Svensson (2010) points out "The individual term digital humanist may be problematic because it may seem both too general in not relating to a specific discipline or competence (thus deemphasizing the discipline-specific or professional) and too specific in emphasizing the "digital" part of the scholarly identity (if you are scholar) or giving too much prominence to the humanities part of your professional identity (if you are a digital humanities programmer or a system architect). The more general and non-personal term digital humanities is more inclusive, but somewhat limited because of its lack of specificity and relatively weak disciplinary anchorage. For both variants, there is also a question of whether "the digital" needs to be specified at all, and it is not uncommon [9] to encounter the argument that technology and the digital are part or will be part of any academic area, and hence the denotation "digital" is not required" [2]. Svensson further points out that since the term, like digital humanities, has proliferated so much in academic spaces, through publishing and funding initiatives that it has become a term of self-identification, but it could be a reference to the digital as 'tool' rather that the object of study itself. However, he also speculates that given digital humanists work across several disciplines, their understanding of humanities as a construct is stronger as the identity is linked to it at large. [3]

This debate is importantly, symptomatic of a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, because of what seems to be a move away from the university to alternate spaces and modes of knowledge production. As Immanuel Wallerstein (1996) suggests, such a conflict of authority has already been documented earlier, in terms of the displacement of theology first and then Newtonian mechanics as dominant sources of knowledge, and the now in the manner in which the separation of disciplines is being challenged. The potential of technology in general and the internet in particular in democratising knowledge has been explored in several cases, with many such online spaces now becoming a suitable 'alternate' to the university mode of teaching and learning. What they have also given rise to are questions about the authenticity of knowledge produced and disseminated and who are the stakeholders in the process. The debates over MOOC's and the Wikipedia, and at some level the criticism that DH and certain methods like distant reading have attracted from traditional humanities scholars are a case in point. However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. DH, with its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and different kinds of knowledge drawn from a diverse set of practices definitely opens up space for a new mode of questioning; whether all of these different modes of questioning can coalesce as a new discipline or interdisciplinary field in itself will remain to be seen.

References

Patrik, Svensson, "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". Digital Humanities Quarterly,4:1 http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html 2010.
Readings, Bill, The University in Ruins Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.
Wallerstein, Immanuel, "The Structures of Knowledge, or How Many Ways May We Know?" Presentation at "Which Sciences for Tomorrow? Dialogue on the Gulbenkian Report: Open the Social Sciences," Stanford University, June 2-3, 1996 http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm

The author would like to thank the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore for support towards the fieldwork conducted as part of this mapping exercise, and colleagues at CIS and CSCS for their feedback and inputs.

Concepts/Glossary of terms

Ontology - A lot of the work being done to define DH is in fact to understand its ontological status, the nature of its being and existence. As pointed out in the part of this section, the difficulty in arriving at a consensus on a definition is largely due to a lack of clarity over the ontological basis of such a field, rather than its epistemological stake, which one may already be able to discern in a few years. There is a slippage due to a lack of connection between the history of the term and its practice, particularly in India, where DH is still a 'found term' of sorts. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities
Humanities - The predominant discourse in the Anglo-American context on DH seems to have set it up in a conflict with or as a threat to the traditional humanities disciplines, the causal link here being the 'crisis' of the disciplines. While there is such a narrative of crisis in the Indian con text as well, anything 'digital' is understood in terms of a problem-solving approach, and at another level seeks to further existing concerns of the humanities themselves, such as around the text. The important shift that DH may open up here is in terms of thinking about the inherited separation of technology and the humanities, and if it indeed possible now to think of a technologised history of the humanities.See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities
Digital - the debate around and interest in DH has reinforced the need for a larger and more elaborate exploration of the 'digital' itself, and as mentioned in an earlier post, deciphering the nuances of the current state of digitality we inhabit will be key to understanding the field of DH much better. This is challenging because India is a mutli-layered technological landscape, which is also quite dynamic, ever-changing and in a period of transition to the digital. Taking this back to more fundamental questions of technology and its relation to the subject would also provide more insights into DH.See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition
Subject - DH is a manifestation of the relationship between technology and the human subject, and provides different ways to negotiate the same. The 'digital humanist' as the likely subject of this discourse has remained largely undefined in this series of explorations, partly because of the lack of resonance with the term among humanities scholars and the fact that everybody at some level is already a digital subject, and therefore a digital humanist. An exploration of how the digital constitutes or constructs a subject position is likely to reveal better the nuances of this term and the reason for its relation to or distance from the practice.
Method - the methodology of a discipline is the connection between theory and field of practice, and the method of DH is still being developed. Whether it is data mining, distant reading, cultural informatics, sentiment analysis or creative visualisations of data sets drawing from aspects of media, art and design, the methodology and interests of DH are necessarily diverse and interdisciplinary. In many a case the distinction among methods, content and forms do blur as newer modes or approaches to DH come into being. This becomes a particular problem in understanding DH in the context of pedagogy and curricular resources, and would therefore require a rethinking of the understanding of a singular methodology itself.
Archive - A large part of the DH work in India seems to be focussed around the archive - both as a concept and practice. With the digital becoming in a sense the default mode of documentation across the humanities disciplines, and the opening up of the archive due to more public and digital archival efforts, the concept of the archive and archival practice have undergone several changes in terms of becoming now more networked and accessible. As mentioned earlier, we are living in an archival moment where there is a transition from analogue to digital, and it is in this moment of transition that a lot of new questions around data and knowledge will emerge. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment.
Text - the text has been one of significant aspects of the DH debate, given that the academic discourse on DH in the West and now in India is primarily located in English departments. The understanding of the text as object, method and practice as mediated through digital spaces and tools is an important part of the discourse around DH, and has implications for how we understand changes in the nature of the text, and reading and writing as technologised processes in the digital context. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance.
Process: An important point of emphasis in DH has been that of process, perhaps even more than content or outcomes. Given that the method of DH is collaborative and peer-to-peer, the processes of doing, making or teaching-learning etc become increasingly visible and important to understanding the nature of the field and knowledge production itself. More importantly, it also seeks to bring in the practitioner's experience into the realm of research and pedagogy.
Liminal : DH is a good example of a liminal space; which is a space that is on both sides of a threshold or boundary, and is therefore at some level undefined and transitional. The liminal space is often located at the margin of a body of knowledge or discipline, and it is at the margins of disciplines that new knowledge is produced. The discourse and even criticism around DH highlights the difficulties with defining the present nebulous nature of these liminal spaces and what they could transform into in the future. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy.
Interdisciplinarity - Closely tied to the notion of liminal spaces is the notion of interdisciplinarity. DH by nature is interdisciplinary, given that it draws upon methods and concerns from the other disciplines, but instead of limiting the definition to just this, it also provides a space to understand the challenges of negotiating and using an interdisciplinary approach to the humanities and other disciplines and develop these questions further. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy.

[1] See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.

[2] See Patrik Svensson. "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". Digital Humanities Quarterly,4:1 http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html

[3] Ibid.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Paper

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:22:29Z

The Digital Natives with a Cause? research inquiry seeks to look at the potentials of social change and political participation through technology practices of people in emerging ICT contexts. In particular it aims to address knowledge gaps that exist in the scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital and Internet technologies in social transformation processes. A conference called Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon was jointly organised by CIS and Hivos in the Hague in December 2010. The Thinkathon aimed to reflect on these innovations in social transformation processes and its effects on development, and in particular to understand how new processes of social transformation can be supported and sustained, how they can inform our existing practices, and provide avenues of collaboration between Digital Natives and "Analogue Activists".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/position-paper

Digital Natives with a Cause? Report

praskrishna — 2015-04-17T11:04:51Z

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/publications/dn-report

March 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-04-14T11:45:29Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the third issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. In this issue we bring you an overview of our research programs, updates of events organised by us, events we participated in, news and media coverage, and videos of some of our recent events.

Jobs
CIS invites applications for the posts of Developer (NVDA Screen Reader Project), Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge and Openness), and Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org.

Accessibility

CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. One of this is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another is for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages. CIS is also working with the World Blind Union and many other organisations to develop a Treaty for the Visually Impaired helped by the WIPO:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
Anandhi Viswanathan from CIS and Manojna Yeluri from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapters on Lakshadweep, Meghalaya and Uttar Pradesh:

The Lakshadweep Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, March 25, 2013): The union territory of Lakshadweep has not passed any legislation for persons with disabilities, but implements the provisions under the central laws. The benefits currently available to persons with disabilities in Lakshadweep include disability pension, unemployment allowance and grant for setting up kiosks.
The Meghalaya Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, March 25, 2013): Meghalaya is one of the few north-eastern states, which has appointed a Commissioner for Disabilities. Most of the schemes and benefits given to persons with disabilities in Meghalaya are under centrally sponsored schemes. Very few schemes are initiated by the state government.
The Uttar Pradesh Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, March 31, 2013): The Government of Uttar Pradesh has established shelter homes and vocational training centres in several parts of the states — most recently in Meerut, Bareilly and Gorakhpur. It has also undertaken to finance nearly 4340 corrective surgeries for polio across nine cities of Uttar Pradesh. It also intends to start several projects in 2013. These include the establishment of a Braille Press in order to produce Braille books, magazines and other study material.

Resources
We now have a new section on our website which contains all government notifications, RTI applications, and accessibility related resources: cases, statutes, etc. The following were published earlier this month:

Information about Schemes for Disabled Persons in Haryana We received this notification on schemes and policies for persons with disabilities from the Government of Haryana.
Haryana Government Notification (Hindi version): The notification that we received from the state government was in Hindi. We will put up the English translation soon.
West Bengal (Govt) Notifications: We received a series of notifications from the West Bengal Government from its various departments such as finance, higher education, transport, health and family welfare, labour, land and land reforms, panchayats and rural development, etc. OCR versions of the same have been published.
Lakshadweep (Govt) Notifications: Notifications received from the Lakshadweep Government including guidelines for functioning of KIOSKS, grant of unemployment allowance and special jobs to persons with disabilities, issuing identity card to persons with disabilities for availing government benefits, etc., are published. OCR versions have also been put up.

Event Participated In

A Discussion on Intercept between UNCRPD & CEDAW (organized by the Shanta Memorial Institute of Rehabilitation – Odisha, CBR Network and Mitra Jyoti, Bangalore, Karnataka, February 4, 2013): Anandhi Viswanathan participated in this event.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.

Wikipedia

Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of four members based in Delhi: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval, and one team member Dr. U.B. Pavanaja who is working from Bangalore office.

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project

Visualising Basic Parameters (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): Sajjad and Sumandro bring you a visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia in this first post on Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project. They look into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divide the visualisation into three different focus areas: (1) basic parameters, (2) geographic patterns of edits, and (3) exploring the topics that receives the greatest number of edits.

Events Organised

Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa (organised by CIS, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Goa, March 7, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team was invited by Nikhil Dixit from BITS to organise a Wikipedia editing session. Nitika Tandon led the session on IP editing.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by CIS, Institution of Engineers, JLB Road, Mysore, March 24, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led this workshop.

Events Co-organised

Wiki Women's Day in Goa (organised by the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Nirmala Institute of Education, Panaji, Goa, March 8, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop held on International Working Women's Day, and shares the developments in this report.
Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers (organised by Wikimedia India Chapter, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.

Upcoming Event

Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013 (co-organised with the Telegu Wikipedia community, Hyderabad, April 9 to 11, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan is participating in this event as a speaker. A public event will be held on April 11 from 5.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. at Golden Threshold (Sarojini Naidu's house) in Hyderabad.

Events Participated

Wikipedia Women's Workshop Bangalore 2013 (organised by Wikimedia India, Servelots Infotech, Jayanagar, Bangalore, March 8, 2013). The event was covered by Kannada Prabha on March 9, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.
Wikipedia at Avenir (organised by the Wikipedia community, Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Kolkata, West Bengal, March 11, 2013). CIS supported this event.

Event Report from Other Organisations
Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications Programme (HEIRA) of CSCS Bangalore to organize a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report.

Other Openness Updates

Event Report

Iraqi Public Data Scenario Workshop: A Summary (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): A workshop on public data was conducted by Sunil Abraham and Sumandro Chattapadhyay for the officials of the Government of Iraq. It was organized by UNDP Iraq in Amman, Jordan from October 18 to 23, 2012. Sumandro Chattapadhyay shares with us the developments from the workshop held over five days.

Event Participated

Open DataCamp - 2013 (organized by Open Data Camp, Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram (inside Christ University Campus), Dairy Circle, Bangalore, March 2 and 3, 2013): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.

HasGeek
HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works from the CIS office in Bengaluru.

Upcoming Events

Pig Workshop (organized by HasGeek, Alchemy Solutions, Domlur, Bangalore, 9.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.): A workshop on how to use Pig for mining useful information from data. It is open to programmers who have a background in Java programming, some familiarity with Hadoop and MapReduce algorithms, and have worked with large chunks of data.
The Fifth Elephant 2013 (organized by HasGeek, July 11 to 13, 2013, NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore).

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes. Currently, CIS is doing a project with Privacy International, London to facilitate research and events around surveillance, and freedom of speech and expression.

Privacy

Policy

Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill (April 2012): High Level Concerns (by Elonnai Hickok, March 12, 2013). The post examines the high level concerns that CIS has with the April 2012 draft of the Bill.
Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 Analysis (by Jeremy Gruber, Council for Responsible Genetics, US, March 19, 2013). Jeremy provides an analysis of the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012. He says that India’s updated 2012 Human DNA Profiling Bill offers largely superficial changes from its predecessor, the Draft DNA Profiling Bill, 2007.

The Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013: A Citizen's Draft (by Bhairav Acharya, March 26, 2013). Bhairav Acharya has drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013. It contains provisions that speak to data protection, interception, and surveillance and also establishes the powers and functions of the Privacy Commissioner, and lays out offenses and penalties for contravention of the Bill. The Bill represents a citizen's version of possible privacy legislation for India, and will be shared with key stakeholders including civil society, industry, and government.

Upcoming Events

A Privacy Round Table in Delhi (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, April 3, 2013).
A Privacy Round Table in Bangalore (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Jayamahal Palace, Jayamahal Road, Bangalore, April 20, 2013).

Event Organized

Analyzing the Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 (organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, March 1, 2013): Maria Xynou shares a summary of the workshop in this report.

Events Participated In

Global Partners Meeting @ London (organized by Privacy International, London School of Economics and Political Science, March 22 – 25, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Malavika Jayaram participated in the event.
India’s Civil Liberties Crisis: Of Bans, Blocks, Bullying and Biometrics (organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March 28, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker.
Future of Privacy in India (organized by DSCI and ICOMP, Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, April 5, 2013). Sunil Abraham is a speaker at this event.

Blog Posts

Hacking without borders: The future of artificial intelligence and surveillance (by Maria Xynou, March 15, 2013). In this post, Maria looks at some of DARPA´s artificial intelligence surveillance technologies in regards to the right to privacy and their potential future use in India.
Driving in the Surveillance Society: Cameras, RFID tags and Black Boxes... (by Maria Xynou, March 26, 2013). Maria examines red light cameras, RFID tags and black boxes used to monitor vehicles in India.
Microsoft Releases its First Report on Data Requests by Law Enforcement Agencies around the World (by Maria Xynou, March 27, 2013). CIS presents Microsoft´s report on law enforcement requests, with a focus on data requested by Indian law enforcement agencies.
The Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2013 — Penalising 'Peeping Toms' and Other Privacy Issues (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013). The pending amendments to the Indian Penal Code, if passed in their current format, would be a huge boost for individual physical privacy by criminalising stalking and sexually-tinted voyeurism and removing the ambiguities in Indian law which threaten the privacy and dignity of individuals.

IT Act

Featured Blog Post

CIS Welcomes Standing Committee Report on IT Rules (by Pranesh Prakash, March 27, 2013). CIS welcomes the report by the Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation, in which it has lambasted the government and has recommended that the government amend the Rules it passed in April 2011 under section 79 of the Information Technology Act. The post was quoted in: The Times of India (March 28, 2013), The Statesman (March 28, 2013), Economic Times (March 28, 2013), Data Quest (March 28, 2013), and The Hindu (April 1, 2013).

Submissions
Bhairav Acharya, on behalf of CIS submitted comments to the Committee on Subordinate Legislation of the 15^th Lok Sabha for the following rules:

Comments on the Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 316(E) on April 11, 2011.
Comments on the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 313(E) on April 11, 2011.
Comments on the Information Technology (Guidelines for Cyber Cafe) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 315(E) on April 11, 2011.

Note: The above rules were submitted earlier but published on our website only recently.

Unique ID Project

Event Organized

Unique Identity Number (UID), National Population Register (NPR), and Governance (organized by CIS and Say No to UID Campaign, TERI, Bangalore, March 2, 2013): CIS interviewed Usha Ramanathan and Anant Maringanti. Watch the videos uploaded in this blog post by Maria Xynou. This was covered in newzfirst on March 3, 2013 and in the Hindu on March 3, 2013.

Interview

Unique Identification Scheme (UID) & National Population Register (NPR), and Governance (by Elonnai Hickok, March 14, 2013). The post examines the UID, NPR and Governance as it exists in India. A video on the UID interview Questions and Answers is published.

News and Media

Indian ID crisis unveils Aadhaar doubts (ZDNet, March 14, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
New $1 Billion RIC Project Casts Doubts on Aadhaar (AEG India, March 16, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Blog Entry

India's Biometric Identification Programs and Privacy Concerns (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013).

Free Speech and Expression

News and Media

Foreign Funding of NGOs (by Prashant Reddy, Open Magazine, March 2, 2013).
Iceland’s proposed porn ban ‘like repression in Iran, N. Korea’ – activists (RT, March 1, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Chidambaram to Talk Budget on Google+ Hangout (by Dhanya Ann Thoppil, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Responding to govt requests is a challenge for online firms: Colin Maclay (LiveMint, March 13, 2013). Colin M. Maclay, managing director of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard mentioned CIS.
Indian police set up lab to monitor social media (originally published by AFP, March 18, 2013, and also carried in Global Post on the same day). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Namaste, Mr. Eric Schmidt (by R. Jai Krishna, Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Parliament panel blasts govt over ambiguous internet laws (by Ishan Srivastava, The Times of India, March 28, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
What if the Net shut down for a few days (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, March 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Press controls ‘send wrong message to rest of world’ (by Jerome Starkey from Johannesburg, Francis Elliott from Delhi and David Brown, The Times, UK).

Event Organized

Freedom Song: Film Screening and Discussion (IIHS Bangalore City Campus, March 21, 2013). Freedom Song, a documentary film produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust and directed by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi was screened.

Events Participated In

Is Social Media Incredible? (organized by Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, Bangalore, March 2, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated in a panel discussion. The New Indian Express published a post-event report.
Rethinking the Internet: The Way Forward (organized by Telecom Italia and Financial iTimes, Telecom Italia Future Centre, Italy, March 21 – 22, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.

Others

Events Organised

DML 2013: Fourth Annual Conference (co-organised by CIS and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central, Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2013). We had a special track that ran through the conference on "Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)". Noopur Raval was one of the 16 presenters that we had selected on the tracks. Nishant Shah was one of the members in the Conference Committee.

Blog Posts

WGIG+8: Stock-Taking, Mapping, and Going Forward (Fontenoy Building, conference room # 7, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, February 27, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was the moderator for the session. A summary of the discussion has been published.
What’s In a Name? — DNS Singularity of ICANN and the Gold Rush (by Sharath Chandra Ram, March 31, 2013). March 2013 being the 28th birthday of the first ever registered Internet domain as well as the exigent launch of the Trademark Clearing House disguised as a milestone in rights protection by ICANN for its new gTLD program, Sharath Chandra Ram, dissects the transitory role of ICANN from being a technical outfit to the Boardroom Big Brother of Internet Governance.
An Introduction to Bitfilm & Bitcoin in Bangalore, India (by Benson Samuel, March 12, 2013). Video of the event organized by CIS on January 23, 2013 is published in this blog post.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access and will touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules will be published in a new website: www.internet-institute.in.

Upcoming Event
We are hosting an “Institute on Internet and Society” in collaboration with the Ford Foundation India, which is to be held from June 8, 2013 to June 14, 2013. Call for registration and relevant details will be announced soon on our website.

The following units have been published:

Internet Protocols (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 18, 2013).
How email works, how do you get your email? Email Protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP), SPAM/Phishing (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 19, 2013).
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 19, 2013).
ITU sectors — ITU-R, ITU-T, ITU-D, etc. (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 27, 2013).
World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 29, 2013).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility of telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Newspaper Column

Are India's Glory Days Over? (by Shyam Ponappa, Organizing India Blogspot, March 8, 2013, originally published in the Business Standard, March 6, 2013).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Events Participated In

Video Vortex # 9 Re:assemblies of Video (organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, Post Media Lab, Moving Image Lab, Leuphana, et.al, February 28 – March 2, 2013). Nishant Shah gave the key note. Videos of the event are published.

Digital Humanities

From 2012 to 2015, the Researchers @ Work series is focusing on building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. We organised the first Habits of Living workshops in Bangalore last year. The next workshop is being held in Brown University

Event Co-organised

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects (co-organised with Brown University, March 21 – 23, 2013, Brown University, Rhode Island). Nishant Shah was a speaker at this event. He made a presentation on network ontologies.

Event Participated

Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World (organized by Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National University of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Seoul, March 27 – 29, 2013). Nishant Shah was a speaker at this event. He spoke on "The Asian Intercourse: Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ in networks".

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2013-bulletin

Future of the Commons: A Conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Indian Languages, and Archives Conference Report

Soni Wadhwa, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Garima Agrawal and Nishant Shankar — 2024-08-06T03:24:53Z

We are pleased to share our report on the ‘Future of the Commons: A Conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Indian Languages, and Archives’ conference, held in July 2024 at the Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited (MKCL) in Pune.

Organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and MKCL, the conference explored the development of localized or Indic generative AI models, state of digital commons, and the role of public institutions such as archives and digitization movements. It featured a mix of panel discussions, roundtables, and workshops, providing a platform for policymakers, civil society organizations, academia, researchers, technologists, archivists, and creative practitioners to exchange views and collaborate. The keynote address by P. Sainath, founder of the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), dwelled on the importance of digitization and archives in India. He emphasized the role of human translators in maintaining the authenticity of stories and the socio-political implications of digitalization on low-resource languages.

The themes discussed at the conference included:

Ongoing Efforts and Innovations in AI:

Current state of research and development of localized generative AI systems.
Use-cases of generative AI products in Indian languages.
Challenges with the availability of training datasets and dependency on big tech.
Open-source development of generative AI models.

Development and Use of Digital Commons:

Digitizing, preserving, and using knowledge and cultural heritage for training AI models.
Practices and challenges in archives and digitization movements, especially in Indian languages.
Role of open knowledge movements and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions.

Future of AI, including LLMs, in Indian Languages:

Designing AI systems that contribute to the digital commons.
Incentivizing expansion, foregrounding diversity, and safeguarding digital commons.
Role of law, policy, ethics, and algorithmic justice.

The conference concluded with participants emphasizing the need for multidisciplinary collaboration, fostering trust in AI applications, and importance of democratization of technology and data.

We invite you to read the full report for a comprehensive view of the discussions and recommendations that emerged.

If you would like to participate in further discussions on this topic, please write to us at anubha@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/report-on-the-future-of-the-commons

The Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond

sneha-pp — 2016-01-28T08:25:18Z

Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.

The Zen of Pad.ma

Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.

Biographies

Sebastian Lütgert, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.

Jan Gerber, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma

RAW Lectures #02: Anil Menon on 'Speculative Fiction and Freedom' - Video

sneha-pp — 2016-02-09T08:38:19Z

Anil Menon spoke on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom' at the second event of the RAW Lectures series in Bangalore on January 13, 2016. Here is the video recording of the talk and the discussion that followed.

RAW Lectures

The Researchers at Work programme initiated the RAW Lectures series to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes. The lectures also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

Lecture #02 - Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom

Anil Menon’s research work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Intl J. of Neural Networks, Neural Proc. Letters, IEEE Trans On Evolutionary Computation, Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, British J. of the History of Science, and Small Business Economics. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Interzone, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, Jaggery Lit Review, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His stories have been translated into German, French, Chinese, Romanian and Hebrew. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and the Carl Brandon Society's 2011 Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books 2012), an international anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana epic. His most recent work is the novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015).

More: http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon.

Download

Video: MP4, OGG, and Torrent.

The video is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon-video

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16)

sumandro — 2016-02-27T06:19:33Z

The first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16) will be organised at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, on February 26-28, 2016. The focus of the Conference is on the experiences, adventures, and methods of 'studying internet in India.' We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), JNU, for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for the generous support. It is a free and open conference. Please use the form to register.

It is our great pleasure to announce the beginning of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), an annual conference series initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward.

This conference series is specifically driven by the following interests: 1) creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions, 2) foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, 3) accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and 4) exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Conference, IRC16, is engaging with the theme of 'studying internet in India.' The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

Dates and Venue

The IRC16 will take place during February 26-28, 2016, at the Convention Centre of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are grateful to Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for its generous support.

Registration and Programme

Conference programme: Download (PDF).

Programme booklet: Download (PDF).

[Important] Invitation letter to help you enter JNU campus: Download (PDF).

Please register for the Conference here: Form (Google).

We apologise for not being able to provide travel or accommodation support.

Etherpads

#Methods&ToolsForInternetResearch : https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-InternetResearch

#DigitalDesires: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-DigitalDesires.

#InternetMovements: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-InternetMovements.

#WebOfGenealogies: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-WebOfGenealogies.

#MinimalComputing: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-MinimalComputing.

#STSDebates: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-STSDebates.

#ArchiveAnarchy: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-ArchiveAnarchy.

#ManyPublicsOfInternet: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-ManyPublicsOfInternet.

#DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins.

#FutureBazaars: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-FutureBazaars.

#PoliticsOnSocialMedia: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-PoliticsOnSocialMedia.

#SpottingData: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-SpottingData.

#WikiShadows: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-WikiShadows.

#FollowTheMedium: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-FollowTheMedium.

#AFCinema2.0: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-AFCinema2.0.

#LiterarySpaces: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC16-LiterarySpaces.

Resources

Call for sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call.

Proposed sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-sessions.

Selected sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions.

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in pre- and post-conference conversations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16

The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India (Excerpt)

sumandro — 2016-02-14T10:11:09Z

In a recently published paper, Jahnavi Phalkey and Sumandro Chattapadhyay explore public initiatives in technological solutions for educating the poor and the disadvantaged in independent India. Here is an edited excerpt from the paper that traces the recent history of technological solutions for mass education and unpacking the narrative of ‘failure’ that is associated with the Aakash experiment.

Students at Pardada Pardadi Education Society in Anupshahr, Uttar Pradesh, use the Aakash tablet in class as part of a pilot project introducing the low-cost computer into rural schools. Photograph by Sonali Campion, April 09, 2013: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonalicampion/9449250639/.

In 2010, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India launched a set of prototype devices of an affordable tablet computer, the development and production of which were to be supported by the Ministry as part of its larger ICTs for education project. This device later came to be known as the “Aakash” tablet, and the project went through several iterations, between 2010 and 2014, of not only technological re-designs, but also institutional arrangements to design, develop, manufacture, test, and procure the devices.

Technological Solutions for Mass Education

Our exploration of technological solutions for mass education in India has taken us through a not-so-linear history of projects that have informed the imagination and making of the Aakash project. This include the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, or SITE (1975); University Grants Commission-led Countrywide Classroom project (1984 -); the Simputer, the first hand-held device developed in India (1998); the Hole in the Wall project developed and led by Sugata Mitra (1999); the Government of India-led EDUSAT (2004); National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (2003); and finally, a national online education portal named Sakshat (2006). The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment itself terminated rather quickly, but it led to several versions of television based instruction programmes, most notably aimed at higher secondary and university students. Instruction in the broadcast-format continues to date, even after the arrival of the internet and the fact it has become the preferred medium for the Indian state. The television has not been replaced, but certainly shadowed by a variety of internet access and computing devices.

Aakash, a “Low Cost Access-Cum-Computing Device”

An early official description of the then-nameless tablet as a “low cost access-cum-computing device” is noteworthy [1]. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary computing device that does not also function as an access device (say, to the internet). Where does the need for calling it an “access-cum-computing” device come from? It comes, perhaps, from the hierarchy of priority – the device is primarily an access device, and secondarily can perform the function of a general-purpose computer. An archaeological reading of the assumptions of learning processes embodied in this device reveals an earlier layer of thinking – that of broadcasting educational programmes to television sets via satellite connection. Labelling it as “access-cum-computing” frames the object as being shaped by the residue of the Indian state’s education technological experiences of the past, including that of the SITE initiative.

“[The] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled”

Throughout the short history of the Aakash device, the verdict of “failed innovation” figures prominently – from the early failure of "Sakshat" [2], to allegations of the Chinese origin of the Aakash device [3], to manufacturing troubles and under-production of the device [4], to criticisms of the tablet’s built quality and computing capacity [5], to mistrust and failed collaborations between parties involved in its production [6], and intra-governmental criticisms of the implementation process [7]. Moreover, there remained a continuous tension within the government itself regarding the necessity of the project, especially fuelled by (and fuelling) the image of the project as being driven by the dreams of a specific minister [8].

To simply describe the Aakash project’s failure as one due to the unbearable heaviness of functions ranging from the technical to the symbolic and political is to fall short of a full explanation. Alongside that narrative of failure, it is critical to foreground the quiet success of the project in establishing the tablet computer as a near-essential and familiarised everyday object for access to educational material. There is an alarming accuracy in the MHRD claim that the Aakash project established a sub $100 tablet market in India – it did, even if it was not for the device they wanted to promote [9].

The Device is the Desire

We observe that the Aakash project, as well as the ones preceding it, have been driven primarily by a desire to scale up the provision of education. The initiatives towards building delivery infrastructures for such mass-scale provision of education has almost always been accompanied by a larger desire for developing capabilities in space exploration, communication, and computing – the key technologies of twentieth century geopolitics. Our study of the manufacturing of the Aakash tablet, and its surrounding discourses, foreground the technological imagination of the state after liberalisation in India (1991), and its unique arrangements and efforts to create domestic capability of technological innovation in a context of globalised production and communication networks. We see our role as one of recovering the work of technology in the history of education as understood through the interactions between the state, academia, and industry.

Archival Research in (Increasingly) Digital India

Documenting the project has been an interesting historical exercise. We have been attentive to documents disappearing from their online locations. One remarkable possibility for archival research opened up by the internet is the (limited, and often uncertain) ability to access materials that are not presently available on a website, but were part of it in the past. This possibility allowed us to access a few crucial government documents that are not directly available on the official websites any more. We have also been attentive to the reiterations and revisions that do not merely overtake or shadow earlier documents. They sometimes erase earlier documents altogether as digital revisions. We do not have access to personal correspondence or internal institutional correspondence relating to the project. We are, however, skeptical of that happening as no protocols for the archiving of digital correspondence is yet in place with the Government of India. Doing recent history of India is becoming an ever more difficult exercise that historians must urgently attend to, if we are to make the present ready to have its own past in the future.

References

[1] Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. “The History of Aakash Low Cost Access cum Computing Device.” Sakshat. October 05, 2011. http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf.

[2] Mukherjee, Arindam. “Bonsai Netbooks.” Outlook. February 16, 2009. http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Bonsai-Netbooks/239719.

[3] Raina, Pamposh, and Mia Li. “India’s ‘Aakash,’ Now Made in China.” The New York Times. November 26, 2012. http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/india%E2%80%99s-super-cheap-tablet-now-made-in-china/.

[4] Nanda, Prashant K., and Surabhi Agarwal. “Government Close to Giving Up on Aakash Project.” Mint. March 22, 2013. http://www.livemint.com/Politics/fmEi8gsOSFgOzSTFfLsw6J/Govt-almost-gives-up-on-Aakash-says-no-point-in-hardware-ob.html.

[5] Chopra, Ritika. “Kapil Sibal's Cheap Aakash Proves to be a Dud.” Mail Today. January 08, 2012. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/kapil-sibal-cheapest-tablet-of-world-aakash-failure/1/167730.html.

[6] Julka, Harsimran. “14 Lakh Aakash Tablets Booked in 14 Days.” The Economic Times. January 03, 2012. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/14-lakh-aakash-tablets-booked-in-14-days/articleshow/11345695.cms. Parthasarathi, Ashok. “Cloudy Outlook for Aakash.” The Hindu. May 21, 2012 (Updated: May 22, 2012). http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3439629.ece.

[7] Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Government of India. Report No. 19 of 2013 - Union Government (Civil) - Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Compliance Audit Observations. Government of India. 2013. http://www.cag.gov.in/content/report-no-19-2013-compliance-audit-observations-union-governmentcivil.

[8] At an event in late 2013, Kapil Sibal admitted, “[the] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled, I tried hard...” Quoted in Press Trust of India. “Kapil Sibal: Aakash Tablet is My Unfulfilled Dream.” Financial Express. December 24, 2013. http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapil-sibal-aakash-tablet-is-my-unfulfilled-dream/1211284/0 .

[9] See [1].

Note: This is an edited excerpt from a paper titled ‘The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India’ recently published in History and Technology, on 5 February, 2016. The paper can be accessed here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142 (the first 50 downloads are free).

Cross-posted from South Asia @ LSE Blog.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-education-in-india-excerpt

Digital Native: Getting through an election made for the social media gaze

nishant — 2019-04-28T04:12:45Z

In the poll season, social media platforms thrive on wounded outrage disguised as politics.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in Indian Express on April 21, 2019.

There is palpable excitement as the most populous democracy in the world goes out to vote. Last election, which saw the saffron sweep, we realised the role of social media platforms in electoral politics. From the controversial selfie by the aspiring Prime Minister flaunting the lotus symbol, that was reported as violating the advertisement rules set by the Election Commission, to the mass mobilisation of ideology-based voters, orchestrated by automated bots and the hashtag brigades of #acchedin, there was no denying that digital strategies are going to form the backend of a robust political campaign.

In a country of hypervisible lynch mobs staged via WhatsApp, polarised hatred exacerbated by armies of trolls, and the fluency with which hate speech has been normalised on the tweetosphere, social media and digital apps are front and centre in this election. People are coming out of voting booths and, even before the exit pollsters catch them, they are making Snapchat videos and “I voted” selfies, clearly identifying the parties they support. The verified social media accounts of leading political parties are doubling down on their poll promises of a communal purge of “infiltrators”, divine curses for the heretic who doesn’t vote for the “party of gods”, and threats of profiling if a community voted for the correct party and subsequent dire consequences. The door-to-door campaigning of the past has obviously been replaced by the tweet-to-tweet mixture of threats, cajoling, and blood lust that seems to set the tone for our current political climate.

At the same time, the manifestos of the two leading coalitions, as well as the affidavits of the people running for office, are under deep public scrutiny. The BJP, in a Freudian blooper, announced itself as working for violence on women, incurring the sarcastic wrath of Twitter. One minister, who has been running through various cabinet positions, including education, was called to task to explain her wide repertoire of unverified degrees that change every voting season. Complaints against suspicious Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) have made themselves heard loudly on social-media discussion forums. And lately, the YouTube videos of people allegedly showing the easy removal of the indelible ink from the voting fingers, exploded into public view, jeopardising the integrity of the one-person-one-vote paradigm.

Social media, it would seem, is everywhere. And its ubiquity is ensuring that all stakeholders of the electoral process are performing for the social media gaze. Our leaders are talking in tweet-sized morsels, hoping to get their last messages in. The organisers of the massive process have taken to debunking false claims, providing verified information, and guiding people to their voting processes. The voters are not only wearing their party colours, but also canvassing for their favourite leaders, either through proclamations of patriotism or through emotional messages of voting against hate and discrimination. Voting groups are scrutinising and discussing the party manifestos and also the unexpected alliances coming into being in the quest of reaching the majority mark.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze

P.P. Sneha - Mapping Digital Humanities in India

sneha-pp — 2016-12-31T05:56:49Z

It gives us great pleasure to publish the second title of the CIS Papers series. This report by P.P. Sneha comes out of an extended research project supported by the Kusuma Trust. The study undertook a detailed mapping of digital practices in arts and humanities scholarship, both emerging and established, in India. Beginning with an understanding of Digital Humanities as a 'found term' in the Indian context, the study explores the discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. Further it inquires about the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today; transformations in the objects and methods of study and practice in these spaces; and the shifts in the imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and its linkages with humanities practices.

Download: Mapping Digital Humanities in India (PDF)

Foreword

What different forms do digital humanities (DH) research and expertise take around the world? My colleagues and I investigated this question for our report on Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective. In some places, we struggled to find resources on local practices in DH, but fortunately in India we could draw upon the excellent work of P.P. Sneha and the Centre for Internet and Society. In a series of insightful blog posts, Sneha explored the implications of technology for humanities scholarship and surveyed digital humanities practices in India.

Now Sneha has brought this work together in “Mapping Digital Humanities in India.” Rather than falling into naive boosterism or superficial critique, this report plumbs deep questions about humanistic knowledge in a digital age: What do we make of textuality in a digital environment? How might digital tools and platforms contribute to conflicts about authority? How does digital infrastructure affect how humanities research can be practiced? Sneha probes the complexities of these questions, drawing from theorists such as Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault as well as digital humanities scholars such as Franco Moretti and Patrik Svensson.

From this strong theoretical foundation, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” explores specific challenges and possibilities for DH in India, synthesizing rich interviews with a range of Indian scholars. Sneha notes that digital humanities is in an “incipient stage” in India, given the persistence of the digital divide in much of the country, the association of the term with a specific history in the Anglo-American context, and concerns about the uncritical embrace of technology. The report highlights several Indian projects that demonstrate how technology can be used to create and disseminate humanistic knowledge. Creating online resources in Indic languages poses challenges, especially inputting languages and translating between them. To create an online variorum of Nobel prize-winning author Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra had to develop a Bangla character set. Bichitra enables readers to collate texts at the level of the chapter/canto, paragraph/stanza or word. In the realm of film and video, Indiancine.ma (which archives Indian films from the pre-copyright period) and Pad.ma (which houses found and deposited audio, video, and allied materials) offer powerful annotation tools and open up the archive into a space for interpretation and collaboration.

As digital humanities scholars attempt to move past a limited, Anglo-American perspective, “Mapping Digital Humanities in India” provides a model for how we can understand local practices in DH and connect them to ongoing discussions about humanistic knowledge. Through this report, readers can navigate central issues in digital humanities, explore the Indian context, and critically examine culturally based assumptions about DH practices.

- Lisa Spiro, Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Rice University, Texas, USA

Executive Summary

In the short time span that the term ‘digital humanities’ (henceforth DH) has been around in the Indian academic landscape, it had generated much discussion and debate about the changes in humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy that have come about with the digital turn. What are the spaces and roles of digital technologies in the humanities, and by extension in the arts, media, and creative practice today? How has it transformed objects and methods of study and practice in these spaces? What does it tell us about the relationship between the humanities and technology? Perhaps most importantly, what is our imagination of the ‘digital’ itself, and how does it shape our humanities practices?

These are but a few of the questions that this study on mapping key conversations and actors around the term DH tries to explore in some detail. While the study began as an attempt to understand the growing interest around the term itself in India, its scope has extended to explore what specific contexts and conditions are in place in India that give it critical purchase. Five universities now offer various programmes in DH in India - ranging from a Master’s degree to certificate courses, and there have been several workshops, winter schools, seminars and one national level consultation over the last five years. Academic and applied practices focus on building of digital archives, film studies, game studies, textual studies, cultural heritage and critical making to name just a few. While these efforts have managed to create a growing interest in DH, there is still a lack of consensus on what exactly constitutes the field in India. Thus, questions around definition, ontology, and method remain pertinent, as does the need for recognition by the national academic bureaucracy.

Context is another important factor here - most global narratives of DH reiterate a predominantly Anglo-American narrative that draws from a history in the field of humanities computing, as well as a crisis in higher education, particularly in the humanities and liberal arts. The efforts to map different histories of DH in the last couple of years, seen in the emergence of fields such as postcolonial DH and feminist DH, then point to diverse locations, and more intersectional perspectives from which the discourse around the field is being shaped. This is an important opportunity to better contextualise the debates around the digital as well – where conditions and hierarchies of access and usage, transition from analogue to the digital, and the notion of ‘digitality’ itself need to be defined and understood better. In India, with initiatives such as the Digital India programme, and the increasing push for the adoption of digital technologies in every sphere from education to governance, and now a steady push towards a digital economy, there is already a tremendous amount of investment in the idea of the digital by a diverse group of stakeholders. These advancements, and the enthusiasm, must be read within the context of a rather chequered and uneven history of the growth of science and technology in India, the advent of the internet and adoption of ICT4D, and existence of digital divides at different levels. The changing higher education system in India, and criticism around a profit-driven model of education, along with the entry of a large number of private actors in the field in the form of MOOCs and other online platforms in the last few years also contribute to this growing interest in DH, as also much of its criticism. In fact, the global discourse on DH and its linkages with shifts in government funding has seen increasingly polarized positions, with many humanities scholars being uncertain about the political or critical stake of the field, and a concern about the its focus on certain kinds of methods and skill sets at the expense of more traditional ones.

In India, the discourse around DH has largely remained within an academic context so far, although emerging creative practices in art, design and media may have been asking questions of a similar nature for some time now. These include efforts to understand changes in objects of enquiry from analogue to digitised and born digital artifacts, and the need for new methods of work and study that are necessitated by these new digital objects. The process of ‘digitisation’ itself is one fraught with several challenges, and demands a closer look – what are tools, resources and skills available for digitisation or creation of new digital cultural artifacts, and the context that facilitates their creation and active use in humanities research and practice. The ‘text’ as the primary cultural artifact or object of enquiry in the humanities, has undergone several changes with digitisation. Working with digital texts that are fluid and networked, and most often in languages other than English bring forth several new questions that are not only technological but also conceptual. The emergence of new digital cultural archives and online repositories, owing to the (marginally) increased access to internet and digital technologies and the growth of a culture that facilitates collecting and sharing, has greatly expanded the scope of engagement with these questions. The archive in fact forms a significant part of the discourse around DH in India - the challenges and prospects offered by digital cultural artifacts are quite diverse, ranging from modes of documentation, preservation and curation to dissemination over online spaces, and there is a need to understand these in greater detail. Infrastructure emerges as an important political and conceptual question here – while an interest in technological advancement and innovation, and the growth of a culture of free and open access to knowledge to some extent has helped facilitate work in the humanities at large, the lack of access to funding, expertise, and of course adequate, and advanced physical and technological infrastructure , such as computational methods often limits the kind of work that can be done with digital artifacts.

The implications of these changes for the study and practice of humanities are several, particularly with respect to traditional methods of pedagogy and scholarship. The access to resources like Wikipedia and devices like the mobile phone have facilitated a move towards more distributed, non-hierarchical, and individualised models and practices of learning, which simultaneously are premised upon new kinds of centralisation, hierarchies, and aggregation of information. The need to develop new forms of digital pedagogy as well as creating more spaces for such conversations within and outside the academic context would be crucial here. This growth of digitally-engaged humanities practice raises pertinent questions about how exactly the “digital turn” is transforming the humanities, its practice and politics. DH being an interdisciplinary field also offers the possibilities to engage with creative, often alternative practices that exist at the margins of mainstream academia, thus trying to encourage collaborative work across different domains of expertise. The inherited separation of disciplines, or even humanities and technology as suggested by the term DH, may then be contentious here, as it creates the opportunity to explore a twinned history of humanities and technology.

While the field of DH in India continues to develop slowly but surely, and hopefully widely, as more institutions and individuals become engaged with DH and related works, these key questions around its history, methods, and scope will continue to remain pertinent over the next years. For us at the Centre for Internet and Society, studying DH at this historical juncture when the Indian state is rushing towards embracing the “digital” provides a critical lens to understand and engage with the reconfigurations in modes and practices of arts and humanities scholarship and pedagogy in particular, and digital economies of knowledge in general.

CIS Papers

The CIS Papers series publishes open access monographs and discussion pieces that critically contribute to the debates on digital technologies and society. It includes publication of new findings and observations, of work-in-progress, and of critical review of existing materials. These may be authored by researchers at or affiliated to CIS, by external researchers and practitioners, or by a group of discussants. CIS offers editorial support to the selected monographs and discussion pieces. The views expressed, however, are of the authors' alone.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india

Digital Native: The Dream of the Cyborg

nishant — 2017-02-02T14:56:37Z

We have arrived at hybrid realities, where the technological and the human cannot be separated. The digital future we had once imagined is already here.

The article was published in the Indian Express on January 8, 2017.

The digital is not just in the future, it is the future. If we do a broad overview of where things are, we realise that almost everything we do, own, and are, is touched by digitality. Here are two short thought experiments. Look around you, think about your day, do a quick stocktaking exercise of things that you possess and communicate with, and try and think of one thing that is untouched by the digital. You realise that digital is not just the visible smart screens and computing devices. It works in insidious and networked ways to shape the world as we understand it. From the food we eat, that comes to our supermarkets, accompanied by barcodes that track it to the money that sits in our banks, and is now available only through digital transactions; from your own body that is being probed by digital health care instruments as well as its connectivity with digital objects, to the very idea of nature in the face of simulation models of climate change, we realise very quickly that the digital is now the default context of our life. The scope of digital might be uneven — there might be varying levels of access and literacy — but this is increasingly becoming the beginning point of all our realities.

Let’s do a reverse thought experiment. Look around you again, review the different processes, products and people around you, and try and find something that is purely digital and has no connection with anything that is human, natural or social. You will also arrive quickly to the conclusion that while the digital operates with agency, constructing smart things and cities, and shaping and facilitating our lives in ways that we can’t imagine, the digital is still incredibly human and social. The algorithms that can seem to be independent, still implement human visions. The robots — physical and virtual — that interact with us, are still engaging with and shaping the human factors. The purely technological is as difficult to find as the purely non-technological or natural.

These realisations, quotidian as they are, are indicative that we live hybrid realities, where the technological and the human cannot be separated, and, indeed, it is impossible to extricate one from the other. It is easy to look at the phone in a hand and say that one is a device, the other is a hand. But the device only has meaning once it is in a hand, and the hand that is used to the comfort of that phone feels like it is missing something when the phone is removed. We live fused lives. We are getting enmeshed in visible and invisible digital networks in ways that are unprecedented. The digital future that we had once imagined, is already here.

Despite this cyborg reality, when we think of the future, we continue to make clear and discrete separations between the human and the technological. We imagine new modes of life and living, where we will either have achieved singularity, where the human self could be converted to code and thus transferred to a new body when the biological body gives up. Or, it could be a state where nanotechnological robots will be rushing through our body, cleaning, preserving and saving, making us live forever. We dream of the world being connected through unceasing data streams so that all our devices can speak to each other. This is the imagination of a hyperconnected world, where we live with the Internet of Things.

However, it is good to realise that the Internet of Things is actually the Internet of Everything. It doesn’t mean that everything we see will be connected on the Internet. On the contrary, what it means is that everything that gets connected to the Internet will be considered a thing. One of the biggest challenges that the digital future poses to us, is how to understand our notions of being human. As the digital becomes the default way by which we are identified, stored, sorted, remembered, and kept alive, it becomes important to realise that as we turn digital, we turn into things. The data which was supposed to be a part of us, often becomes something that stands for us, and in some instances, replace us. What emerges with it is a new data reality, where we are represented only by things — data — that is then governed, shaped, and controlled, as a way of governing and forming the human subject. Thus, you don’t need to be killed in person — it can be done merely by deleting your data and identity from all databases, rendering you without support. Similarly, you do not need to be confined, but the data that you leak in all your everyday activities becomes a way by which you can be tracked, so that the entire world becomes your cage where you can be seen. You don’t need to necessarily have human contact, you can just connect using an algorithm, without really knowing whether the thing on the other end is human or not.

As we celebrate the Internet of Things and a future where all things stay connected, it would be important to dwell on what happens to the human being when it also becomes a thing in this connected network.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-8-2017-digital-native-the-dream-of-the-cyborg

Digital transitions in the newsroom: How are Indian language papers adapting differently?

zeenab — 2017-02-03T01:50:20Z

In a new report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Centre for Internet and Society, Zeenab Aneez explores how Indian newsrooms are adapting their workflow and processes to cater to an increasing digital audience and the implications these changes have on how journalists produce news.

This was published on the website of the London School of Economics and Political Science on January 16, 2017.

Global discussions about how the rise of the Internet has impacted journalism and news publishers has involved accounts of newspapers stopping publication altogether, or bringing their presses to a halt in order to direct resources to publishing solely digital content as in the case of Newsweek or the Independent. Large newspapers like The New York Times and The Guardian have successfully managed to transition from print only publications to multimedia news providers, bringing out both print and digital news but this is an ongoing and costly process.

In the Indian context however, things are a bit different, especially with regard to Indian language newspapers whose print business remains profitable, which positively impacts the dynamics of this transition. For our report, we interviewed over 30 senior editors, managers and rank-and-file journalists of three newsrooms – Hindustan Times, Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama – to understand how large Indian newspapers are reorganising themselves to cater to the demands of the digital space.

It has always been known than the print industry in India is still growing and we found that this leaves big Indian newspapers in a more comfortable position when it comes to investing in digital operations. Contrary to our assumptions, we discovered that these newspapers are taking aggressive steps to capture India’s growing digital audience and while Hindustan Times’ transition is very similar to English-language newspapers abroad, both Malayala Manorama and Dainik Jagran have adopted approaches that are specific to their niche audience and their position as market leaders.

Expansion rather than transition

In contrast to the Hindustan Times, which has reorganised and equipped its existing print newsroom to do print as well as digital and mobile journalism, both the Indian language newspapers have focused on launching digital operations that run parallel to the print newspaper organisation.

This involved creating new brands (Jagran Online, Jagran Josh, Manorama Online), opening up new offices and hiring new personnel geared towards putting purely digital media products, that are not limited to news.

Sukirti Gupta, CEO of MMI Online explains, “When we started thinking of our digital strategy, we were not looking so much at news but asking if there are new areas of growth as a media company and content was the first thing that seemed exciting for us. We looked at two genres that we thought would be great – health and education.”

Jagran Online includes ten websites covering news, health, entertainments, blogging and classifieds. Manorama Online lists fifteen websites as part of their operations, of which about ten are news, feature or content websites while the rest include a matrimonial site, classifieds and portals for real estate listings and doctor’s appointments.

Changing rhythms in the newsroom

The production and distribution of digital news content for Malayala Manorama and Dainik Jagran is handled primarily by their respective digital counterparts from a separate newsroom. In adopting this approach, both newspapers have partially shielded their traditional newsrooms from the difficulties that arise when moving from a print to a digital newsrooms. At the same time Manorama Online and MMI Online, which operate as start-ups within these incumbent organisations, partially avoid the inertia that comes from their established organisational and professional cultures. Although print reporters are not directly involved with the digital publication, they continue to be the primary source of news for the website and mobile applications and have to adapt their workflow according to the demands of the online space.

This means that breaking news, a prominent feature of online news, has been made a priority for all reporters. “The journalism remains the same,” says Santosh Jacob George, Editor, Manorama Online, “the only difference is that we have to break the news ourselves while print has the whole day to produce the story. We’ve requested our print reporters to file first for online, either directly into the CMS or via WhatsApp.” At Dainik Jagran, Digital Editor Shekhar Tripathi, has the right to ask a reporter to file the story immediately for the website. “First our policy was print but now online is our first priority, but not at the cost of print. If a story breaks at 8 am, it first comes to me on WhatsApp. If I’m interested, I ask the reporter for more details and then to file the story. Our print reporters have gotten into the habit of filing stories online, they give us the facts first and add perspective later,” he says.

This change in rhythm has not come easily to the print newsrooms which are accustomed to filing stories towards an evening deadline but efforts by management are towards promoting a systematic collaboration between the print and online desks. Dainik Jagran’s Chief Editor has made digital a part of every journalist’s Key Result Area (KRA). “So it’s not just the digital team’s responsibility but now everyone has it in his list of duties and responsibilities to support digital,” explains Gupta. At Malayala Manorama, a clear set of guidelines to streamline workflow were introduced; ‘They called in senior people from print to have detailed discussions on this and our senior editors also visited individual bureaus and spoke to reporters there,’ informs an associate content producer, recalling efforts to sensitise print journalists to the demands of digital news.

Emergence of new forms of newswork

Apart from the changes in workflow, the medium demands the use of various new tools and methods to gather, publish and distribute news. This has resulted in the emergence of new kinds of newswork performed by a new category of news workers. At the Hindustan Times newsroom, this work is performed by journalists who work on the online and audience engagement desks while at Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama, it is carried out by ‘content producers’ of the digital newsrooms. Although writers and editors for Manorama Online are journalism graduates who have also undergone journalism training specific to MM’s writing styles and journalistic values, they are designated as ‘content producers’ to differentiate their role from that of print journalists. At MMI Online, content producers do not necessarily possess prior journalistic experience, but have experience in web content production.

These content producers are social media savvy, have an eye for trending topics, are acutely aware of their competition and feel directly responsible for performance of their stories and subsequently, revenue. “We have to be very quick and prepare keyword-stuffed, trending news in a matter of minutes. It’s a race not just to get clicks but to retain the audience,” informs a junior content producer at Jagran Josh. “In print, your job [is], you write your story and you are done. With online we are more responsible for the outcomes. A well-researched story may not garner too many views so we have the option and the responsibility to package and redistribute the story until it finds the audience,” explains a senior content producer at Manorama Online.

Aside from these key observations, our interviews revealed the increased use of audience analytics combined with the introduction of new applications like Chartbeat and Parse.ly that analyse performance of stories and aid in editorial decision making, the increased use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as a source of news and distribution, experiments with new forms of storytelling, especially with the use of mobile phones and a renewed focus on hyperlocal news especially in the case of Indian-language publications.

Our findings, which are limited to observations of what changes are taking place within newsrooms and how this is impacting journalists, open up several questions about the current state of journalism in India, the increasing interdependence on social media platforms, especially Facebook, the use of external software to make editorial decisions, the evolving role of journalists in digital newsrooms and finally, the question of developing a sustainable business model for news on the web.

This article is based on a report co-authored by Zeenab Aneez, Sumandro Chattapadhyay from the Centre for Internet and Society, Vibodh Parthasarathi of the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Milia Islamia and Rasmus Kleis Nielson of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The open access report can be read and downloaded on the Reuters Institute website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/london-school-of-economics-and-political-science-january-16-2017-digital-transitions-in-the-newsroom-how-are-indian-language-papers-adapting-differently

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17)

sumandro — 2018-07-02T18:29:55Z

With great pleasure we announce the second edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), an annual conference series initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward. The Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) will be held at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. It is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT-B and the CIS.

Registration is closed now.

Propose open sessions here.

Agenda (final): Download (PDF)

Programme: Download (PDF)

Poster (high resolution): Download (JPG)

IRC17: Key Provocations

Two critical questions that emerged from the conversations at the previous edition of the Conference (IRC16) were about the digital objects of research, and the digital/internet experiences in Indic languages. As we discussed various aspects and challenges of 'studying internet in India', it was noted that we have not sufficiently explored how ongoing research methods, assumptions, and analytical frames are being challenged (if at all) by the becoming-digital of the objects of research across disciplines: from various artifacts and traces of human and machinic interactions, to archival entries and sites of ethnography, to practices and necessities of collaboration.

We found that the analyses of such digital objects of research often tend to assume either an aesthetic and functional uniqueness or sameness vis-à-vis the pre-/proto-digital objects of research, while neither of these positions are discussed in detail. Further, we tend to universalise the English-speaking user's/researcher's experience of working with such digital objects, without sufficiently considering their lives and functions in other (especially, Indic) languages.

These we take as the key provocations of the 2017 edition of IRC:

How does the becoming-digital of the research objects challenge our current research practices, concerns, and assumptions?
How do we appreciate, study, and theorise the functioning of and meaning-making by digital objects in Indic languages?
What research tools and infrastructures are needed to study, document, annotate, analyse, archive, cite, and work with (in general) digital objects, especially those in Indic languages?

This conference series is specifically driven by the following interests: 1) creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions, 2) foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, 3) accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and 4) exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Dates and Venue

The conference is being hosted by the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) during March 03-05, 2017.

Address: 26/C, Electronics City, Hosur Road, Bangalore, 560100, location on Google Map.

Session Details and Notes

Day 01, Friday, March 03

#DigitalIdentities: Details and Etherpad

#IndicLanguagesAndInternetCohabitation: Details and Etherpad

#SelfiesFromTheField: Details and Etherpad

#HookingUp: Details and Etherpad

Day 02, Saturday, March 04

#DotBharatAdoption: Details and Etherpad

#DigitalPedagogies: Details and Etherpad

#MaterializingWriting: Details and Etherpad

#RenarrationWeb: Details and Etherpad

Day 03, Sunday, March 05

#ArchivesForStorytelling: Details and Etherpad

#ObjectsOfDigitalGovernance: Details and Etherpad

#OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing: Details and Etherpad

Session Selection Process

Call for sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-call.

Selected sessions: http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selected-sessions.

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in pre- and post-conference conversations.

About the IRC Series

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) initiated the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) series to address these concerns, and to create an annual temporary space in India, for internet researchers to gather and share experiences.

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,
foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and
exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The Conference was constituted by eleven discussion sessions (majority of which were organised around presentation of several papers), four workshop sessions (which involved group discussions, activities, and learnings), a book sprint over three sessions to develop an outline of a (re)sourcebook for internet researchers in India, and a concluding round table. The audio recordings and notes from IRC16 are now being compiled into an online Reader. A detailed reflection note on IRC16 has been published.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-04-10T09:22:29Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Introduction

In the 21^st Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies.

The young are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “ Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in processes of social and political change.

Methodology

In 2010-11, three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners, educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements? What are the relationships that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable citizen action outside of institutionalisation?

Rationale

One of the knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc. which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book.

Structure

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

We see this book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital (alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice, which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the present to change our futures.

Click here to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues

Nishant Shah

Fieke Jansen

For media coverage and book reviews, read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook