Centre for Internet and Society

Call for Essays: Offline

sneha-pp — 2018-08-20T06:58:05Z

Who is offline, and is it a choice? The global project of bringing people online has spurred several commendable initiatives in expanding access to digital devices, networks, and content, and often contentious ones such as Free Basics / internet.org, which illustrate the intersectionalities of scale, privilege, and rights that we need to be mindful of when we imagine the offline. Further, the experience of the internet, for a large section of people is often mediated through prior and ongoing experiences of traditional media, and through cultural metaphors and cognitive frames that transcend more practical registers such as consumption and facilitation. How do we approach, study, and represent this disembodied internet – devoid of its hypertext, platforms, devices, it's nuts and bolts, but still tangible through engagement in myriad, personal and often indiscernible ways. The researchers@work programme invites abstracts for essays that explore dimensions of offline lives.

Offline

Does being offline necessarily mean being disconnected? Beyond anxieties such as FOMO, being offline is also seen as disengagement from a certain milieu of the digital (read: capital), an impediment to the way life is organised by and around technologies in general. However, being offline is not the exception, as examples of internet shutdown and acts on online censorship illustrate the persistence and often alarming regularity of the offline even for the ‘connected’ sections of the population.

State and commercial providers of internet and telecommunication services work in tandem to produce both the “online” and the “offline” - through content censorship, internet regulation, generalised service provision failures, and so on. Further, efforts to prioritise the use of digital technologies for financial transactions, especially since demonetisation, has led to a not-so-subtle equalisation of the ‘online economy’ with the ‘formal economy’; thus recognising the offline as the zones of informality, corruption, and piracy. This contributes to the offline becoming invisible, and in many cases, illegal, rather than being recognised as a condition that necessarily informs what it means to be digital.

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the "offline". Please submit the abstracts by Sunday, September 02.

We will select 10 abstracts and announce them on Wednesday, September 05. The selected authors are expected to submit the first draft of the essay (2000-4000 words) by Friday, October 05. We will share editorial suggestions with the authors, and the final versions of the essays will be published on the researchers@work blog from November onwards. We will offer Rs. 5,000 as honourarium to all selected authors.

Please submit the abstracts (300-500 words) as a text file via email sent to raw@cis-india.org, with the subject line of "Offline".

The essays, for example, may explore one or more of the following themes:

Geographies of internet access: Infrastructural, socio-political, and discursive forces and contradictions
Terms, objects, metaphors, and events of the internet and their offline remediation and circulation
Minimal computing, maker cultures, and digital collaboration and creativity in the offline
Offline economic cultures and transition towards less-cash economy
Offline as democratic choice: the right to offline lives in the context of global debates on privacy, surveillance, and data justice
Methods of studying the "offline" at the intersections of offline and online lives

Please note that the scope of essays need not be limited to the topics mentioned above but may address other dimensions of offline lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-offline

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

sneha-pp — 2018-09-06T14:14:47Z

In response to a recent call for essays that explore various dimensions of offline lives, we received 22 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 10 pieces to be published as part of a series titled 'Offline' on the upcoming r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts.

1. Chinar Mehta

2. Cole Flor

3. Elishia Vaz

4. Karandeep Mehra

5. Preeti Mudliar

6. Rianka Roy

7. Simiran Lalvani

8. Srikanth Lakshmanan

9. Titiksha Vashist

10. Dr. Yenn Lee

Chinar Mehta

In September 2017, a student of Banaras Hindu University was allegedly sexually harassed by two persons on a motorcycle while she was walking back to her hostel. Taking the discourse around this event as the starting point, the essay argues that the solutions offered for the safety of women align with the patriarchal notions of surveillance of women. The victim is twice violated; once during the act of sexual harassment, and twice when bodily privacy is exchanged for safety (exemplified by security cameras across the BHU campus). In fact, the ubiquitous presence of security cameras in order to control crime rates makes the safety of the woman’s body contingent to her adherence to social rules.

The moral panic around the safety of women encourages ways to offer a technological solution to a sociological problem. The body is granted safety insofar as the body is not ‘deviant’. There is a fusion of a ‘synoptic-panoptic’ vision, where not only a few watch the many, but the many also watch the few. Additionally, the essay then engages with the politics of mobile applications like Harassmap or Safetipin, and how offline spaces become online entities with crowdsourced data about how safe it is. Mapping events like sexual harassment on an online map is inscribed with perceptions about class and caste. The caste-patriarchal ideas of the protection of upper-caste women is maintained within these applications. The location and the people who visit or reside in them often collapse as the same; as being perpetrators of sexual crimes, while decontextualising incidents. Instead of a focus on how to make areas safer for all women, the discourse becomes about the avoidance of certain spaces, which may not be an option for the majority of women, especially those belonging to certain castes and classes. Features in mobile applications, specifically to do with location mapping, like Google Maps or Uber, become vehicles for the narratives about gendered security.

In defining the ‘offline’, the ‘online’ already exists, and the dichotomy is strangely maintained by the use of interactive maps on personal devices. The essay argues for a more nuanced understanding of internalised constructions of safety, and proposes the idea that institutional surveillance has been a way to discipline gendered bodies historically, and that it is continued with the use of technologies. This may be due to state machinery, or even cultural consent, which would then show up the way that features of mobile applications are marketed.

Cole Flor

Deactivating: An Escape From the Realities of the Online World

A friend posts travels, unboxing the latest gadget, trying out makeup products even before theyÕre out in the market, and the audience hit ÔlikeÕ but deep inside suddenly feel inadequate about their own lives and ask, "What am I doing wrong? Why am I not happy like them?"

The year was 2012 when the earliest of studies on how Social Media contributes to Anxiety went viral.

Even with the complicated nature of mental illnesses the taboo of it all that kept people tiptoeing around the topic - the news was able to crack the glossy facade of online spaces. Back then, it was ridiculous to think that online content the very representation of freedom of expression, information-sharing, open communities caused users some level of distress that affects their mental state. However, with every story that comes out these days of or relating to mental illnesses and social media, people are no longer in denial that being online has become the worldÕs default state. With that primary connection comes a full spectrum of emotions and perspectives that shifted how society views the self, their community, and their roles in being a ÔnetizenÕ. The blurring of lines of whatÕs considered appropriate content, the multiple performances of everyday life, and the imagery that constitutes "happiness", "satisfaction", "significance", "purpose", and "validation" can be described as overwhelming, disconcerting, and stressful to an extent. For borderline Millennials like myself the generation Digital Natives being offline is now an escape from the harsh realities of the online society.

These studies shed light on new narratives that recognized how curating the perfect and seamless life online not only affects the users viewing the content but even the content producers themselves, cracking under pressure and giving into the expectation of "Keeping the Image Alive", whatever it takes. Online life gave "peer pressure" a new meaning.

But users can only deal with so much pressure without sacrificing a part of themselves. During the emergence of social media in early 2000s, users felt the need to go online to escape their personal problems and live in another world where everything seemed easy and possible; where anonymity was powerful and so was virtually traveling in a borderless space where a link opens doors for personal, professional, political, and socio-economic transformation. A quick turn of events, users now wish to escape from the clamor of Twitter threads, Instagram stories, Snaps, and political rants and fake news on Facebook. More and more users deactivate and hibernate, get on board a "social media detox" to rid of the "poison" online content and their [e]nvironments has caused them, all in search for a new something to be called "real".

This narrative essay explores several dimensions why users choose to deactivate, and how that very choice is more of a symptom of a societal anomaly rather than a simple "break" from the chaotic world of social media. It is written in the perspective of a Digital Native - a person who has an inextricable affinity to digital devices but at the same time, is in touch with the analog way of life. The choice of going offline is not only to focus on what used to be real (a life away from the Internet), but it is to gather wits together, stay away from perfectly curated lives to keep sane, and ultimately, to chase life's curiosities and ambitions without having the need to validate achievements with a Like.

Elishia Vaz

Dynamics of the ‘offline’ self-diagnosis, exploration of the corporeal and the politics of information

The corpus of information on health and related topics in the online sphere has caused much concern in relation to self-diagnosis. Concepts like cyberchondria have emerged with the medicalisation of behaviour that uses online health information to explore the corporeal disabilities of the body. While literature has largely concentrated on individual susceptibilities to Cyberchondria and corresponding negative and positive results of the behaviour, there is little that explores the politics of information that characterises this trope. The behaviours of self-diagnosis and exploration of the corporeal often challenge the symptomatology of the offline allopathic physician. The physician often deals with an informed patient. Yet, the questions remain. If online information drives such offline corporeal exploration, who is left out? Are behaviours analogous to cyberchondria a privilege when viewed from a lens of digital marginalization? Are only those who have access to and can make sense of the online health discourse afforded simultaneous access to their offline corporeal bodies in ways that the digitally marginalized are not? This article uses semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews with doctors to explore the dynamics of exploring the offline corporeal in the presence of online health information.

Karandeep Mehra

The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality

In William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the protagonist ‘Case’ ‘jacks in’ and ‘jacks out’ of ‘cyberspace’. Yet when ostracized from cyberspace, when there is no more a possibility of jacking in, Case suffers a withdrawal from the ‘SimStim’ – simulated stimulations of cyberspace – and he crumbles in the hollow ache of this isolation “as the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.”

Neuromancer has already been deemed prophetic by critics and theorists, yet in beginning with Gibson, this paper seeks to throw into relief a problem that has now begun to receive scholarly and academic attention. Namely, the legitimacy of drawing a line between the online and offline, or the virtual and the real. With Case, the real or the offline only becomes possible within the capacity to access or enter the virtual or online. To think of an offline without this capacity, but after it has become possible, is to confront a detritus, a second offline – a hapless clawing dexterity, with dreams that overrun an articulated, identificatory imagination. Anthropologists like Boellstorff, and media theorists like Yuk Hui, have resolved this problem though they have left unexplained this detritus. Instead they resolve the problem through a tight coupling of the online and offline, and rightly so, dismiss any attempts to think of the real in any way unaffected by the virtual.

The purpose of this paper, though in agreement with the work of Hui and Boellstorff, and drawing from them, is to restage the problem to incorporate the unexplained detritus. That to understand how our conceptions of the subject must be recast to apprehend the transformations that the internet has wrought, must not resolve the opposition between offline and online. We must, instead, attend to the way the two offlines emerge, and the conceptualization of the threshold that oscillates to constitute them.

The paper understands these two offlines as emerging in what are called “shitstorms”, or moments of frenzy across social media that incite a whorl of discourse, where the speaking body becomes a medium for the propagation for viral forms. The threshold that constitutes them is the relation of the technical extension that makes this propagation possible. This relation leaves the body in a perpetual state of information entropy – that is as a disordered source of data - which must be ordered to be communicated successfully. This threshold that marks out the phase shift between disorder to order to make possible propagation, makes possible also the shadow of an incommunicable that it casts behind – an incommunicable that when understood through Walter Benjamin’s idea of “the torso of a symbol” can help us recast the subject of a network society, as a subject grounded on this shadow.

Preeti Mudliar

In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women

In telecom policy imaginations that seek to bridge India’s digital divides, public WiFi hotspots are a particular favourite to ensure last mile Internet connectivity in rural areas. As infrastructures, WiFi networks are thought to privilege democratic notions of freedom and connectivity by rendering space salient as networked areas that only require users to have a WiFi enabled device to get online. However, the kind of spaces that WiFi networks occupy are not always accessible by women even though they are ostensibly public in nature. Social norms that restrict and confine women’s mobilities to certain sanctioned areas do not allow their Internet and digital literacies to be visible in the same way as men who are more easily recognized as active Internet and technology users.

The invisibility of women thus struggles to create a presence as desirable subjects of the Internet that WiFi infrastructures should also address. In a community where WiFi networks was hosted in public spaces, women reported hearing about WiFi and seeing men using WiFi, but had never used it themselves even though they were also active users of the Internet. With its inaccessibility, the WiFi infrastructure was a contradictory presence in the community for the women who found themselves confined to using the Internet with spotty prepaid mobile data plans. Their use and experience of the Internet was thus in many ways diminished and limited and they reported experiencing a state of offlineness in contrast to the men in their community who could frequent the WiFi hotspots and avail of high speed Internet leading to more expansive repertoires of use.

This essay proposes a reflection on how the offline can be relational and constituted by the way infrastructures compose certain user subjectivities even while they exile others from being a part of their networks. It expands on Brian Larkin’s contention that in addition to their technical affordances, infrastructures are also equally semiotic and aesthetic forms that are oriented towards creating and addressing certain subjects. It thus asks, how do public WiFi deployments unwittingly create and constitute, what Bardzell and Bardzell call, as ‘subject positions’ of WiFi Internet users and non-users? How do these subject positions inform subjectivities of felt experience of the WiFi that translate to experiencing the offline even while being online?

Rianka Roy

Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance and Activism in the Indian IT&ITES Industry

In India the public availability of the internet in the nineties coincided with the beginning of liberalisation. Online connectivity brought the aura of globalization to this country. The internet was a privilege of the few. The Information Technology sector (along with the IT-enabled service industry) had an elite status. Its employees visited, and immigrated to western countries. In fact, India still remains one the major suppliers of cheap labour in the global IT sector.

Over the years the aura of the internet waned. In Digital India the State now projects the internet as a necessity. However, IT&ITES companies still identify the labour of their ‘white collar’ employees as a superior vocation. This vague claim to sophistication strips the digitally-connected workforce of various labour rights. Long hours, working from home, and surveillance on personal social media are normative practices in this industry. I conducted a case study on Indian IT&ITES employees for my doctoral research (2013-2018). It showed that protocols of online conduct influence these employees’ offline behaviour. For example, even without digital intervention, employees engage in manual self-surveillance and peer-surveillance to complement the digital surveillance of their organisations. They defend this naturalised practice as employers’ prerogative. Offline attributes like reflective glass walls in the office interior and exterior, reinforce this organisational culture.

Online connectivity is so deeply entrenched in this industry that even dissent seeks digital representation. Activist groups like the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) and the Union for IT & ITES (UNITES) run online campaigns parallel to their offline activism—adopting a hybrid method of protest. They have not abandoned the networks that ensnare them. Paradoxically they embody the same principle of exclusivity that their employers enforce on them. In their interviews, some activists have condemned militant trade unionism prevalent in other industries. For them, their online access sets them apart, and above their industrial couterparts. The “salaried bourgeoisie” (Zizek, p.12) refuse to align themselves with other labour unions.

My paper examines the impact of the near-absence of offline parameters in this industry. On the basis of company policies and interviews of IT&ITES employees, it examines if employees can stand up to digital dominance and secure their rights without conventional modes of offline protests.

Simiran Lalvani

The Offline as a Place of Work: Examining Food Discovery and Delivery by Digital Platforms

Digital platforms for food discovery and delivery are generally viewed as convenient, efficient, allowing discovery of choices beyond the familiar and as reliable sources of information regarding credibility through ratings, comments and photographs.

The digital divide after demonetisation became more stark as those with access to the online abandoned the offline service providers for their digital counterparts. The adverse impact of this digital divide on offline, informal goods and service providers like local kirana stores, autorickshaw drivers, hawkers has been highlighted and the paradox of formalising the financial system while informalising labour has been pointed out too. In a similar vein, this essay examines continuities and changes in the practices of food discovery and delivery in the context of new digital platforms. How do practices of offline food discovery and delivery respond to the introduction of digital platforms?

Recently, the Food Safety and Standards Association of India (FSSAI) found that nearly 40 percent of listings on 10 digital platforms like Swiggy and Zomato were of unlicensed food operators. The FSSAI directed these digital platforms to delist these unlicensed entities and also commented that some of the platforms themselves did not have required licenses.

This essay therefore turns attention away from the impact of digital platforms on offline, informal food operators and towards the digital platforms themselves and the large swathes of informal labour employed in the offline by such platforms. It focuses on location-based gig work4 like delivery to highlight the role of these workers in running the online. It does so in order to avoid obfuscating the role of such workers in making the online seem formal, efficient and reliable. Finally, it asks how working for the online in the offline allows a denial of their status as employees and invisibilisation of such work and workers.

Srikanth Lakshmanan

The Cash Merchant

The paper explores the various reasons for merchants remaining offline and using cash over digital payments, both willingly and without a choice, various factors leading to it, the rationale for their choices, policy responses by the state and industry in furthering promotion of digital payments. Demonetisation not only made everyone including merchants seek alternatives to cash in order to continue the business but also provided a policy window for digital payments industry to get a faster regulatory, policy clearances, get the government to invest in incentivising digital payments. Despite these, the cash to digital shift has not taken place and the demonetisation trends in increased digital payments across modes reversed after cash was back in the system.

The paper attempts to document infrastructural, commercial, social issues preventing the adoption and the responses of merchants, industry to various policy prescription/enablement to increase adoption whose outcomes are unclear and have not been evaluated.

Infrastructural issues include technology, policy, regulatory, industry challenges in expanding the existing infrastructure. The lack of physical, regulatory, legal infrastructure prevents growth and merchants from adopting digital payments. Commercial issues include economics of direct and indirect costs to the merchant incurred in owning, accepting digital payments, commercial considerations of various ecosystem players including banks, payment processors that inhibit adoption. Social issues include awareness, literacy including digital, financial literacy, trust, behaviour shift, convenience, exercising choice towards cash.

Ever since the demonetisation, there is a heightened activity from industry and various arms of the government has been active in promoting digital payments. Industry-led by banks and fintech ecosystem has built a range of mobile-enabled digital payment platforms/products such wallets, BHIM-UPI, BHIM-Aadhaar, BharatQR to enable asset light merchant acceptance infrastructure, expanded merchant base in addition to catering to the surge in demand of card-accepting PoS machines. The government had undertaken a massive awareness program Digidhan soon after demonetisation and had also set up National Digital Payments Mission to promote, oversee the sustainable growth of digital payments. Various ministries are also adopting digital payments in their functioning. It also aided behavioural shift through cashback, incentivisation schemes, some specifically targeted at merchants, reimbursement of card processing charges for smaller merchants and even has in principle proposed a 20% discount on the GST. It has remained light touch on the regulation by not setting up the regulator even after 18 months of announcing the same.

The paper will analyse how the efforts of industry and government have been met by the merchant and look at factors which can and cannot be changed with policy interventions and real scope of digital payments in the merchant ecosystem.

Titiksha Vashist

Byung-Chul Han in his celebrated book “In the Swarm” warns us of the dangers of the mob that is increasingly replacing the ‘crowd’ or collective which constituted the mass of politics. He states that no true politics is possible in the digital era, where online communities lack a sense of spirit, a “we” that is now a swarm of individuals. Despite his theoretical brilliance, Han forgets that he cannot talk of the digital, the online without the offline. Politics has occurred, and continues to exist in the offline space, using the internet to spread its wings. It is not the online as-is, which has become the subject of philosophy, politics, art and aesthetics that characterises itself alone, sealed off as a space where events occur, identities formed and movements created. It is in fact, the offline that brings the online into being and gives it a myriad of meaning. While access, priviledge, commerce and capital are major themes while discussing internet access, we must not forget that the online is not merely a question of choice or access- but one that is often carefully disabled on purpose to control the offline. In India as well as other parts of the world, the internet has been interrupted for long durations to exercise political control and power, often crippling populations. According to a report by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), an organisation that keeps a track on internet shutdowns in the country, India has seen 244 shutdowns in 2012, of which 108 have been enforced on 2018 alone. These have been concentrated in areas such as Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East, and in instances of violence and resistance as well.

An internet shutdown is the digital equivalent of a curfew, and its application raises questions regarding its cause, uses and political intent. The internet as means, as an enabler of political action is seen as threatening, given the shift in the way people today communicate with one another. Internet bans and shutdowns are not only matters of commerce, but also pose the question of politics to understand when and how power is exercised. An offline created out of a shutdown is different- it is curated on purpose and calls for alternative means by which functionalities of daily life, resistance, capital and media occur. This essay aims to explore how the political image of the “sovereign” also enters the digital space to carefully construct, cut- off and marginalized voices, all in the name of state security, and law and order. According to philosopher Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is he who decides on the exception, and the offline is increasingly becoming a space of exception where those who control the digital can influence the political in real time. In this context, how do we understand the relationship of power and digital access? This essay focuses on three broad questions: (a) Is there a community online capable of political action that is facilitated by the internet? (b) How does power function in internet shutdowns and are they threats to democratic freedom of expression? And finally, (c) How do we begin to unpack the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ in such a context?

Dr. Yenn Lee

Online consequences of being offline: A gendered tale from South Korea

We hear numerous anecdotes of people facing the consequences of their online activity when offline. Some have lost jobs, have been disciplined in school, or have wound up in court for what they have posted online. However, in comparison, there has been somewhat limited discussion of the reverse scenario, where going about one's day-to-day life offline leads to violations of one's online self.

This essay is concerned with a new and unparalleled phenomenon in South Korea, locally termed molka. Literally meaning 'hidden camera', molka refers to the genre of women being filmed in the least expected of situations, including cubicles in public restrooms and in the midst of car accidents, and the footage being traded and consumed as entertainment. This is distinct from revenge porn or cyber-stalking where the perpetrators usually target a known or pre-determined individual with the intention of humiliating them or to exercise control. The subjects of molka are victimised for merely existing offline and are mostly unaware that their privacy has been violated until they are recognised by someone who knows them and informs them (or inflicts further harm). In response to the rising trend of molka, tens of thousands of frustrated and infuriated women have staged monthly protest rallies in central Seoul since May 2018, urging government intervention. Ironically, women gathered offline to protest against molka have been subjected to further molka crimes with unconsented photos of themselves at the rallies surfacing online and many have been the target of misogynous attacks.

Informed by the author's multi-year ethnographic study of technologically mediated and heightened tensions in contemporary South Korean society, this essay provides a succinct yet contextualised account of the molka phenomenon. With particular attention to the ways in which the phenomenon has developed while shifting between offline and online realms, the essay demonstrates the gendered nature of digital privacy and harassment, and the broader implications of this Korean phenomenon for women in other parts of the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-offline-selected-abstracts

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): List - Call for Sessions

sneha-pp — 2018-11-05T09:15:35Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite sessions that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*.

IRC19: List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite sessions that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the list - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Call for Sessions

We invite teams of two or more members to propose sessions for IRC19. All sessions will be one and half hours long, and will be fully designed and facilitated by the team concerned, including moderation (if any). Please remember this when planning the session. Everything happening during the session, except for logistical support, will be led and managed by the session team.

The sessions are expected to drive conversations on the topic concerned. They may include presentation of research papers but this is not mandatory.

We look forward to sessions that involve collaborative work (either in groups or otherwise) - discussions, interactions, documentation, learning, and (list-)making are most welcome.

We also look forward to sessions conducted in Indian languages apart from English. The proposing team, in such a case, should consider how participants who do not understand the language concerned may engage with the session. IRC organisers and other participants shall help facilitate these sessions, say by offering translation support.

The only eligibility criteria for proposing sessions are that they must be proposed by a team of at least two members, and that they must engage with the *list*.

The deadline for submission of sessions proposals for IRC19 is Sunday, November 18 (extended).

To propose a session, please send the following documents (as attached text files) to raw@cis-india.org:

Session Title: The session should be named in the form of a hashtag (check the sessions proposed for IRC18 for example).
Session Plan: This should describe the objectives of the session (the motivations and expectations driving it), what will be done and discussed during the session, and who among the people organising the session will be responsible for what. This note need not be more than 500 words long. If your session involves inviting others to present their work (say papers), then please provide a description and timeline of the process through which these people will be identified.
Session Team Details: Please share brief biographical notes of each member of the session team, and their email addresses.

IRC19 will be organised in Hyderabad during January 31 - February 2, 2019. We will announce the venue of the conference in December 2018.

There is no registration fee for the conference, but participants are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodation (to be organised by CIS) expenses. Limited funding will be available to support travel and accommodation expenses of few participants who are unemployed or underemployed.

Session selection process:

November 18, 2018 (extended): Deadline of submission of session proposals. All submitted sessions will be posted on the CIS website, along with the names of the session team members.
November 23 - December 07: Session selection process. All session teams will select 10 sessions to be included in the IRC19 programme. The votes will be anonymous, that is no session team will know which other session teams have voted for their session. The sessions with most votes will be selected for the final programme of IRC19.
December 14: Announcement of selected sessions, and of travel grants available for members of selected session teams.
January 31 - February 2, 2019: IRC19 in Hyderabad!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Call for Papers

sneha-pp — 2018-12-06T07:00:30Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*.

Call for Papers

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the list - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Paper abstracts (of not more than 500 words) are to be submitted by Sunday, December 23 via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Authors of selected paper abstracts will be informed by Monday, December 31, and will be expected to present the full paper (either in person, or remotely) at the IRC19 - #List, to be held in Hyderabad during Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2019.

Selected paper authors, who are unemployed or underemployed, will be offered support to cover travel expenses fully/partially.

The only eligibility criteria for submitting papers is that they must engage with the thematic of the conference - *list*.

IRC19: List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call-papers

Silicon Plateau: Volume Two

sneha-pp — 2019-03-13T01:01:27Z

Silicon Plateau is an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian city of Bangalore. Each volume of the series is a themed repository for research, artworks, essays and interviews that observe the ways technology permeates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. This project is an attempt at creating collaborative research into art and technology, beginning by inviting an interdisciplinary group of contributors (from artists, designers and writers, to researchers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs) to participate in the making of each volume.

Download the book: Epub and PDF

Silicon Plateau Volume 2 explores the ecosystem of mobile apps and their on-demand services. The book investigates how apps and their infrastructure are impacting our relationship with the urban environment; the way we relate and communicate with each other; and the way labour is changing. It also explores our trust in these technologies, and their supposed capacity to organise things for us and make them straightforward—while, in exchange, we relentlessly feed global corporations with our GPS data and online behaviours.

The sixteen book contributors responded to a main question: what does it mean to be an app user today—as a worker, a client, or simply an observer?

The result is a collection of stories about contemporary life in Bangalore; of conversations and deliberations on how we behave, what we sense, and what we might think about when we use the services that are offered to us on demand, through just a tap on our mobile screens.

Website: siliconplateau.info

Contributors

Sunil Abraham and Aasavri Rai, Yogesh Barve, Deepa Bhasthi, Carla Duffett, Furqan Jawed, Vir Kashyap, Saudha Kasim, Qusai Kathawala, Clay Kelton, Tara Kelton, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Sruthi Krishnan, Vandana Menon, Lucy Pawlak, Nicole Rigillo, Yashas Shetty, Mariam Suhail

Editors

Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

Publisher

Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, 2018. ISBN: 978-94-92302-29-8

Book and Cover Design

Furqan Jawed and Tara Kelton

Copyediting

Aditya Pandya

Supported by

Jitu Pasricha, Bangalore; Aarti Sonawala, Singapore; and the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Cross-posted from Institute of Network Cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-volume-two

Welcome to r@w blog!

sneha-pp — 2019-01-02T11:48:04Z

We from the researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are delighted to announce the launch of our new blog, hosted on Medium. It will feature works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media, and society; and highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme.

r@w blog: Visit (Medium)

A space for reflections on internet and society, r@w blog is also an attempt to facilitate conversations around contemporary debates and foster creative engagement with research and practice through text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other media forms offered by the internet.

r@w blog opens with an essay on ‘Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance, and Activism in the Indian IT & ITES Industry’ by Rianka Roy - as part of an essay series exploring social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions of the "offline" - and audio recording from a session titled #ILoveYou by Dhiren Borisa and Dhrubo Jyoti, which was part of the Internet Researchers’ Conference 2018 - #Offline.

We will publish our (including commissioned/supported) writings and works on this blog, as well as submitted and compiled materials. Please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org to submit your works to be considered for publication. Copyright to all material published on this blog are owned by CIS and author(s) concerned, and they are shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog

RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video

sneha-pp — 2016-02-09T08:45:00Z

Dr. Nishant Shah spoke on the 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' at the first event of the RAW Lectures series in Bangalore on March 6, 2015. 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 #01 - Stories and Histories of Internet in India

Dr. Nishant Shah is the Professor of Culture and Aesthetics of New Media at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Research Associate at COMMON MEDIA LAB, Affiliate at DIGITAL CULTURES RESEARCH LAB, and International Tandempartner at HYBRID PUBLISHING LAB. He is the co-founder and former-Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.

More: http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah.

Download

Video files: 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-01-nishant-shah-video

Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages 2019 - From Conversations to Actions

sneha-pp — 2019-11-01T17:53:40Z

Whose Knowledge? is organising the Decolonizing the Internet's Languages 2019 gathering in London on October 23-24 — with a specific focus on building an agenda for action to decolonize the internet’s languages. Puthiya Purayil Sneha is participating in this meeting with scholars, linguists, archivists, technologists and community activists, to share the initial findings towards the State of the Internet’s Language Report (to be published in 2020) being developed by Whose Knowledge?, Oxford Internet Institute, and the CIS.

Event page: URL

Agenda: Download (PDF)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/dtil-2019-from-conversations-to-actions

Call for Contributions and Reflections: Your experiences in Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages!

sneha-pp — 2019-08-07T12:29:25Z

Whose Knowledge?, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Centre for Internet and Society are creating a State of the Internet’s Languages report, as baseline research with both numbers and stories, to demonstrate how far we are from making the internet multilingual. We also hope to offer some possibilities for doing more to create the multilingual internet we want. This research needs the experiences and expertise of people who think about these issues of language online from different perspectives. Read the Call here and share your submission by September 2, 2019.

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: Call for Contributions and Reflections

The call is available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, English, IsiZulu, Spanish, and Tamil.

Note: This call for contributions is in a few languages right now, but we invite our friends and communities to translate into many more! Please reach out to info (at) whoseknowledge (dot) org with your translations… thank you!

“It’s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It’s too beautiful for English to explain.”
– Potawatomi elder, cited in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.”

The problem: The internet we have today is not multilingual enough to reflect the full depth and breadth of humanity. Language is a good proxy for, or way to understand, knowledge – different languages can represent different ways of knowing and learning about our worlds. Yet most online knowledge today is created and accessible only through colonial languages, and mostly English. The UNESCO Report on ‘A Decade of Promoting Multilingualism in Cyberspace’ (2015) estimated that “out of the world’s approximately 6,000 languages, just 10 of them make up 84.3 percent of people using the Internet, with English and Chinese the dominant languages, accounting for 52 per cent of Internet users worldwide.” More languages become endangered and disappear every year; 230 languages have become extinct between 1950 and 2010.

At best, then, 7% of the world’s languages are captured in published material, and an even smaller fraction of these languages are available online. This is particularly critical for communities who have been historically or currently marginalized by power and privilege – women, people of colour, LGBT*QIA folks, indigenous communities, and others marginalized from the global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific Islands). We often cannot add or access knowledge in our own languages on the internet. This reinforces and deepens inequalities and invisibilities that already exist offline, and denies all of us the richness of the multiple knowledges of the world.

Some of the issues that shape our abilities to create and share content online in our languages include:

The internet’s infrastructure (hardware, software, platforms, protocols…);
Content management tools and technologies for translation, digitization, and archiving (voice, machine-learning systems and AI, semantic web…);
The experience of those who consume and produce information online in different languages (devices like cell phones and laptops, messaging tools, micro-blogging, audio-video…);
The experience of looking for content in different languages online, through search engines and other tools.

Understanding the range of these issues will help us map the possibilities and concerns around linguistic biases and disparities on the internet.

Who we are: We are a group of three research partners who believe that the internet we co-create should support, share, and amplify knowledge in all of the world’s languages. For this to happen, we need to better understand the challenges and opportunities that support or prevent our languages and knowledges from being online. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The Oxford Internet Institute is a multidisciplinary research and teaching department of the University of Oxford, dedicated to the social science of the Internet. Whose Knowledge? is a global campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalized communities – the majority of the world – online.

Together we are creating a State of the Internet’s Languages report, as baseline research with both numbers and stories, to demonstrate how far we are from making the internet multilingual. We also hope to offer some possibilities for doing more to create the multilingual internet we want.

Why we need YOU: This research needs the experiences and expertise of people who think about these issues of language online from different perspectives.

You may be a person who:

Self-identifies as being from a marginalized community, and you find it difficult to bring your community’s knowledge online because the technology to display your language’s script is hard to access or read
Works on creating content in languages that are from parts of the world, and from people, who are mostly invisible and unheard online
Is a techie who works on making keyboards for non-colonial languages
Is a linguist who tries to bring together communities and technologies in a way that is easy and accessible
... you may be any of these, all of these, or more!

We are looking for your experience online to help us tell the story of how limited the language capacities of the internet are, currently, and how much opportunity there is for making the internet share our knowledges in our many different languages. Most importantly: you don’t have to be an academic or researcher to apply, we particularly encourage people experiencing these issues in their everyday lives and work to contribute!

Some of the key questions we’d like you to explore:

How are you or your community using your language online?
What do you wish you could create or share in your language online that you can’t today?
What does content in your language look like online? What exists, what’s missing? (you might think about, for example, news, social media, education or government websites, e-commerce, entertainment, online libraries and archives, self-published content, etc)
How and where and using what technologies do you share or create content in your language? (you might think about, for example, video, audio, writing, social media, digitization…whatever formats, tools, processes or websites you use for creating oral, visual, textual, or other forms of content.)
What is challenging to create or share on your language online? (you might think about, for example, access, device usability, platforms, websites, apps and other tools, software, fonts, digital literacy, etc when developing digital archives, online language resources, or just making any presence on the web in general for your language.)

Submissions:

We would love to hear about your and your community’s experiences in response to any or some of the above questions!

Your contribution could be in the form of a written essay, a visualization or work of art, a video or recorded conversation – we’d be happy to interview you if that’s your preference. We would be happy to accept in any language, and will review the submissions with the support of our multilingual communities and friends.

Are you interested in participating? Please email raw [at] cis-india [dot] org a short note (of about 300 words) by 2 September at 23:59 IST (Indian Standard Time), briefly outlining your idea along with the following information:

Your name
Your location – both country of origin and your current location is useful!
Your language(s)
Your community or any other background you’d care to share with us
Which questions you’re interested in addressing, and why
Your prefered contribution format
Any requests for how we can best support your participation

Timeline:

By 2nd September 2019: Send us your submission note
By 1st November 2019: Contributors will be notified of selection
By 1st December 2019: First round of contributions are due. We’ll work with you to finalise contributions by mid January.

Selected contributors will be offered an honorarium of USD 500, and their final works will be published as part of the Decolonising the Internet – Languages Report, in early 2020.

பங்களிப்பதற்காக அழைப்பு இணைய மொழி ஆதிக்கச் சூழலை மாற்றியதில் உங்கள்அனுபவம்!

“மொழி அழிவால் சொற்கள் மட்டும் அழிவதில்லை. நம் பண்பாட்டின் சாரமே மொழி தான். மொழியே நம் எண்ணங்களை வெளிப்படுத்துகிறது. இவ்வுலகத்தை நாம் காண்பதும் மொழிவழியே தான். ஆங்கிலத்தால் அதை ஒருக்காலும் வெளிப்படுத்த முடியாது.”
– போட்டோவாடோமி எல்டர் (ராபின் வால் கிம்மெரார் எழுதிய ‘பிரெயிடிங் சுவீட்கிராஸ்’ என்ற நூலில் இருந்து)

சிக்கல்: மனித குலத்தின் பரந்துவிரிந்த பண்பாட்டுச் சூழலை வெளிப்படுத்தும் அளவுக்கு இன்றைய இணையம் பன்மொழிச் சூழல் கொண்டதாய் இல்லை. தகவல்களை அறிந்துகொள்வதற்கு மொழி ஒரு கருவியாய் இருக்கிறது. ஒவ்வொரு மொழியும் உலகத்தை வெவ்வேறுவிதத்தில் காட்டத்தக்கன. இருந்தபோதும், பெரும்பாலான அறிவுசார் தளங்கள் ஆதிக்க மொழிகளில், குறிப்பாக ஆங்கிலத்தில் அதிகளவில் இருக்கின்றன. ‘இணையவெளியில் பன்மொழிச் சூழலைக் ஊக்குவிக்க பத்தாண்டுகளில் எடுத்த முயற்சி’ (2015) என்ற யுனெசுகோ அறிக்கையில் குறிப்பிட்டுள்ளதாவது: “உலகில் பேசப்படும் சுமார் 6,000 மொழிகளில், வெறும் 10 மொழியை பேசுவோர் மட்டுமே இணையத்தின் 84.3 சதவீதம் பேராக உள்ளனர். இவற்றில், ஆங்கிலமும் மாண்டரின் சீனமும் பேசுவோர் மட்டும் 52 சதவீதத்தினர் என்பது குறிப்பிடத்தக்கது.” ஒவ்வொரு ஆண்டும் அதிகளவிலான மொழிகள் அருகி, அழிந்து வருகின்றன. 1950 – 2010 ஆகிய ஆண்டுகளுக்குள் 230 மொழிகள் அழிந்திருக்கின்றன

எல்லா உள்ளடக்கத்தையும் கணக்கில் எடுத்தால் கூட, உலகின் 7% மொழிகளில் தான் ஆக்கங்கள் இருக்கின்றன. இவற்றில் சிலவே இணையத்தில் கிடைக்கின்றன. முற்காலத்தில் ஒடுக்கப்பட்டிருந்த பழங்குடியின சமூகத்தினர், அடக்குமுறைக்கு உட்பட்டிருந்த பெண்கள், நிறவெறிக்கு உட்பட்டிருந்தோர், மாற்று பாலின கருத்தியல் கொன்டோர் ஆகியோருக்கான ஆக்கங்கள் வெகு சில. பெரும்பாலானோர் இணையத்தில் தம் தாய்மொழியில் தகவல்களை தேடிப் பெற முடிவதில்லை. தம் மொழியில் கிடைக்கப்பெறாத பெரும்பாலானோருக்கு இவ்வுலகைப் பற்றிய அறிவுசார் ஆக்கங்கள் மறுக்கப்பட்டு, சமமின்மை வெளிப்படுகிறது.

நம் மொழியிலேயே இணையத்தில் ஆக்கங்களை உருவாக்குவதிலும் பகிர்வதிலும் சில சிக்கல்களை எதிர்நோக்குகிறோம். அவை:

கட்டமைப்பு வசதிக் குறைபாடு : வன்பொருள், மென்பொருள், இயங்குதளம், மரபுத்தகவு
உள்ளடக்க மேம்பாட்டுக் கருவிகளும் தொழில்நுட்பங்களும் போதிய அளவில் இல்லாமை: மொழிபெயர்ப்புக் கருவி, மின்மயமாக்கக் கருவி, சேமிப்பகம், செயற்கை நுண்ணறிவு, குரல்வழி உள்ளடக்கம்
இணையத்தில் பொருட்களை வாங்கிப் பயன்படுத்துவோரின் கருத்துக்களோ, பொருட்களைப் பற்றிய தகவலோ, இணையச் செயலிகளான செய்தியனுப்பல், வலைப்பூ போன்றவையோ தம் மொழியில் இல்லாமை
தேடுபொறிகளையும் பிற கருவிகளையும் கொன்டு வெவ்வேறு மொழிகளில் ஆக்கங்களைத் தேடிப் பழக்கம் இல்லாமை

இச்சிக்கல்களைப் புரிந்துகொள்வதன் மூலம், இணையத்தின் பன்மொழிச் சூழலுக்கான தேவைகளையும் அவற்றிற்கான குறைநிறைகளையும் சரிப்படுத்திக்கொள்ள முடியும்.

நாங்கள் யார்?: உலக மொழிகளிலான ஆக்கங்கள் இணையவெளியில் இடம்பெற உதவவும், ஊக்குவிக்கவும் மூன்று ஆய்வு நிறுவனங்கள் கைகோர்த்துள்ளோம். இதை நடைமுறைப்படுத்துவதற்கு முன், நாம் எதிர்கொள்ளும் சிக்கல்களையும் பெறக்கூடிய வாய்ப்புகளையும் நன்கு அறிந்துகொள்வது அவசியம் என உணர்ந்தோம்.

1. சென்டர் ஃபார் இன்டர்நெட் அன்ட் சொசைட்டி (the Centre for Internet and Society or CIS) என்ற தன்னார்வல நிறுவனம், இணையத்தையும், மின்மயமாக்கத் தொழில்நுட்பங்களையும் பற்றிய ஆய்வுகளை கொள்கை நோக்கிலும், கல்விசார் நோக்கிலும் செய்கிறது. உடற்குறைபாடு உடையோருக்கு மின்மயமாக்கிய உள்ளடக்கம், அறிவைப் பெறும் சூழல், அறிவுசார் சொத்துரிமை, திறந்தவெளி ஆக்கங்கள், இணையவழி ஆளுகை, தொழில்நுட்பச் சீர்திருத்தம், இணையவெளியில் தனியுரிமை, இணையவெளிப் பாதுகாப்பு போன்ற தலைப்புகளில் இந்நிறுவனம் கவனம் செலுத்துகிறது.

2. ஆக்சுபோர்டு இன்டர்நெட் இன்ஸ்டிடியூட் என்ற ஆய்வு நிறுவனம் ஆக்சுபோர்டு பல்கலைக்கழகத்தைச் சேர்ந்தது. இது இணையச் சமூகத்துக்காகவே தனித்துவமாக உருவாக்கப்பட்ட துறை.

3. ஹூஸ் நாலெட்ஜ் என்ற இயக்கம், உலகளவில் ஒடுக்கப்பட்ட சமூகங்களின் அறிவுசார் ஆக்கங்களை இணையவெளியில் கொண்டு வர முயற்சி எடுக்கிறது.

நாங்கள் மூவரும் இணைந்து, இணையத்தில் பயன்பாட்டிலுள்ள மொழிகளைப் பற்றிய ஆய்வறிக்கையை தயாரிக்கிறோம். புள்ளிவிவரங்களையும், தகவல்களையும் வெளியிட்டு, பன்மொழிச் சூழலில் எந்தளவு பின்தங்கி இருக்கிறோம் என்பதை உணர்த்த உள்ளோம். இணையவெளியில் ஆக்கங்களை வெளியிட எங்களால் முடிந்த சில வாய்ப்புகளையும் வழங்க உள்ளோம்.

உங்கள் உதவி எங்களுக்கு தேவைப்படுவதன் காரணம்: இத்தகைய சிக்கல்களை எதிர்நோக்கி வருவோரின் அனுபவங்களையும், அவர்கள் முயன்ற தீர்வுகளையும் பற்றி அறிந்துகொள்வதே இவ்வாய்வின் நோக்கம்.

நீங்கள்,

ஒடுக்கப்பட்ட சமூகத்தைச் சேர்ந்தவராக உணர்ந்தாலோ, உங்கள் சமூகத்தின் அறிவுசார் உள்ளடக்கங்கள் இணையவெளியில் கிடைப்பதில்லை என்று கருதினாலோ, உங்கள் மொழி எழுத்துவடிவங்கள் அணுகவும், படிக்கவும் ஏற்றவகையில் கணினிமயமாக்கப்படவில்லை என்று உணர்ந்தாலோ,
தொழில்நுட்பராக இருந்து, ஆதிக்கத்துக்கு உட்பட்டோரின் மொழிகளுக்காக விசைப்பலகைகள் செய்பவராக இருந்தாலோ,
மொழியியலாளராக இருந்து, பல்வேறு சமூகங்களை ஒருங்கிணைத்து, தொழில்நுட்பத்தை அவர்களுக்கு புரியும் வகையிலும், அணுகும் வகையிலும் கிடைக்கச் செய்தாலோ,
… உங்களைத் தான் தேடிக் கொன்டிருக்கிறோம்!

உங்கள் இணையவெளி அனுபவங்களை எங்களுக்கு தெரிவிப்பதன் மூலம், ஒவ்வொரு மொழிச் சமூகத்தின் நிலையையும் நாங்கள் அறிந்துகொள்ள உதவியாக இருக்கும். அத்துடன், எத்தகைய வாய்ப்புகளை ஏற்படுத்தித் தரலாம் என்றும் நாங்கள் சிந்திக்க உதவியாய் இருக்கும்.

உங்களிடம் நாங்கள் கேட்க விரும்பும் சில கேள்விகள்:

நீங்களும், உங்கள் மொழிச் சமூகத்தினரும் இணையவெளியில் உங்கள் மொழியை எப்படி பயன்படுத்துகிறீர்கள்?
இன்றைய நிலையில், இணையவெளியில் உங்கள் மொழியைக் கொண்டு செய்ய முடியாதது இருப்பின், அதற்கு என்ன செய்ய விரும்புவீர்கள்?
இணையவெளியில் உங்கள் மொழியில் என்னென்ன ஆக்கங்கள் இருக்கின்றன, எவை இல்லை? (எடுத்துக்காட்டாக, செய்திகள், சமுக வலைத்தளம், கல்விசார் உள்ளடக்கம், அரசுசார் உள்ளடக்கம், மனமகிழ் வீடியோக்கள், இணையவழி கற்றல், போன்றவை)
உங்கள் மொழியில் ஆக்கங்களை படைப்பதற்கு எந்த தளத்தை நாடுவீர்கள், எந்த தொழில்நுட்பத்தை பயன்படுத்துவீர்கள்? (எ.கா : ஒளி, ஒலி, உரை, உரைநடை ஒழுங்கமைவு, பிழைத்திருத்திக் கருவி போன்றவை)
உங்கள் மொழியில் எழுதுவதற்கோ, பகிர்வதற்கோ முயலும் போது என்னென்ன மாதிரியான சிக்கல்களை இணையவெளியில் சந்திக்கிறீர்கள்? (எ.கா: அணுக்கம் இன்மை, கருவியில் எழுத்துரு ஆதரவின்மை, பிழை திருத்த கருவி இன்மை)

ஆய்வேடு சமர்ப்பித்தல்:

மேற்கண்ட கேள்விகளுக்கு உங்கள் சமூகத்தினரிடமும், உங்களிடமும் அனுபவம் மூலம் விடை கிடைத்திருக்கும் என நம்புகிறோம். அவற்றைப் பற்றி தெரிந்து கொள்ள விரும்புகிறோம்!

கட்டுரையாகவோ, கலைப்படைப்பாகவோ, பதிவு செய்யப்பட்ட ஆவணமாகவோ, வேறு வடிவிலோ உங்கள் படைப்புகள் இருக்கலாம். நீங்கள் விரும்பினால் உங்களை பேட்டி காணவும் தயாராக இருக்கிறோம். உங்கள் படைப்புகள் எந்த மொழியில் இருந்தாலும் ஏற்போம். எங்களிடமுள்ள பன்மொழிச் சமூகத்திடம் உங்கள் படைப்புகளை கொடுத்து அவற்றை சீராய்வு செய்யச் சொல்வோம்.

உங்களுக்கு பங்கேற்க விருப்பமா? raw@cis-india.org என்ற மின்னஞ்சல் முகவரிக்கு, செப்டம்பர் இரன்டாம் தேதிக்கு முன்னர் அனுப்புக. 300 சொற்களுக்கு மிகாமல், கீழ்க்காணும் விவரங்களைக்

உங்கள் பெயர்
இருப்பிடம் – பிறந்த நாடும், தற்போது வாழும் நாடும்
உங்கள் மொழி(கள்)
உங்கள் சமூகத்தினரைப் பற்றிய தகவல் (அ) நீங்கள் விரும்பும் சமூகத்தினரைப் பற்றிய தகவல்
எந்தெந்த கேள்விகளுக்கு பதிலளிக்க விரும்புகிறீர்கள், ஏன்
உங்கள் படைப்பு எந்த வடிவில் உள்ளது
உங்கள் பங்களிப்பை மேம்படுத்தல் நாங்கள் ஏதும் செய்ய வேண்டுமா

காலகட்டம்:

2 செப்டம்பர், 2019: உங்கள் படைப்புகள் எங்களை வந்தடைய வேண்டிய கடைசி நாள்
1 நவம்பர், 2019: தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்ட படைப்பாளர்களிடம் விவரம் தெரிவிக்கப்படும் நாள்
1 திசம்பர், 2019: முதற்கட்ட பங்களிப்பு நடைபெறும். பங்களிப்பை ஜனவரி மாத மத்தியில் முடிக்க முயற்சி செய்வோம்.

தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்ட படைப்பாளிகளுக்கு 500 அமெரிக்க டாலர்கள் ஊக்கத்தொகையாக வழங்கப்படும். நாங்கள் தயாரிக்கும் அறிக்கையில் அவர்களின் படைப்பு வெளியிடப்படும்.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/stil-2020-call

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions!

sneha-pp — 2019-11-01T18:12:49Z

In response to our call for contributions and reflections on ‘Decolonising the Internet’s Languages’ in August, we are delighted to announce that we received 50 submissions, in over 38 languages! We are so overwhelmed and grateful for the interest and support of our many communities around the world; it demonstrates how critical this effort is for all of us. From all these extraordinary offerings, we have selected nine that we will invite and support the contributors to expand further.

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: URL

Call for Contributions and Reflections: URL

Thank you to all of you who wrote in: we would publish every one of your contributions if we could! Each of you highlighted unique aspects of the problem and possibility of the multilingual internet, and it was extremely difficult to select a few to include in the ‘State of the Internet’s Languages Report’. Whether your submission was selected or not, we hope you will continue to be part of this work with us, and that the report will reflect your thoughtful concerns and interests in a multi-lingual internet.

The nine selected contributions will be a significant aspect of the openly licensed State of the Internet’s Languages report to be published mid-2020. In different formats and languages, they span many kinds of language contexts across the world, from many different communities and perspectives. They will form part of a broader narrative combining data and experience, highlighting how limited the current language capacities of the internet are, and how much opportunity there is for making our knowledges available in our many languages.

A special thank you to the final contributors – we’ll be in touch shortly with more details. We’re looking forward to working with you as you develop your contributions and share your experiences!

The selected contributions are from:

Caddie Brain, Joel Liddle, Leigh Harris, Graham Wilfred

As part of a broader movement to increase inclusion and diversity in emojis, Aboriginal people in Central Australia are creating Indigemoji, the first set of Australian Indigenous emojis delivered via a free app. Caddie, Joel, Leigh and Graham aim to describe how to reflect Aboriginal experiences online, to increase the accessibility of Arrernte language in the broader Australian lexicon, to position Arrernte knowledge on digital platforms for future generations of Arrentre speakers and learners, and to contribute more broadly to the decolonisation of the internet.
Claudia Soria

Claudia will describe “The Digital Language Diversity Project” funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme. The project has surveyed the digital use and usability of four European minority languages: Basque, Breton, Karelian and Sardinian. It has also developed a number of instruments that can help speakers’ communities drive the digital life of their languages, in the form of a methodology named “digital language planning”.
Donald Flywell Malanga

Donald will share his experiences conducting two panel discussions with elderly and ten young Ndali People in Chisitu Village based in Misuku Hills, Malawi. He aims to hear their stories and make sense of them relating to how Chindali could be spoken/expressed online, examine the barriers they face in sharing/expressing their language online, and unearth possible solutions to address such barriers.
Emna Mizouni

Emna will interview African and Arab content creators and consumers to share their experiences in posting content in their own language and expose their cultures. She will reach out to different ethnicities from Africa to gather data on the reasons they use the “colonial languages” on the internet and the burdens they face, whether technical such as internet connectivity and accessibility, lack of devices, social or cultural barriers, etc.
Ishan Chakraborty

Ishan will explore the experiences of individuals who identify themselves as both disabled and queer, and who are not visible online in Bengali. Online research papers and academic works in Bengali are significantly limited, and even more so in the case of works on marginalities and intersections. One of the most effective ways of making online material accessible to persons with visual disability is through audio material, and Ishan will explore some of these possibilities.
Joaquín Yescas Martínez

Joaquin will be describing the free software, open technology initiatives and the sharing philosophy of “compartencia” in his community of Mixe and Zapotec peoples in Mexico. He will explore initiatives such as Xhidza Penguin School, an app to learn the language online, and learning workshops to look at new methodologies for sharing and using the language. It is not only a means of communication but it also encompasses a different way of understanding the world.
Kelly Foster

Kelly will draw attention to the work being done to revitalise indigenous languages and the struggles to represent the Nation Languages of the Caribbean and its diasporas in structured data and on Wikipedia. She aims to have the native names of the islands, locations and indigenous peoples on Wikidata, labelled with their own language so she can generate a map of the Caribbean with as many native names as possible. But the language of the Taino people of the islands that are now called Jamaican, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Haiti has been labelled as extinct, as are the people, by European researchers. Though a victim of the first European genocide of the Caribbean, they live on in the tongues and blood of people who are more often racialised as Black and Latinx.
Paska Darmawan

As a first-generation college student who did not understand English, Paska had difficulties in finding educational, inspiring content about LGBTQIA issues in their native language, let alone positive content about the local LGBTQIA community. They plan to share a mapping of available Indonesian digital LGBTQIA content, whether it be in the form of Wikipedia articles, websites, social media accounts, or any other online media.
Uda Deshpriya

Uda will explore the lack of feminist content on the internet in Sinhala and Tamil. Mainstream human rights discussions take place in English and leaves out the majority of Sri Lankans. Women’s rights discourse remains even more centralized. Despite the fact that all primary criminal and civil courts work in local languages, statutes and decided cases are not available in Sinhala and Tamil, including Sri Lanka’s Constitution and its amendments. This extends to content creation through both text and art, with significant barriers of keyboard and input methods.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/stil-2020-selected-contributions

Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium

sneha-pp — 2019-05-03T09:41:53Z

P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives at the Global Digital Humanities Symposium organised by Michigan State University on March 21-22, 2019.

Puthiya Purayil Sneha (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India)

The archive has been an important context for conversations around digital humanities (DH) in India, as it has been globally. The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors, including state institutions (National Museum, National Cultural Audio-Visual Archive (IGNCA)) universities (Jadavpur University, Ambedkar University,) and individual and collaborative efforts (Indian Memory Project, Indiancine.ma ) to name a few. The emergence of new fields like DH, digital cultures and cultural analytics also indicate several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, on the one hand alluding to the potential offered by democratizing technologies, but also reflecting persistent challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines.

The growth of new areas of study and creative practice like DH has brought about a renewed focus on the creation of digital corpora, and the need for new technologies and methods of research, more specifically through the development of digital pedagogies. The contexts of these questions are however much wider, located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. Even as the colonial imagination of state archives remains prevalent in India, digital archival initiatives facilitated by infrastructure such as open source content management systems and tools like web annotation have opened up spaces for alternate narratives. Drawing upon excerpts from a report on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in archival practices, this presentation seeks to understand the politics of digital archiving in a postcolonial context, and how it informs larger trajectories of digitalisation, and the growth of fields like DH in India today.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/presentation-at-global-digital-humanities-symposium

Call for Essays — #List

sneha-pp — 2019-10-11T17:07:26Z

The researchers@work programme at CIS invites abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the ‘list’. We have selected 4 abstracts among those received before August 31, 2019, and are now accepting and evaluating further submissions on a rolling basis.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and also consumed through.

What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? How are they hegemonic or intersectional?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making? What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords their authority; what makes them legitimate information artefacts, or contentious forms of knowledge?
How and when do lists became digital, where are lists on paper? How do we understand their ephemerality or robustness; are they medium or message?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed? Who decides, and who gets invisibilized on lists?

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the ‘list’.

Please submit the abstracts by Friday, August 23, 2019.

We will select 10 abstracts and announce them on Friday, August 30. The selected authors are expected to submit a full draft of the essay (of 2000-3000 words) by Monday, September 30. We will share editorial suggestions with the authors, and the final versions of the essays will be published on the researchers@work blog from November onwards. We will offer Rs. 5,000 as honorarium to all selected authors.

Please submit the abstract (300-500 words), and a short biographic note, in a single text file with the title of the essay and your name via email sent to raw@cis-india.org, with the subject line of ‘List’.

Authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the internet offers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-list

Making in the Humanities – Some Questions and Conflicts

sneha-pp — 2015-11-13T05:46:32Z

The following is an abstract for a proposed chapter on 'making' in the humanities, which has been accepted for publication in a volume titled 'Making Humanities Matter'. This is part of a new book series titled 'Debates in the Digital Humanities 2015' to be published by University of Minnesota Press (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/cfps/cfp_2015_mhm). The first draft of the chapter will be shared by mid-August 2015.

The object of enquiry in the humanities has traditionally been defined in the form of text, audio-visual or other kinds of ‘objects’ or cultural artifacts. With the growth of information and communication technologies, and the advent of the digital, the emergence of a ‘digital object’, as ambiguous as the term may sound, in the last couple of decades, has led to a rethinking of the conventional notion of research objects as well as modes of questioning, with larger consequences for the production and dissemination of knowledge. The rise of fields like ‘humanities computing’, ‘digital humanities’ and ‘cultural analytics’, suggest a combining of two separate domains, or polarized binaries (such as old and new media), and point to the availability of new objects of study, and therefore the need for new methods to study them. A large part of the discourse around these objects however, in trying to read them closely, obfuscates the processes by which they are constituted, which are often as novel and innovative as the artifacts themselves.

This paper will attempt to explore the processes of ‘making’ of these digital objects in the context of several sites of recent humanities scholarship in India that mobilise digital techniques as key methods. These will include two online video archival initiatives (Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma), a digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore's literary works (Bichitra) developed at the University of Jadavpur, Kolkata, and curatorial work undertaken by the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru. Film, text and archival objects acquire several nuances as they are ‘made’ into digital objects, which are also reflected in the methods of working with and studying them. At the same time, problems of authorship, authenticity, accessibility, and a lack of adequate methods to study these objects are some challenges faced across disciplines. The objective of the study is to outline some of the questions related to form and methods that emerge with the digital object, and in the process undertake a critical reading of the politics of making in the humanities. What is the role of ‘making’ in the humanities? Where does humanities research using digital technologies intersect with art and creative practices? How is this research manifested in new forms or objects and methods, and to what effects on the humanities? The paper will aim to respond to some of these questions through a discussion of the initiatives mentioned above.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/making-in-the-humanities-2013-some-questions-and-conflicts

New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T04:45:25Z

An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the sixth among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Introduction

From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself, in India. As the previous sections may have illustrated, most of the prominent initiatives around DH in India have largely been within the university context, or have at least focused around the university as the centre of the processes of knowledge production, and emphasise a move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, and at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation. In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and topics, which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide or even accommodate. These include tools for working with digitisation processes, digital archives, and the use of computational methods in the study of cultural artifacts. Thus processes such as topic modelling, data visualisation, cultural analytics, sentiment analysis and several more become increasingly prominent in discussions about DH. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a particular kind of teaching-learning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.

Wikipedia and internet-based sources of information are entering classrooms with the proliferation of gadgets and tools, and with this there is a tendency towards adopting a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration. DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010) – not only in terms of people, but also spaces, methods and objects of learning - to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this in the global discourse on DH is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ [1]: people with training in the humanities who now inhabit what earlier seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. But it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that are now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters within the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. While the DH discourse in India has developed mostly within the university space, given its multidisciplinary interests and methods, it is often seen as bearing potential in terms of working outside the academic norm. Through an examination of changes in teaching-learning methods, creative and critical practices that come about with the adoption of the digital, it may be useful to explore whether it indeed opens up such alternate modes of humanities practice and how it informs the way we do DH in India; as practitioners, researchers, students, teachers or the lay person. The growth of the internet and digital tools and technologies has led to many changes in teaching-learning practices, and engendered new methods and forms of humanities practice, all of which may now be found within the university or academic space. It is therefore imperative to examine these new modes of research and practice, to arrive a better understanding of the changes in and possibilities available for humanities work after the digital. The notion of the ‘alternate’ is also an important concern here, and the emergence of these new modes of humanities practice help unpack and understand this term better.

Technology in the Classroom

This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster new and alternate knowledge-making practices. India is also still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition, and the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the university circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research, where one may see DH–related work being done. What remains an important part of the discourse in the context of the university is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom.

The use of technology in education has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom [2]. However, the digital divide still persists, as a result of which many initiatives come with problems of their own, the most important being the lack of connection among practice, content and pedagogy [3]. Vikram Vincent, a doctoral scholar in the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, attributes this to a problem of understanding technology itself and what it can do for learning. He looks at technology as an extension of the human body and not something alien to it. Over the course of his research, he has found that the prevalent attitude to the use of technology in the classroom, particularly in early ICTs in education projects, has been more techno-centric rather than learner-centric, which is not the most effective approach [4]. Technology has always been around in some form or the other, from drawing on walls to the blackboard to now the smart board; it has always been in the classroom. How you choose to use it determines the outcomes, and one needs to ensure that the learning environment evolves with the new technology that is introduced, because it does not happen automatically but over a period of time.

The Wikipedia India Education programme pilot project, implemented in Pune in 2011 is an example of the number of challenges that the introduction of a new technology in the classroom brought forth, in terms of skills, content and pedagogy [5]. The need to focus on the educational component of the technology, the improvement of skills of the learner in writing, research and communication, rather than on the tool itself has been an important learning from the programme, even as it continues in a different university today. As Vincent adds further, the problem arises with looking at technology as a disruptive element or merely a tool to aid learning, which prevents institutions from envisioning a more holistic model of learning that takes some amount of time and effort. This also requires the appropriate stimulus and other conditions such as training of teachers, access to resources and training in certain required skills, addressing barriers of language and so forth, which is a feature of some programmes, such as the IT @ school in Kerala which have seen a measure of success [6]. Vincent further mentions examples of programmes he has been part of, some of them under the MHRD-NMEICT initiative which focussed on the teaching-learning process rather than the technology itself, key to which is building teacher capacity to use new and already available resources better [7]. These would be crucial steps to take before envisioning a model of teaching-learning that is premised largely on digital technologies and the internet.

While educational technology is a separate field in itself which looks at better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology [8], it does form part of the context, or landscape in India within which DH would perhaps develop as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach.

Another predominant discourse that informs DH is that of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) which is often used as a rather broad, catch-all term, and has been variously defined and used by different groups and stakeholders across domains (Saith et al, 2008). ICT4D is premised largely around the question of access, and seeks to bridge the digital divide in terms of knowledge, resources, people and infrastructure, among other things. This has also been an intensely debated term, given its social and political implications, particularly in the manner in which it informs a larger discourse on development, technology and globalisation in the global South.(Sundaram, 2005) It is important to understand whether DH has been posited as making an intervention into these prevailing systems of knowledge – so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change. What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it – will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.

Towards a Digital Pedagogy

Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University is positive about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies. According to him, while a media or film studies department would be close to the concerns of DH, and use some form of digital technology such as video clips or blogs as part of coursework, it is particularly important to see what change it has brought about in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages. While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research that he sees a vast change now. Many researchers, many of his students also, have found this a useful part of the research process, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms and tools like Academia or Scalar [9]. It not only makes the process more transparent, but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities for teaching-learning practices.

It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies, but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few, with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata, and more recently Srishti School of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore. The change is recent, as several researchers have pointed out. There have always been concerns about privacy and regulation of content, whether on a university archive or its network. The enthusiasm towards ‘anything digital is good’ is relatively new, and comes from a larger (and sometimes rather utopian) development discourse focussed around modernity and technology. Curricularisation comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets - we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital, and both modes exist simultaneously - but the rate of change is faster with the digital than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities, thus also seen as threat to the disciplines themselves, but to see if it has its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.

The development of courses on DH in three universities in India, and the manner in which the field has been ‘curricularised’ so to say, would be an indication of its specific academic concerns in the Indian context, and the disciplinary challenges and questions that it may throw up for the teaching-learning process. Expectedly, the three courses mobilise a set of resources and expertise that the schools have built over the course of many years. In doing so they also foray into areas that existing humanities courses at the university may not have explored enough, within their own disciplinary framework. For example the course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at Jadavpur University [10] comprises of components on software studies and digital music preservation, building on work done at the large archives at the School of Cultural Texts and Records. Similarly, the course at Presidency University [11] has components on storytelling in digital media through video games, while the course at Srishti [12] has a focus on design practice and critical making amongst other interests. The courses therefore follow a decidedly interdisciplinary framework, which no doubt interesting, also makes curriculum development and course assessment a challenge. While the ‘digital’ aspect of ‘DH’ forms a significant part of these explorations, the manner in which it is being studied is an important point of focus – whether as a condition, space, concept or object, rather than just a set of tools and methods that facilitate the enquiry of the humanities. Digitisation significantly alters the cultural artifact, and there is a need to understand and theorise this digital object better. As Padmini Ray Murray points out, the digital is one way to mediate the material object, particularly those that are not textual, since that kind of experiential access can only be provided by the digital, especially in the case of archival objects. A critical understanding of the digital needs to therefore be a key aspect of such an enquiry in DH.

Alternate Spaces of Humanities Practice

While these are the developments within academia or the university space, there are a number of spaces outside this circle that have also been asking similar questions, and producing new kinds of scholarship and research around these ideas. The Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma archives have not only served as rich repository of material on film and video, used by scholars and film enthusiasts alike, but also as a pedagogic tool in spaces like the Media Lab at Jadavpur University. Through an innovative fellowship programme, Pad.ma has supported research and film making using the archive as a platform. An interesting example here would be a documentary film on power plants in Chhattisgarh made by Sunil Kumar. Available as a film treatment/script on Pad.ma, Kumar’s work is based on research in mainly two districts of Chhattisgarh, where he met and spoke with people, collected documents and shot several hours of video, which he then published in the form of 80 footage series on Pad.ma [13]. There are several other examples on Pad.ma, such as the video-art project on the Radia tapes, and the work on "perfume arts" in Bangalore [14]. The Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) through its workshops on oral and visual history has tried to engage with the more pedagogic aspects of the archive [15]. While the possibilities are many, the uptake of such platforms in universities has been slow, due to issues that range from lack of internet connectivity to a discomfort or unfamiliarity with the internet and other kinds of technology. This eventually relegates initiatives like these to the space of an alternate, extracurricular or outlier, even though they seem to be asking the same questions as the mainstream institutions and doing similar work.

What this also refers to is the space for new modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders or even brings to the fore in already existing practices. With these however, also come the questions about the legitimacy of these forms and methods of knowledge production, as seen in the rather polarised positions around DH in its global discourse. The Wikipedia is one example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang (2011) describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the 15th -18th centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the Internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says:

The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an inherent quality but a transitive one 6 located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge, but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?

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

The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’–often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge. While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of prominent practices and occupations are but alternatives - from alternative medicine to education - to the already established or mainstream system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now. The attempts to subsume these alternate practices under a unifying term such as DH, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long, within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question.

Humanities and Technology: A Twinned History

Another factor in this reduced visibility of the alternate and now re-emergence is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. Therefore by extension then, the term DH itself may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. David Berry (2012) in his essay on the computational turn speaks of possibilities that computationality, and specifically new software and code offer in terms of unifying multiple kinds of knowledge in the university. He says that:

In trying to understand the digital humanities our first step might be to problematize computationality, so that we are able to think critically about how knowledge in the 21st century is transformed into information through computational techniques, particularly within software. It is interesting that at a time when the idea of the university is itself under serious rethinking and renegotiation, digital technologies are transforming our ability to use and understand information outside of these traditional knowledge structures. This is connected to wider challenges to the traditional narratives that served as unifying ideas for the university and, with their decline, has led to difficulty in justifying and legitimating the postmodern university vis-à-vis government funding. (5)

Berry therefore indicates that this turn towards computationality is the result of an emerging need to demonstrate the relevance of the university structure to processes of knowledge production, therefore reiterating the ‘crisis’ argument. The notion of the postmodern university has been examined in detail by Bill Readings, who Berry quotes in his paper. Readings (1997) is sceptical of the term postmodern, preferring instead the idea of a post historical university, which is divested from the notion of the nation-state and further culture as a unifying idea, and is moving towards a notion of excellence that he sees as techno-bureaucratic, a result of several factors including globalisation and the fact that processes of knowledge production and institutionalisation are no longer centred around a liberal subject. If the demonstrated project of the university has changed, the emergence of such new discourse, and specifically concepts and terms such as the ‘alt – academy’ has relevance to how one may now imagine new spaces, objects, processes and figures of knowledge itself.

The significance of the university system to knowledge production has been a recurring point of much debate and discussion in India. Although not explicitly stated as a crisis in humanities by the people interviewed, there are problems of content, pedagogy, infrastructure, and vision that continue to plague higher education at large [16], and very often technological fixes are seen as a solution to these, in some part due to the imagination of a techno-democracy as described in the introduction to this report. As Berry points out then, computationality is a promise, or possibility to do things differently, which is then also inherently assumed to be a way of doing things better. The computational possibilities of DH still need to be explored, but how much of these contribute qualitatively to addressing or even furthering certain disciplinary concerns, still remains an open question. As Jan and Sebastian point out from their experience of working on Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma, the computational aspects of the archives are still to be developed, as there are still restrictions in terms of speed and feasibility (see chapter on infrastructure [17]); the kind of new questions it produces for cinema studies at large will remain a contention. Further, as Padmini Ray Murray observes, drawing on archival material, or data to develop new computational hypotheses would be a direction to work towards, as not much work has been done in this respect in India (See chapter on archives [18]). The challenges with computationality then demand, as Berry argues, a more critical exploration of the term itself, and in fact can be extended to a critical analysis of the state of digitality more broadly.

Final Notes

The problems with the crisis in the humanities and the contribution of technology to these changes could be located to this change in what has traditionally been seen as the space of culture and reason, which has now moved on to something else, a notion of excellence in Readings’ example, thereby changing the questions at the centre as well. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field. At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of humanities practice have been brought to the foreground, but have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come. Some of the questions or points or focus that open up are as follows:

The role of extra-institutional/non-academic or alternate spaces in humanities practice, and in producing and creating new kinds of knowledge.
The increased visibility of new objects and methods within informal and marginal spaces of knowledge production. This demands different, and often innovative methods of enquiry, and whether they alter disciplinary modes of humanities practice and research.
The notion of a moving away from established modes of humanities practice, research and scholarship (therefore the question of a ‘crisis’) which would open up a larger debate around the authority of knowledge.
The ontological and epistemological stake of DH, in short the kinds of new questions it enables us to ask.

As important and visible as the idea of the alternate is in DH, it also presents the mainstream itself as fractured space that imbibes several contradictions of the practices in question, which cannot be confined to these watertight silos of formal/informal, academic or creative. Nevertheless, the mainstream spaces remain crucial for widening and deepening creative digital practice and research in arts and humanities disciplines, and will be the spaces to watch to understand the development of a substantive DH discourse in India.

Endnotes

[1] For more on this see: Nowviskie, Bethany, (Ed.) Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars, last accessed December 23, 2015.

[2] The largest and most ambitious has been the Ministry of Human Resources and Development’s National Mission in Education through ICT programme (NMEICT), started in 2009. See: http://mhrd.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-0 Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[3] To stay with the example of the NMEICT, an evaluation of the programme pointed out several challenges to technology-enabled learning, namely in the areas of connectivity, content, and pedagogy. See http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[4] For more see this position paper by the NCERT on education technology in India: http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[5] See an evaluation report on the programme by Tory Read: http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[6] See: http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[7] For more on these projects see: http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[8] See: Spector, J. Michael. Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015; and Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) Opening up Education. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008, https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf. Also see: http://ciet.nic.in/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[9] See: https://www.academia.edu/ and http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[10] See: https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[11] See: http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[12] See: http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[13] See: http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script. Last accessed December 12, 2015

[14] See: http://pad.ma/texts Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[15] See: http://www.sparrowonline.org/.

[16] See the report of 'The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education: by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development: http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf; and Roy, Kum Kum, "Decoding 'New Education Policy,'" Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 19, May 09, 2015, http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html, last accessed December 23, 2015.

[17] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities.

[18] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment.

References

Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn." Culture Machine. Vol 12, 2012 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440. Last Accessed April 12, 2016.

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

Iiyoshi, Toru and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) Opening up Education. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.

Liang, Lawrence. "A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century." In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (Eds). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Saith, A, M. Vijayabaskar and V. Gayathri. ICTs and Indian Social Change. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008.

Spector, J. Michael. Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Sundaram, Ravi. "Developmentalism Redux." In Incommunicado Reader. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (Eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice

Creativity, Politics, and Internet Censorship

sneha-pp — 2016-06-17T07:07:40Z

In collaboration with Karnataka for Kashmir, we organised a discussion on 'Creativity, Politics and Internet Censorship' on May 25, 2016. Mahum Shabir, a legal activist and artist, Mir Suhail, political cartoonist with Kashmir Reader and Rising Kashmir, and Habeel Iqbal, a lawyer who has worked with several justice groups in Kashmir, shared some of their work and experiences. This discussion was organised as part of Port of Kashmir 2016, a series of events bringing together a small collective of people using different modes of art and activism to address crucial challenges to free speech and democracy in the state.

Mahum Shabir talking about the Handwara case. Source: Swar Thounaojam.

The discussion began with Mahum Shabir giving an overview of the work at the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, specifically on the Handwara case. She spoke of the role of the internet, and social media in particular, in perpetuating the gaze of the state, while also bringing up the larger question of how media propagates a certain way of looking at Kashmir, particularly women, marginalised groups and victims of violence. Internet blockades and media censorship pose several obstacles for the circulation of information, resulting in the need for surreptitious ways of communication as a necessary way to counter predominant narratives in the discourse around occupation. The implications of these for the rights of women in particular, the curbs on freedom at different levels, and the undercurrent of violence that is prevalent in everyday life, came up as significant questions.

Mir Suhail presented some of his cartoons, and shared some poignant personal experiences of growing up in a state under military occupation. His works reflect his concerns about a changing society, from understanding strife as an almost normalised state of existence, to now a phase of industrialization and control of resources. He spoke on the politics of exercising creative freedom in the present, and his attempt to encourage conversations on contemporary issues through his art. The role of technology in facilitating these conversations is as crucial as it is contentious, for it also brings up questions of surveillance and privacy;his art tries to navigate through some of these questions in different ways.

Habeel Iqbal, a lawyer who has worked on the Shopian and Handwara cases, spoke on some of the legal aspects of censorship and surveillance related issues in Kashmir, particularly in instances involving social media. He discussed some of the challenges faced by activists, social workers and political groups in working on certain cases, particularly in gathering and circulating information or in writing about sensitive issues. Self-censorship is often the only option for people working on these issues, as he elaborated through some personal experiences.

The discussion included questions on the possibilities opened up by privacy tools, such the use of encryption and to the extent to which they affect communication. Access to these technologies is a factor here; besides, transparency is also a goal for most human rights organisations working in the state. Social media, and social messaging apps in particular often function as an alternative to mainstream media as a means of communication, and it is interesting to see the questions it opens up for censorship. Examples of activism using not just the internet, but the network (through USBs and hard drives) were also discussed. The responses to such forms of activism, from across the world were interesting to engage with, as it tries to tackle predominant perceptions about the state. The economic aspects of different strategies of censorship and surveillance, through curfews and blockades and its broader implications for socio-economic development in the state were also discussed. The talk provided several insights into the problems and challenges to freedom of speech, the censorship of ideas, and its repercussions for creative freedom and politics in Kashmir.

Postcards of cartoons by Mir Suhail. Source: Swar Thounaojam.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/creativity-politics-and-internet-censorship-20160525

Centre for Internet and Society

Call for Essays: Offline

Offline

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the "offline". Please submit the abstracts by Sunday, September 02.

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

1. Chinar Mehta

2. Cole Flor

3. Elishia Vaz

4. Karandeep Mehra

5. Preeti Mudliar

6. Rianka Roy

7. Simiran Lalvani

8. Srikanth Lakshmanan

9. Titiksha Vashist

10. Dr. Yenn Lee

Chinar Mehta

Cole Flor

Deactivating: An Escape From the Realities of the Online World

Elishia Vaz

Dynamics of the ‘offline’ self-diagnosis, exploration of the corporeal and the politics of information

Karandeep Mehra

The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality

Preeti Mudliar

In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women

Rianka Roy

Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance and Activism in the Indian IT&ITES Industry

Simiran Lalvani

The Offline as a Place of Work: Examining Food Discovery and Delivery by Digital Platforms

Srikanth Lakshmanan

The Cash Merchant

Titiksha Vashist

Dr. Yenn Lee

Online consequences of being offline: A gendered tale from South Korea

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): List - Call for Sessions

IRC19: List

Call for Sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Call for Papers

Call for Papers

IRC19: List

Silicon Plateau: Volume Two

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Welcome to r@w blog!

r@w blog: Visit (Medium)

A space for reflections on internet and society, r@w blog is also an attempt to facilitate conversations around contemporary debates and foster creative engagement with research and practice through text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other media forms offered by the internet.

RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video

RAW Lectures

Lecture #01 - Stories and Histories of Internet in India

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Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages 2019 - From Conversations to Actions

Event page: URL

Agenda: Download (PDF)

Call for Contributions and Reflections: Your experiences in Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages!

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: Call for Contributions and Reflections

“It’s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It’s too beautiful for English to explain.”

Some of the key questions we’d like you to explore:

Submissions:

Timeline:

பங்களிப்பதற்காக அழைப்பு இணைய மொழி ஆதிக்கச் சூழலை மாற்றியதில் உங்கள்அனுபவம்!

உங்களிடம் நாங்கள் கேட்க விரும்பும் சில கேள்விகள்:

ஆய்வேடு சமர்ப்பித்தல்:

காலகட்டம்:

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions!

Cross-posted from the Whose Knowledge? website: URL

Caddie Brain, Joel Liddle, Leigh Harris, Graham Wilfred

Claudia Soria

Donald Flywell Malanga

Emna Mizouni

Ishan Chakraborty

Joaquín Yescas Martínez

Kelly Foster

Paska Darmawan

Uda Deshpriya

Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium