Centre for Internet and Society

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

zeenab — 2017-02-03T01:50:20Z

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

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

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

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

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

Expansion rather than transition

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

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

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

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

Changing rhythms in the newsroom

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

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

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

Emergence of new forms of newswork

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Elements of Role Playing Games

arun — 2011-08-02T05:58:06Z

This article, the first in a three part series addresses the definitions of role-playing games (RPGs) and their elements, the integration of elements from other genres facilitating to what might lead to the hybridization of genres and the relation between online and offline games as well as solo gaming with respect to the ‘Alone Together’ phenomenon.

What are RPGs?

RPGs include a broad family of games where a player assumes the role of a character who interacts with the game(s) world (often imaginary) in some manner. It is to be noted that even an empire building game, which technically belongs to another genre has mild elements of role play where the player is a ruler and certain elements of characterization that follows are noticeable in the Caesar series designed by Sierra. The in-game character from generation (character generation is prominent among most RPGs, particularly fantasy based, and this marks the beginning of a particular route or path that a player wishes to take) to growth and development along various pathways and strands in multi-pathed RPGs would be an interesting read and is duly examined in the third and final part of this series. Role-playing games examined here are not table top games or board games but simulations, which sufficiently justify the basic RPG elements as well as the incorporation of other generic elements from turn based gaming, real time strategy, and simulation.

The ideal examples used are ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ (DA: O) and ‘King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame’ (KA).

What are some of the key elements of RPGs?

Interviews given by Chris Beleszinski from Epic Games and Ray Mayzuka from Bioware echo similar statements on the future of shooters (both first person{FP} and third person{TP} shooters), on the lifting of the pillars of RPGs, and the merging of genres, which may inevitably lead to some form of hybridization of genres. The key features among many of RPGs are (also described as the three key pillars, with the fourth pillar being a new addition/merger):

Combat/Conflict: Some of the new RPGs such as Mass Effect, DA: O and KA have options of combat centred on the choices that are made. In KA allies and enemies and such other categorizations depend on the ability of the character. All RPGs have some form of conflict which may present itself in the third person form in DA: O or in the slightly merged Real Time Strategy (RTS) form in KA.
Progression: Progression is hard to define since there are different levels of progression often simultaneously operating in RPGs. It may be based on Quest/Plot progression without which the game (most if not all) do not progress (for example, finding Dr. Young is imperative in Batman: Arkham Asylum. This quest cannot be overridden or bypassed as is possible in others with a more flexible quest progression system, such as DA: O or KA). Progression may also include character progression in terms of statistics such as health, agility, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and mana/magic. They are the six main attributes that defer among character classes. Depending on the fantasy game there are considerable differences or overlaps in their attributes (refer the RPG terminologies listed earlier). Progression could also mean levelling in a war game where there are no identifiable characters but cities/towns or some similar collective.
Exploration: Another main feature of any RPG almost always present in a shooter (FP/TP) also reiterated by developers such as Bioware and Epic Games in their RPG shooters is Exploration! This is most notably found in Dungeon Crawlers (with non-persistent characteristics being the best example), which contributes to replayability. Exploration often contributes to the immersiveness of the game environment in conjunction with storytelling. Exploration is also linked to quest and character progression in that the game does not sufficiently progress without a minimum amount of exploration meanwhile some content/areas are always hidden and accessible only through certain quests and characters. For example - in T.O.M.E, an ASCII based game which follows Tolkien’s fictionalized world of LOTR, it is nearly impossible to locate ‘Sauron the Sorcerer’ in the dungeons of ‘Angband’ level 99 without first finding/defeating ‘The Necromancer of Dol Guldur’ in the dungeons of ‘Dol Guldur’. In the LOTR world ‘The Necromancer’ is the disguise Sauron uses to conceal his presence from Middle Earth. In fact Greg Zeschuka developer (and co-founder) from Bioware, mentions ‘developing of vast parts of content that an ordinary player might never see in an interview to Gamasutra. Almost 30 per cent of the content including sub-quests and related content are available but generally not explored by a casual gamer (the distinctions between casual gamers and hardcore gamers is problematic, but in this case suffices to say that the casual gamer would be an ordinary player who spends a few hours a week gaming compared to the hardcore gamer).
The Story (The Narrative) as the fourth pillar of RPG: Releases such as Mass Effect 2 and DA: O are by the developers own definition catering to a new RPG (shooter) and a more traditional RPG (in terms of classical role-play). The narrative is one of the elements of an RPG that has in recent releases strengthened enough to be termed as a key pillar particularly by prominent developers such as Epic Games and Bioware whose efforts are to create immersive game worlds, which respond to a player’s actions and characterizations.
Another feature important to gameplay but which do not possess such commonalities is social interaction. Although focus is given to social interaction in RPGs, there is no identification of social interaction as a relevant feature. This may manifest in two phases, one is the ‘alone together’ phenomenon and the second is the emulation of social interaction through choice (moral) in games such as DA: O.

The Playing ‘Alone Together’ Phenomenon

The ‘Alone Together’ phenomenon refers to gaming on and off MMOs in either solo play or in small manageable teams. These phenomena are noticed in MMO Games and multi-player games. ‘Alone Together’ elements are also imported into the offline gaming scene. This is not a new phenomena, rather it is something which has gained more prominence with MMO releases and offline/LAN games trying to incorporate these elements for better gameplay. DA: O has a specific in-game function where you can login and post screenshots/character profiles and achievements online through the game. This is also noticeable in newer releases of T.O.M.E (v2.35 and 3.00 alpha 19 release). Fan content and MODs were usually put up on the Games official website or fans sites, a few games incorporate these modifications as custom maps and thus incorporating fan content into the game. The incorporation of this element in DA: O suggests the merging or the blurring of lines between genres, explored in the following sections.

Unification and/or Merger of Genres

Ray Mayzuka and Chris Beleszinski echo similar sentiments. Genres are ‘almost a vestige of the past’, says Mayzuka, and Beleszinski echoes this as he says that the future of shooters is lodged with RPG. Mayzuka stretches this to predict a future, which may no longer subscribe to traditional classifications and have borrowed elements from multiple genres. The rising importance given to story and narrative technique by game developers such as Epic Games and Bioware are telling, since generically opposite developers (Epic works on shooters, while Bioware is renowned for its RPG) are working towards similar goals—goals which focus on creating games which are more realistic and require the addition of elements that traditionally remains the exclusive domain of one genre. Traditionally, Shooters and RPGs have been simulating the same experience (fighting) from two different perspectives, the former focuses on the action and combat, and the latter focuses on development and story behind warfare. The inclusion of the story in shooters enhances its immersiveness. Beleszinski states that the content is there for a purpose just like a script and as such the feedback by the in-game character contributes to the immersive environment for the player/reader. Feedback becomes one aspect of the immersive environment, one that responds and reacts to the player as and when the game is played. The player creates the game as it is played and takes part in the process of authorship of that playthrough. This element of authorship gives an amount of independence and moral choice that allows the player to create the narrative as the game progresses and this among many elements contributes to the immersiveness of the game environment (by environment I mean the game world including all its design aspects as well as the programming aspects which create this world).

The second part will review the debates around narratives and gameplay and focuses on the 'Demands of the story' and the 'Demands of the Game' derived from Greg Costikyan’s ‘Where Stories End and Games Begin’.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/the-elements-of-role-playing-games

From Taboo to Beautiful - Menstrupedia

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:25:59Z

On this post, we take a look at 'menstrual activism' -a movement that despite its trajectory in feminism, remains unnoticed in most accounts of traditional and digital activism. We interview Tuhin Paul, the artist and storyteller behind Menstrupedia, an India-based social venture creating comics to shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding menstruation around the world.

CHANGE-MAKER: Tuhin Paul, Aditi Gupta and Rajat Mittal
ORGANIZATION: Menstrupedia
METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling and comics
STRATEGY OF CHANGE: To shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding
 menstruation, by delivering accessible, informative and entertaining 
 content about menstruation through different media.

Most of us think we know what menstruation is; except...we don’t. Many of my male friends still cringe at the mention of the phrase “I’m on my period”, or use it as a derogatory justification for my occasional cranky mood at the office: “It’s that time of the month, isn’t it?” Poor menstruation has been the culprit of femininity; always bashful, tiptoeing for five days straight, trying its best to remain incognito. The social venture Menstrupedia is committed to change this. Aditi, Tuhin and Rajat want to shift how we look at menstruation and remove the stigma that haunts the natural, self-regulation process women undergo to keep their bodies healthy and strong to sustain life in the future.

Now, if you are already wondering what menstruation has to do with internet and society, just wait for it. This post manages to bring art, punk, menstruation and technology together, all within the scope of the Making Change project! Before though, we shall start with some definitions. Let us first lay conceptual grounds about menstruation and Menstrupedia, to then locate and unpack their theory of change.

What is menstruation?

It can be defined as:

Menstruation is the periodic discharge of blood and mucosal tissue (the endometrium) from the uterus and vagina. It starts at menarche at or before sexual maturity (maturation), in females of certain mammalian species, and ceases at or near menopause (commonly considered the end of a female's reproductive life).

And it looks something like this:

But, I believe, most women will agree the following are much more accurate depictions of the spectrum of thoughts, emotions and sensations that menstruation spurs:

The Beauty of RED

My Periods: A Blessing or a Curse

By Naina Jha

My periods
Are a dreadful experience
Because of all the pain.
Myths and secrets make it a mystery
What worsens it most though, are members of my family
Especially my mother, who always make it a big deal
They never try to understand what I truly feel
I face all those cramps and cry the whole night long
None of which is seen or heard or felt by anyone.

Instead of telling me, what it is,
They ask me to behave maturely instead.
Can somebody tell me how I am supposed to
Naturally accept it?
My mother asks me to stay away from men
And a few days later, she asks me to marry one!
When I ask her to furnish
the reason behind her haste
She told me that now that I was menstruating,
I was grown up and ready to give birth to another.

I don’t know whether to feel blessed about it
Or consider it to be my curse.
For these periods are the only reason for me to be disposed.
Since my childhood, I felt rather blessed to be born as a girl
But after getting my periods now,
I’m convinced that it’s a curse...

Find it in Menstrupedia's blog.

Despite all this, it is still perceived as a social stigma in society. There is clearly a dissonance between the definition, experience and perceptions around menstruation, that calls for a reconfiguration of the information we are using to define it.

Stigma as a Crisis

However, re-defining 'menstruation' is no popular or easy task. The word belongs to a group of contested terminology around womanhood and is the protagonist of its own breed of feminist activism: menstrual activism. [1] Although I would consider many of the stigmas surrounding menstruation to be quite self-explanatory (we've all experienced and perpetuated them in one way or another -and if they are not, then you are the product of an obscenely progressive upbringing for which I congratulate your parents, teachers and all parties involved), I will still outline the main reasons why menstruation is a source of social stigma for women, and refer to scholarly authority on the subject to legitimize my rant.

Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and Joan Chrisler use Goffman's definition of stigma [2] on their paper: The Menstrual Mark: Menstruation as a Social Stigma to explain the misadventures of menstruation:

Stigma: 
stain or mark setting people apart from others. it conveys the information 
that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their 
appearance or identity

Among the various negative social constructs deeming menstruation a dirty and repulsive state, this one made a particular echo: “[menstruation is] a tribal identity of femaleness”. Menstruation is the equivalent of a rite of passage marking the lives of girls with a 'before' and an 'after' on how the world sees them and how they see themselves. From the dreaded stain on the skirt and the 5-day mission to keep its poignant color and smell on the down low, to having to justify mood and body swings to the overly inquisitive; menstruation is imagined as inconvenient, unpleasant and unwelcome. As Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler point out: the menstrual cycle, coupled with stigmas, pushes women to adopt the role of the “physically or mentally disordered” and reinforce it through their communication, secrecy, embarrassment and silence (Kissling, 1996).

Why does it matter?

Besides from strengthening attitudes that underpin gender discrimination and attempting against girls' self-identity and sense of worth, there are other tangible consequences for their development and education. I'm going to throw some facts and figures at you, to back this up with the case of India.

An article published by the WSSCC, the Geneva based Water supply and Sanitation Council, shows the Menstruation taboo, consequence of a “patriarchal, hierarchical society”, puts 300 million women at risk in India. They do not have access to menstrual hygiene products, which has an effect on their health, education (23% of girls in India leave school when they start menstruating and the remaining 77% miss 5 days of school a month) and their livelihoods.

In terms of awareness and information about the issue, WSSCC found that 90% didn't know what a menstrual period was until they got it. Aru Bhartiya's research on Menstruation, Religion and Society, shows the main sources of information about menstruation come from beliefs and norms grounded on culture and religion. Some of the related restrictions (that stem from Hinduism, among others) include isolation, exclusion from religious activities, and restraint from intercourse. She coupled this with a survey where she found: 63% of her sample turned to online sites over their mothers for information, 62% did not feel comfortable talking about the subject with males and 70% giggled upon reading the topic of the survey. All in all, a pretty gruesome scenario

Here's where Menstrupedia comes in

The research ground work attempted above was done in depth by Menstrupedia back in 2009 when the project started taking shape. They conducted research for one year while in NID and did not only find that awareness about menstruation was very low, but that parents and teachers did not know how to talk about the subject.


							Facts about menstruation awareness in India. Video courtesy of Menstru pedia Youtube channel.

Their proposed intervention: distribute an education visual guide and a comic to explain the topic. They tested out the prototype among 500 girls in 5 different states in Northern India and the results were astonishing.

A workshop conducted by MJB smriti sansthan to spread awareness about mensuration.
Find full album of Menstrupedia Comic being used around India on Menstrupedia's Facebook page.

"To my surprise, they [the nuns] all agreed that until they read the information given in the Menstrupedia comic, even they were of the opinion that Menstruation was a ‘dirty’ and 'abominable' thing and they wondered 'why women suffered from it in the first place'? But after reading the comic book, their view had changed…now they felt that this was a 'vital' part of womanhood and there's nothing to feel ashamed about it! The best part was while this exercise clarified their ideas, beliefs, concepts about menstruation, it also helped me to get over my innate hesitancy to approach such a sensitive issue in ‘public’ and boosted my confidence for taking this up as a 'mission' to reach out to the maximum possible girls across the country."

Ina Mondkar,
on her experience of educating young nuns about menstruation.

Testimonial after a workshop held in two Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh.

Their mandate today reads: ‘Menstrupedia is a guide to explain menstruation and all issues surrounding it in the most friendly manner.’ They currently host a website with information about puberty, menstruation, hygiene and myths, along with illustrations that turn explaining the process of growing up into a much friendlier endeavour than its stigma-ladden alternatives.

Snipbit of the first chapter. Read it for free here.

Through the comic and the interactions around it, Menstrupedia strives to create a) content that frame menstruation as a natural process that is inconvenient, yes; but that should have no negative effects on their self-esteem and development; and b) an environment where girls can talk about it openly and clarify their doubts.

Technology's role in the mix

"We want to reach out to as many girls as possible”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

The role of digital technologies basically comes down to scalability. Opposite to The Kahani Project's views on scaling up, Menstrupedia makes emphasis on using technology to reach a larger audience. Currently they have a series of communication channels enabled by technology that include: a visual quick guide, a Q&A forum (for both men and women), a blog (a platform of self-expression on menstruation), a you tube channel (where they provide updates on their progress) and the upcoming comic.

Upon the question of the digital divide and whether this expands the divide between have and have nots, Tuhin was very set on the idea of producing the same content in both its digital and print form. “parents or schools should be able to buy the comic and give it to their daughters, so whenever they feel like it, they can refer to it”. The focus is on making this material as readily available as possible, in order to overcome the tension between new and old information: “workshops are conducted but the moment they go back home, their mothers impose certain restrictions. It becomes a dilemma. But if you provide [The girl] with a comic book, she has something she can take home and educate her mother with”

And here's why it works

More than the comic book itself, what is truly remarkable about Menstrupedia is Tuhin, Rajat and Aditi’s guts to pick up such a problematic theme in the Indian social imaginary and challenge the entrenched, stubborn beliefs surrounding the issue. The comic book, asides from being appealing to the eye and an accessible format of storytelling (a method we have unpacked in previous posts), fits right into the movement of menstrual activism and what it stands for.

“We thought of creating something: a tool that can help girls understand menstruation without having to rely on anybody else”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

First, it is a self-reliant resource. Once the comic book leaves Menstrupedia's hands and lands on those of kids and adults, it takes its own journey. The format of the comic is accessible enough for someone to pick it up and learn about menstruation without the intervention or the support of a third party. This makes Menstrupedia's comic highly flexible and mobile. It can be shared from teacher to child, from mom to daughter, from peer to peer: “[it should teach] how to help your friends when they get their period” (Tuhin) However, it has the autonomy to also take roads less travelled: from mom to dad, from child to teacher, from boy to girl. The goal at the end of the day: a self-reliant, solidarity-based community where information circulating about menstruation highlights its capacity to give life and overshadows its traditional stigmatized identity.

This self-reliance is characteristic of previous manifestations of menstrual activism. Back in the 80s, the feminist movement, tightly linked to punk culture, embraced the do it yourself movement,[3] that enabled women to materialize personalized forms of resistance. They published zines promoting “dirty self-awareness, body and menstrual consciousness and unlearning shame” through “raw stories and personal narratives” (Bobel, 2006). According to Bobel using the self as an example is a core element in the “history of self-help” within the DIY movement. The role of the Menstrupedia blog is then crucial to sustain the exposure and production of “raw narratives”. Tuhin adds: “We don't write articles on the blog. It is a platform where people from different backgrounds write about their experiences with menstruation and bring in a different perspective”: For example,

Red is my colour by Umang Saigal

Red is my colour,
To make you understand, I endeavour,
Try to analyse and try to favour.
It is not just a thought, but an attempt,
To treat ill minds that are curable.

When I was born, I was put in a red cradle,
I grew up watching the red faces for a girl-children in anger,
Red became my favourite,
But I never knew,
That someday I would be cadged in my own red world.

Red lover I was,
All Love I lost,
When I got my first red spots,
What pain it caused only I know,
When I realized, Red determined my ‘class’

I grew up then, ignoring red,
At night when I found my bedsheet wet,
All day it ached,
All day it stained,
And in agony I would, turn insane.

At times I would think,
Does red symbolize beauty or pain?
But when I got tied, in the sacred knot,
I found transposition of my whole process of thought,
When from dirty to gold, Red crowned my bridal course.

As I grew old,
All my desires vanished and got cold,
My mind still in a dilemma,
What more than colour in itself could it unfold?
What was the secret behind its truth untold?

Is Red for beauty, or is it for beast?
It interests me now to know the least,
All I know is that Red is a Transition,
From anguish to pride
Red is a sensation.

Red is my colour, as it is meant to be,
No matter what the world thinks it to be,
No love lost, one Love found,
Red symbolizes life and also our wounds,
I speak it aloud with life profound,
That red is my colour, and this is what I’ve found.

Submission to the Menstrupedia blog

'Self-expression' is not a concept we usually find side by side with 'menstruation'; however, if we look at what has been done in the past, we find that Menstrupedia is actually contributing to a much larger tradition of resistance. For instance, Menstrala, by the American artist Vanessa Tiegs. Menstrala is the name of a collection of 88 paintings “affirming the hidden forbidden bright red cycle of renewal”.

Another interesting example is American feminist Gloria Steinem's[4] text If Men Could Menstruate.

“What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?
The answer is clear:
Menstruation would become an enviable, boast worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed- for proof of manhood,with religious and stag parties.”

Gloria Steinem
[excerpt]

Opportunities like these, enable Menstrupedia's community to actively participate in the reconfiguration of 'menstruation' as a concept and as an experience. By exposing new narratives and perspectives on the issue and by disseminating menstrual health information, the community is able to crowd source resistance and dismantle the stigma together.

Making Change through Menstrupedia

The case of Menstrupedia reminds us of Blank Noise because of its approach to change. Both locate their crises at the discursive level and seek to resolve them by creating new forms of meaning-making. They advocate for a reconsideration of 'givens', for a self-reflection on our role perpetuating these notions and for resistance against conceptual status quos: be it socially accepted culprits like 'eve-teasing', or more discrete rejects like 'menstruation'. Both seek to dismantle power structures that give one discourse preference over others, and both count with a strong gender dynamic dominating the context where these narratives unfold. They are producing a revolution in our system of meaning making, yet only producing resistance in the larger societal context they inhabit.

On the question of where is Menstrupedia's action located, Tuhin replied by pinning it at the individual level: “if a person is aware of menstruation and they know the facts, they are more likely to resist restrictions and spread awareness”. However, they still acknowledge the historicity behind menstrual awareness (as knowledge passed down from generation to generation) that precedes the project. While the introduction of Menstrupedia, to an extent, does shake up household dynamics in terms of content, it also provides tools and resources to sustain the traditional model of oral tradition and knowledge sharing within the community.

In terms of their role as change-makers ,Tuhin stated that the possibility to intervene was a result of their socio-economic status and the resources they had at hand as “educated members of the middle class with access to information and communication technologies”. Is this the role the middle class should play? I asked. To which he gave a two fold answer: First, in terms of responsibility of action: “it is a role that anyone can play depending on what kind of expertise they have. It comes to a point where [intents of change] cannot be sustained by activism if you want to achieve long term impact” And second, in terms of setting up a resilient infrastructure: “I believe we can create an infrastructure people can use and create models that can help low income groups overcome their challenges and become self-sustainable.” Both answers highlight the need for sustainability in social impact projects, hinting a retreat from wishful thinking upon the presence of technology and a more strategic allocation of skills and resources by middle class and for-profit interventions.

As far the relationship between art, punk, menstruation and technology goes; that was just a hook to get you through the unreasonable length of my blog post, but if anything, it represents an effort to portray the importance of contextuality and interdisciplinary we have been exploring throughout the series. Identifying the use of various mediums and language systems, such as different art forms and modes of self-expression, as well the acknowledgement of the theoretical and social contexts preceding and framing the project, as is feminist activism and the cultural and religious backdrop in India, contribute immensely to fill gaps in the stories of how we imagine change making today; especially at the nascence of new narratives, as we hope is the case for menstruation in a post-Menstrupedia era.

Sources:

Bhartiya, Aru: “Menstruation, Religion and Society” IJSSH: International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. Volume: Vol.3, No.6.

Bobel, Chris. "“Our Revolution Has Style”: Contemporary Menstrual Product Activists “Doing Feminism” in the Third Wave." Sex Roles 54, no. 5-6 (2006): 331-345.

Johnston-Robledo, Ingrid, and Joan C. Chrisler. "The menstrual mark: Menstruation as social stigma." Sex roles 68, no. 1-2 (2013): 9-18.

Footnotes

[1] Refer to Chris Bobel's work including New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. Access it here

[2] Johnston Robledo and Chrisler made reference to Erving Goffman's 1963 work: Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. "According to Goffman (1963), the word stigma refers to any stain or mark that sets some people apart from others; it conveys the information that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their appearance or identity Goffman (1963, p. 4) categorized stigmas into three types: "abominations of the body” (e.g., burns, scars, deformities), “ blemishes of individual character” (e.g., criminality, addictions), and “tribal” identities or social markers associated with marginalized groups (e.g., gender,race, sexual orientation, nationality)".

[3] For a short run through on DIY as part of the Punk Subculture, refer to Ian P. Moran's paper: Punk - The Do-it-Yourself culture."Punk as a subculture goes much further than rebellion and fashion as punks generally seek an alternative lifestyle divergent from the norms of society. The do-it-yourself, or D.I.Y. aspect of punk is one of the most important factors fueling the subculture." Access it here.

[4] Gloria Steimen is a journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970. Visit her official website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/menstrupedia-taboo-beautiful

Digital Transition in Newspapers in India: A Pilot Study

zeenab — 2016-07-20T11:43:53Z

Introduction

This pilot study situates itself at the intersection of global trends in news and journalism, and emergent practises of legacy print media in India. Our aim is to explore how legacy print newspapers are transitioning to the online space. The study will address questions in two thematic clusters: 1) the work of journalism, and 2) how the emergence of the digital, both as a source of news, and the medium of distribution, is shaping the work of newspaper journalists, which has expanded to include various functions particular to the digital environment. And two, newsroom practices, which focus on the different modalities of convergence emerging in Indian newsrooms, and the organisational re-engineering that is being attempted in order to do journalism in a space where professional editors and journalists no longer have dominance with respect to the production and distribution of content.

News Culture in Transition

The influx of digital technology combined with advancements in the field of telecommunications has had a disruptive effect on the global news industry. This year’s World Press Trends survey, released last month, reports that at least 40 per cent of global internet users read newspapers online and that in most developed countries, readership on digital platforms has surpassed that in print(WAN-INFRA, 2016). However, while revenue from print is said to be declining, it still makes up for more than 92 per cent of all newspapers revenues. At the same time, circulation increased by 4.9 per cent globally, mostly owing to the 7.8 per cent growth in numbers from India, China and other parts of Asia which made up 62% of the global average daily print unit circulation in 2015. This growth, the report suggests, is a function of low prices and expanding literacy in these markets.

While newspapers are a thriving industry in India, newspaper organisations and journalists are adopting new technology in order to remain relevant in a fast changing environment (Chattopadhyay 2012, Panda 2014). One one hand, they are swept up in the disruptive shifts in the global media economy, while on the other, they are in a unique position to convert this disruption into an opportunity.

The WPT report also notes, perhaps to the relief of those struggling to find a sustainable revenue model for digital news, that revenue from paid digital circulation has increased 30 per cent in 2015 and that one in five readers from the countries studied are willing to pay for online news. Revenue from digital advertising on the other hand, is growing at the slower pace of 7.3 per cent.

The report points out that there is a huge opportunity in mobile growth, with more than 70 per cent of readers in countries like USA, UK, Australia and Canada reading newspapers via a mobile device. Similar trends can be seen in India, as internet usage here is increasingly shaped by mobile growth (Google India Report, 2015). The fact that many digital-born news sites are adopting a mobile-first strategy (Sen and Nielsen, 2016) reflects this. More recently, Hindustan Times has hired a mobile editor to build a team of over 700 journalists specialising in mobile journalism.

Earlier this year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released a report on digital news start-ups in India (Sen and Nielsen, 2016), which explores how digital-born news start-ups are developing new editorial priorities, funding models and distribution strategies for news in the Indian digital media market. The study, which included observing the practices of The Quint, Scroll, The Wire, Khabar Lahariya, Daily Hunt and InShorts, concluded that India was not short of noteworthy experiments in journalism and online news. It also found that more news publishers are adopting mobile-first approaches, given that internet use in India is increasingly through mobile devices. More relevant to this study, the report established that social media has emerged as a tool for distribution and also stated that digital news start-ups are turning their focus to Hindi and local language content, in order to serve new audiences.

Studying the Effects of Convergence

Their digital transition can be witnessed on two counts: publishing with digital and publishing for digital. The first involves a shift towards using the digital in the process of sourcing and publishing news. Workflow is managed by advanced content management systems, news articles contain multimedia and interactivity that require technical expertise, and the web and social media are increasingly becoming a reliable source of primary and secondary information for journalists. Second, publishing for the highly competitive comes with it’s own challenges. Distribution and consumption of news is increasingly being carried out on digital platforms, fostering a culture of interdependence that impacts news providers in previously unforeseen ways. As the decision to prioritise their digital products take hold, newsrooms themselves evolve to contain a diverse range of skill and expertise.

According to the 2015 Trends in Newsroom report, editors and senior reporters in newsrooms across the globe are experimenting with new ways of storytelling using podcasts, chat apps, automation, virtual reality and gamification, as well as dealing with new challenges with respect to source protection in the face of increased surveillance and intermediaries like Facebook and Google and reporting on culturally sensitive subjects(World Editors Forum, 2015).

The dynamics of these shifts in different countries may be shaped by several factors including the availability of human and financial resources, and pace of adoption of new technologies by the readers. In markets like Japan, complexities of the existing newspaper trade in the country act as a deterrent to technological change (Villi and Hayashi, 2014). Given the pace at which the media ecology of the web evolves; this transition is an ongoing process characterised by experiments in business, marketing and editorial strategies. A good example of such an experiment is last week’s decision by leading Indian newspapers, to make their content unavailable to those consumers who had ad-blocking software installed.

Such a shift also demands that we ask new questions of news in journalism. In his paper on studying computational and algorithmic journalism, C. W. Anderson tackles how sociologists and media scholars can frame inquiries related to journalism, given its computational turn (Anderson, 2012). He suggests using the added lens of ‘technology’ and ‘institutions and fields’ to Michael Schudson’s (Schudson, 2010) typology on the sociology of news which approaches the study of news from economic, political, cultural and organisational approaches. While most of these are self-explanatory, by institutions and fields, he refers to the ‘field of journalism’ as a whole and the different actors that shape it. This frame will examine the cultural power struggles that occur within the field and the way these struggles shape newsroom practises and news content (Anderson, 2012). Anderson adds that it is imperative to understand that the dynamics of the field of journalism are closely connected to nearby fields which now include computer science, web development and digital advertising.

We adopted a similar approach for our study. We began our inquiry by asking questions about how the emergence of digital technologies and the Internet are changing the process of producing news and how news organisations are rising up to the challenges posed by the digital space: what technologies and software are being used in the production and distribution of news in India, how are these technologies and softwares influencing the process of news production and distribution, how are the everyday practices and roles with respect to journalistic and editorial work transforming with their transition to digital, how do media agencies conceptualise and measure online viewership, and how do these metrics impact journalistic and editorial practices.

These questions led us to explore how leading legacy print newspapers across three language markets - English, Hindi and Malayalam - are making the transition from producing news stories exclusively for print to producing multimedia stories for the highly competitive and and diverse media ecology of the web.

Research Plan

As already mentioned, the study is divided into two thematic clusters: work of journalism and newsroom practises.

The former will include asking questions related to strategies and skills of information gathering and validation, methods and tools of communicating a news story in an online-first (or simultaneously print and online) environment, personal engagements with audiences via social media websites, new methods of performance assessment and sources and practices of learning and capacity building.

The latter will explore how choice/emphasis of content and reportage is being re-shaped by the digital environment by inquiring into changes in editorial responsibilities, dynamics of decision making, news-making workflows, technical diversity of the work force, and interaction between news producers within an increasingly convergent newsroom.

This being a pilot study, we will conduct intensive interviews with journalists, editors, and management personnel associated with one newspaper in each language market: 1) Hindustan Times in English, 2) Dainik Jagran in Hindi, and 3) Malayala Manorama in Malayalam. We selected these three languages due to their large market sizes and geographic distribution, and selected the newspapers for either their pioneering efforts in adopting digital technologies, or their dominant position in terms of circulation.

The research team includes Zeenab Aneez and Sumandro Chattapadhyay from CIS, and RISJ Director of Research Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Vibodh Parthasarathi from CCMG, Jamia Millia Islamia, will contribute to the study as an advisor.

References

Anderson, Christopher W. 2013. ‘Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism’. New Media & Society 15 (7): 1005-1021.

Bajaj, Ambrish. 2016. “Indian news sites lost 100 million page views and $500K in three weeks - and had no clue why” http://factordaily.com/indian-news-sites-lost-100-million-page-views-500k-three-weeks-no-clue/.

Chattopadhyay, Saayan. 2012. ‘Online Journalism and Election Reporting in India’. Journalism Practice 6 (3): 337-48. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663596.

Coddington, Mark. 2014. ‘Defending Judgment and Context in “original Reporting”: Journalists’ Construction of Newswork in a Networked Age’. Journalism 15 (6): 678–95.

– 2015. ‘The Wall Becomes a Curtain: Revisiting Journalism’s News–business Boundary’. Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices, and Participation. New York: Routledge. [forthcoming]. Accessed from http://markcoddington.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/CoddingtonFINAL.NewReferences.docx.

Diakopoulos, Nicholas, and Mor Naaman. 2011. ‘Towards Quality Discourse in Online News Comments’. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 133–42. ACM. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958844.

Diakopoulos, Nicholas, Mor Naaman, and Funda Kivran-Swaine. 2010. ‘Diamonds in the Rough: Social Media Visual Analytics for Journalistic Inquiry’. In Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2010 IEEE Symposium on, 115–22. IEEE. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5652922.

Hermida, Alfred. 2010. ‘Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.’ Journalism Practice. Special Issue on the Future of Journalism. 4 (3): 297-308. doi:10.1080/17512781003640703.

Jalarajan, Sony, Rohini Sreekumar, and Nithin Kalorth. 2014. ‘“Tweeting” the News: Twitter Journalism as a New Age Crowd News Disseminator in India’. http://euacademic.org/UploadArticle/317.pdf.

Kilman, Larry. 2015. ‘World Press Trends: Newspaper Revenues Shift To New Sources - WAN-IFRA’. World Press Trends. June 1. http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends-newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources.

K. J., Shashidar. 2016. ‘Hindustan Times has appointed a Mobile Editor’. Published online on Medianama.com. http://www.medianama.com/2016/07/223-hindustan-times-has-appointed-a-mobile-editor/.

Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, Frank Esser, and David Levy. 2013. ‘Comparative Perspectives on the Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy’. The International Journal of Press/Politics 18 (4): 383-91. doi:10.1177/1940161213497130.

Örnebring, Henrik. 2010. ‘Technology and Journalism-as-Labour: Historical Perspectives.’ Journalism. February. 11 (1): 57-74. doi: 10.1177/1464884909350644.

Panda, Jayanta K. 2014. ‘Impact of Media Convergence on Journalism: A Theoretical Perspective’. Pragyaan, 14.

Paulussen, Steve and Pieter Ugille. 2008. ‘User Generated Content in the Newsroom: Professional and Organisational Constraints on Participatory Journalism.’ Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 5(2): 24-41.

Royal, Cindy. 2010. ‘The Journalist as Programmer: A Case Study of The New York Times Interactive News Technology Department.’ Presented at the International Symposium in Online Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin, April 20. Accessed from https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2010/papers/Royal10.pdf.

Schudson, Michael. 2010. ‘Political Observatories, Databases * News in the Emerging Ecology of Public Information’. Daedalus. 139(2): 100–109. doi:10.1162/daed.2010.139.2.100.

Scott, Ben. 2005. ‘A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism.’ Television & New Media. February. 6(1): 89-126. doi: 10.1177/1527476403255824.

Sen, Arijit and Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2016. Digital Journalism Start-Ups in India. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Accessed from: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital%20Journalism%20Start-ups%20in%20India_0.pdf.

‘Nine top #TrendsinNewsrooms’. 2015. WAN-IFRA blog. http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/06/02/nine-top-trendsinnewsrooms-of-2015.

Villi, M., and K. Hayashi. 2014. ‘“The Mission Is to Keep This Industry Intact”: Digital Transition in the Japanese Newspaper Industry’. In 64th Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference, Seattle, WA, 22-26 May.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study

Information Structures for Citizen Participation - Janaagraha

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:28:47Z

In our efforts to understand how change is conceptualized in the digital era, we find a growing emphasis on the role of effective information structures to empower the citizen and the government. We interview Joylita Saldanha from Janaagraha to answer questions around information, participation and e-governance.

CHANGE-MAKER:Interview with Joylita Saldanha

ORGANIZATION: Janaagraha - I change my city

METHOD OF CHANGE: Online platforms to enable communication between the citizen and the government.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:Empower the government -create resources to help them do what the citizens expect them to do.

10 posts into the project, we are identifying the most outstanding patterns between processes of change. One of the themes that comes up often is: information management. How do we translate data to information, and information to knowledge? What is the best way to produce, consume and disseminate information? How does visible information lead to better mechanisms of participation in democracy? As the topic recurs in my conversations with change-makers, I have even reflected about the way that I display the research outputs of this project, and have adapted the format of these articles to make them as interactive and accessible as possible. Why? Because we believe this research is an entry point for a wider conversation around different ways to understand ‘making change’, and in order to produce this knowledge we need different actors to take part in the conversation. Hence, the format of our information must be (visually) persuasive enough to sway the readers into at least reading the article, and encourage their engagement, interaction and participation.

This is also the rationale behind digital information platforms, including e-governance. Governments, authorities and organizations are devising new ways of presenting their information and making their services more accessible and interactive for the public. According to the UNESCO’s definition, e-governance is the public sector’s use of information and communication technology with the aim of:

Improving information and service delivery
Encouraging citizen participation in decision-making processes
Making governments accountable, transparent and effective

What is e-governance?
By the IDRC and IdeaCorp

India has its own National e-governance plan in place. It’s ambitious in scope:

“a massive country-wide infrastructure reaching down to the remotest of villages is evolving, and large-scale digitization of records is taking place to enable easy, reliable access over the internet. The ultimate objective is to bring public services closer home to citizens”.

Information and Urban Governance

(This section will be revised)

The question on information management is key in the analysis of citizen action in emerging information societies. This project acknowledged from its inception that the information flow of networks is changing and shaping the dynamics of state-citizen-market relationships (Shah, 2014). I will refer to Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, to revisit the information economy, as it has been a recurrent reference in my analyses throughout the project, and it will be a useful benchmark to cross-reference findings in the future. On this opportunity, I would like to highlight his views on the role of information flow in democratic societies:

“The basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use, opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies-individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice” Benkler, 2006

Enabling a smoother and more transparent information flow, according to his work, has the following effects on citizen’s participation:

1. Autonomy: Access to information enables citizens to perceive a wider range of possibilities and options against which they can gauge their choices. This is particularly important when the citizen participates in decision-making processes.

2. Democracy: The emergence of an information economy, creates information structures that are not only an alternative to mass media, as Benkler states, but I would like to add are also alternative to government-run e-governance platforms that cannot fully cater to citizens' need for participation and debate. Creating an accessible and participatory information structure also creates a space that fosters public discussion, and hence, the expression of our political nature. (Visit Storytelling as Performance Part 2 for a larger exploration of the political in the public space)

3. Human justice: The freedom to access basic resources and services, allows us to fulfil our capabilities in society, including producing our own information, as well as improving our well-being by accessing information about health, education, public infrastructure, etc.

These three characteristics can be very well tied up with the three objectives of e-governance outlined above: wider information delivery, citizen participation and government accountability. Citizens aspire to access information that enables them to make good choices and participate in conversations that affect their livelihoods. For this reason, we find a common goal among the change actors (interviewed in the series), is devising new modes to engage with government-related information that complement or replace government-owned platforms.

Civil Society' and E-governance

One of the best known examples of these initiatives have been spearheaded by the Bangalore-based NGO: Janaagraha. the Centre for Citizenship and Democracy.

Image courtesy of Duke University website

The organization works to improve the quality of life in Indian cities and towns, by improving the information around infrastructure and services; and citizenship. We interviewed Joylita Saldanha, who works for the NGO’s leadership team to learn more about Janaagraha’s views on the role of information for urban governance, based on the experience of platforms such as I change my city. Her perspective c aught me off guard, as she framed the problem in urban governance from a somewhat unconventional angle:

Joylita Saldanha

Janaagraha's Leadership Team

Experience conceptualizing and
building Mobile and Web products in Los Angeles and Bangalore

Believes technology is a great lever and enabler.
Sees potential in technology to drive community action at the ground level

Whenever we talk about social change, participation and democracy, we root for the discourse that works to empower the citizen. Janaagraha finds this assumption incomplete. Saldanha suggests it is our role to find new ways to empower the government and help them do their job: "One citizen cannot be always an agent of change so we need communities coming together [...] We want to look at how to get citizens involved, because we can’t keep blaming the government if we don’t participate. We need to help them do what they do".

Read this short interview to get a glimpse of the information structures Janaagraha is building to empower the government.

Interview:

In order to gauge the extent to which Janaagraha is empowering and enabling the government to make information accessible for the public, we will look at how their online platforms are improving e-governance, based on the three characteristics outlined in the UNESCO definition and the three characteristics of effective information economies outlined by Benkler.

Stage 1: Improving information delivery

How does I change my city tackle this information crisis?

JS: Janaagraha wants to improve the quality of life in two ways:

Improving the quality of infrastructure.
Improving the quality of citizenship and citizen engagement.

We look at I change my city as something that enables citizens and governments to be more transparent for each other. Janaagraha can’t be everywhere, but technology crosscuts all the programs to allow us to roll it out to other cities.

How does Janaagraha know what information people need?

JS:We have a Net Plus Roots approach:

Stage	Roots: Information transactions at the grassroots level	Net: Information transactions through technology
Process	Reach out to communities and engage with them Community outreach and advocacy teams contacts the government Get the government and the citizen connected Send out citizen reports to government Follow up with the government to get responses Share responses with the citizens	We take all learnings from the grassroots and apply them to technology. The design/product team in place does customer research. Look at google keywords and try to understand what people are searching for Disseminate that content with citizens
Example	Crisis: Low voting turn out. Roots intervention: Look at where people go to enroll for voting and how we can clean up the electoral role at the grassroots level. Net intervention: Jaagte Raho: A portal People can register online to vote.	Crisis: How to get a driving license in Bangalore. Roots intervention: People were not getting them because they don’t know the correct process or what to do. They don’t know the hows or the whys. Net intervention We created a section called How To and put the process of a) How to get a driving license b) why do you go and get a driving license c) what are the documents you need to carry.

Right now we are playing the role of facilitator, but eventually we don’t want to be those facilitators. We want these platforms to be bridges between the citizen and the government.

My only problem with this is that an information structure based and reliant on digital technologies will only allow the interests of the middle class to permeate the system. How will information from other groups feed into the structure?

JS: We definitely want to enable access for everyone, but we don’t want a duplication of efforts. If the road is broken; even if one person complains and gets that pothole fixed then the road will be good for everyone to use. At the end of the day what we want people is to participate. From then we can take it to the next level and ask: ok what are we really missing in terms of planning? where are we missing participatory budgeting? where can we involve everybody: not only the urban but everybody. That’s what it takes it to the next level.

Stage 2: Encouraging citizen participation in decision-making processes

How does access to information improve urban governance?

JS: A very basic important aspect of where you live is to find which is your ward who is your electoral representative and what does he do. People don’t even know which ward they are living in, which is their assembly constituency, etc. Engaging with the electoral representative, then engaging with civic agencies. These are things you need to have in place before we start looking beyond this.

And you are facilitating this information?

JS: Yes, we are trying to map out services in the neighborhood and give more information about this. We have Municipal Commissions in Bangalore, and most people don’t know where these agencies are located, so our survey team went out found the offices and mapped them.

We use maps a lot because we make a lot of emphasis in spatial data. We want people to participate: tell us where their the park or playground is, locate it and then we take this information and find out: what is the budget allocated for this park, when was the last clean up, what is the future of this park, etc. At the same time, we want the citizen to tell us about its state and their wish-lists for this park.

You mention spatial data. What is the best way to use it? and who should manage it?

One thing we see when we interact with civic agencies or electoral, is that most of them don’t have a grasp of the analytics to understand what is the ground level situation, and that is where we come in. We have an information structure in place and we make data accessible. This helps representatives understand what are the patterns: a) what are the trends, b) where are their successes, c) where are their failures. Data needs to play a major role in how we take our decisions. It cannot be intuitively thought out.

Stage 3: Making governments accountable and transparent

How can these resources make the government more accountable?

We need more [information] systems in place to identify what is accessible in terms of services and infrastructures. First step is making things transparent; and making elected representatives, civic agencies, citizens -all these people accountable. We believe that accountability and participation goes hand in hand. You need to participate in order to make it accountable. The process of engagement is empowering for the citizen once they realize they can bring about change."

It takes time to get things done; change happens very slowly. And we can’t keep blaming the government if we don’t participate. We don’t lend them a hand, and let’s be honest, we probably don’t have the resources. So, how do we enable the government? How do we empower them? That’s something Janaagraha works for: helping the government do what they need to do.

***********

The next interview will feature Surabhi HR from Political Quotient, an organization working to redefine how youth engage with politics in the digital era. We will refer back to the characteristics about information economies and e-governance outlined on this post and use Janaagraha's experience as a backdrop, to explore the work PQ is doing: organizing spatial data, improving information structures for the government and bridging communication between citizens and their elected representatives.

Sources:

Benkler, Yochai. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2006.

Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/information-structures-janaagraha

July 2016 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2016-09-17T14:13:32Z

Welcome to the July 2016 newsletter of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

For us at CIS, July was filled with a a wonderful diversity of activities, opportunities, windows, and future gazing. We made a crucial intervention by bringing attention to the misrepresentation of India's position at the UNHRC meeting by global media, and continued our contribution to the drafting of the open data license by Government of India.

We made a submission to the Ministry of Home Affairs to reject the Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, and also appealed to the MPs to re-examine the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). We contributed to the making of an open source typeface and input tools for the Santhali language. We were studying developmental initiatives driven by big data in three parts of India (more on that in the August newsletter), mapping the emerging global governance frameworks for big data in development, and planning our future steps in this field. We initiated a study of digital transitions in Indian newspapers with support from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford, and also produced a series of analysis of industrial policy engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT.

We also kept pushing digital and new media research in India through our annual call for essays (abstracts have been accepted), and a brilliant talk on game studies and storytelling by Dr. Souvik Mukherjee. We were busy, and happily so.

- Sumandro Chattapadhyay

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS sent a letter to Members of Parliament to appeal to re-examine the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a mega-regional trade agreement currently under negotiation. Japreet Grewal and Pranesh Prakash in an article published by FactorDaily argued that India did not oppose the United Nations move to make Internet access a human right. Submitted comments on the "Government Open Data Use License - India". CIS listed out its comments and recommendations on name of the licence, changing the language on permissible use of data, adding section on the scope of applicability of the licence, etc. CIS published the Report of the Group of Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security and Implications for India. The report developed by governmental experts from 20 States addresses existing and emerging threats from uses of ICTs, by States and non-State actors alike. CIS is collaborating with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford to study various aspects of digital transition in Indian news media. Zeenab Aneez is leading the pilot study exploring digital transition in three newspapers across English, Hindi, and Malayalam markets. Over a series of three blog posts, Pavishka Mittal documented engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in industrial policy making in the Indian IT sector during 2006-2016, including on transfer pricing policy. Deputy US Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Holleyman discussed the Digital 2 Dozen document with Ambassador Shyam Saran. Anubha Sinha participated in the discussions and wrote a summary. Meera Manoj conducted an analysis of the different models of collection, management, sharing, and governance of global development data that are being discussed in several international forums. Shubhangi Heda in a blog entry has explored the concerns related to data protection and digital privacy under the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement signed recently between United States of America and 11 countries located around the Pacific Ocean region, across South America, Australia, and Asia.

Highlights

CIS sent a letter to Members of Parliament to appeal to re-examine the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a mega-regional trade agreement currently under negotiation.
Japreet Grewal and Pranesh Prakash in an article published by FactorDaily argued that India did not oppose the United Nations move to make Internet access a human right.
Submitted comments on the "Government Open Data Use License - India". CIS listed out its comments and recommendations on name of the licence, changing the language on permissible use of data, adding section on the scope of applicability of the licence, etc.
CIS published the Report of the Group of Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security and Implications for India. The report developed by governmental experts from 20 States addresses existing and emerging threats from uses of ICTs, by States and non-State actors alike.
CIS is collaborating with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford to study various aspects of digital transition in Indian news media. Zeenab Aneez is leading the pilot study exploring digital transition in three newspapers across English, Hindi, and Malayalam markets.
Over a series of three blog posts, Pavishka Mittal documented engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in industrial policy making in the Indian IT sector during 2006-2016, including on transfer pricing policy.
Deputy US Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Holleyman discussed the Digital 2 Dozen document with Ambassador Shyam Saran. Anubha Sinha participated in the discussions and wrote a summary.
Meera Manoj conducted an analysis of the different models of collection, management, sharing, and governance of global development data that are being discussed in several international forums.
Shubhangi Heda in a blog entry has explored the concerns related to data protection and digital privacy under the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement signed recently between United States of America and 11 countries located around the Pacific Ocean region, across South America, Australia, and Asia.

CIS in the News

CIS gave inputs to the following media coverage:

FB & Google have already monopolised Indian cyberspace (Asad Ali; Catch News; July 3, 2016)
Cyberstalkers, the new bullies in town (S. Poorvaja; Hindu; July 4, 2016).
TRAI Free Data paper: Paytm to Hike, the responses from other companies (Indian Express; July 5, 2016).
India No Haven For Net Freedom But It Did Not Oppose UN Move on Internet Rights (Anuj Srinivas; The Wire; July 6, 2016).
India may not be guilty of opposing UN move to save internet rights (Ciol; July 7, 2016).
Flashpoint #TrollControl: Maneka versus NCW (Times Now Television, July 8, 2016).
Place for a safety net (The Telegraph; July 10, 2016).
Tamil Nadu likely to hold Facebook accountable for suicide case (V. Prem Shanker; Economic Times, July 13, 2016).
Belling the trolls (Bishakha Datta; India Today; July 13, 2016).
Mandatory Aadhaar card for govt scholarships violates SC order (Neelam Pandey and Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times, July 15, 2016).
It's That Eavesdrop Endemic (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; July 25, 2016).
Facebook is censoring some posts on Indian Kashmir (Rama Lakshmi; Washington Post; July 27, 2016).
Art, Science and Open Electromagnetic Spectrum Culture [ENG] (Creative Disturbance Platform; July 31, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following articles:

The Gay Pride Charade (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 3, 2016).
How are Indian Newspapers Adapting to the Rise of Digital Media? (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; Sumandro Chattapadhyay; July 5, 2016).
One Pokémon to Rule Them All (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 17, 2016).
No, India did NOT oppose the United Nations move to “make internet access a human right” (Pranesh Prakash and Japreet Grewal; Factordaily; July 13, 2016).
New Approaches to Information Privacy – Revisiting the Purpose Limitation Principle (Amber Sinha; Digital Policy Portal; July 13, 2016).

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Accessibility & Inclusion

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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Report

July 2016 Report (Suman Dogra; July 31, 2016).

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Access to Knowledge

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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entries

Letter to MPs on Concerns on Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (Anubha Sinha; July 27, 2016).
USTR elaborates the Two Dozen Digital Rules of Club TPP (Anubha Sinha; July 29, 2016).

Participation in Events

Mapping & Mobility (Organized by Carnegie India; June 28, 2016). Anubha Sinha attended the event.

Workshop on Declaration on Patents Protection: Regulatory Sovereignty under TRIPS (Organized by the Inter-University Centre for IPR Studies, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development; Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, Institutional Area, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; July 12 - 13, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

3rd International Conference on Management of Intellectual Property Rights and Strategy (Organized by Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, at IIT Bombay, through the MHRD IPR Chair; July 15-16, 2016). Anubha Sinha was a speaker on the 'Negotiating India's IP Policy" panel.
India and Regional Mega-Trade Agreements (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; July 25, 2016). Anubha Sinha participated in a panel discussion on "India and Regional Mega-Trade Agreements" with Ambassador Robert Holleyman, Deputy US Trade Representative and Ambassador Shyam Saran, Chairman, Research and Information System for Developing Countries.
Live Webinar on Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (Organized by RCEP; New Delhi; July 27, 2016).

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entry

ತರಬೇತಿ ಮಾಡಲು ತರಬೇತಿಗೊಂಡಾಗ.... CIS-A2K TTT 2016 (Dhanalakshmi; July 3, 2016).

Participation in Event

Architectures of Knowledge (Organized by Columbia's Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities; Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; July 4, 2016). Rohini Lakshané was a speaker.

Media Coverage

The Digital Oxygen for Odia Language (My City Links; July 4, 2016).

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Openness

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Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Article

Open Source Effort gives Indigenous Language an Official Typeface (Subhashish Panigrahi; Opensource.com; July 8, 2016).

Submission

Comments on the 'Government Open Data Use License - India' (Anubha Sinha, Pranesh Prakash, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay; July 26, 2016).

Participation in Event

Open Data Charter Lead Stewards In-Person Meeting (Organized by Open Data Charter; Mexico; July 4 and 5, 2016). Sunil Abraham participated remotely.

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Internet Governance

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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Privacy

Research Paper

Analysis of the Report of the Group of Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security and Implications for India (Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda; July 30, 2016)

Blog Entries

Trans Pacific Partnership and Digital 2 Dozen: Implications for Data Protection and Digital Privacy (Shubhangi Heda; July 12, 2016).

Event Organized

Stand up for Digital Rights (CIS, New Delhi; July 29, 2016).

Participation in Event

Privacy Law and impact of emergent technology (National Law School of India University; Bangalore; July 12, 2016). Amber Sinha taught an elective full credit course for final year undergraduate students.

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Big Data Governance Frameworks for 'Data Revolution for Sustainable Development' (Meera Manoj; July 5, 2016).

►Freedom of Expression

Blog Entries

Perumal Murugan and the Law on Obscenity (Japreet Grewal; July 21, 2016).

CIS sought a series of information from ICANN on various topics. The DIDP Requests and the responses solicited were compiled and published by Asvatha Babu:

Participation in Events

Safety Net (Organized by APC and Point of View; Mumbai; July 11, 2016). Rohini Lakshané was a trainer.
Meeting on Net Neutrality and Related Issues (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 15, 2016; New Delhi). Sunil Abraham attended the meeting.
Digital in South Asia (Organized by World Economic Forum; July 19, 2016; Bangalore). Sunil Abraham attended this event.
Roundtable: Identifying and Limiting Hate Speech and Harassment Online (Organized by SFLC; New Delhi; July 28, 2016). Japreet Grewal attended the event.

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Researchers at Work

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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Blog Entries

How are Indian Newspapers Adapting to the Rise of Digital Media? (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; July 6, 2016).
Digital Transition in Newspapers in India: A Pilot Study (Zeenab Aneez; July 19, 2016).
Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Recommendations by NASSCOM, 2006-2012 (Pavishka Mittal; July 1, 2016).
Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Comparative Analysis of Recommendations by NASSCOM and iSPIRT, 2013-2016 (Pavishka Mittal; July 4, 2016).
Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Recommendations by NASSCOM on Transfer Pricing, 2014-2016 (Pavishka Mittal; July 27, 2016).
RBI and Regulation of Digital Financial Services in India, 2012-2016 (Shivalik Chandan; July 11, 2016).
Studying Internet in India (2016): Selected Abstracts (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; July 5, 2016).

Participated in Event

The Data Explosion – How the Internet of Things will Affect Media Freedom and Communication Systems? (Sumandro Chattapadhyay was a panelist at this session organised by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) at the Deutsche Welle's Global Media Forum 2016, held in Bonn, Germany; June 13-15, 2016.

Event Organized

Game Studies: A Talk by Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (CIS, Bangalore, July 28, 2016). Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Presidency University, Calcutta gave a talk on game studies, digital media, internet cultures and traditional humanities.

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About CIS

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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 diverse abilities, 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 academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2016-newsletter

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:58:59Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Cross-posted from Democracy and Society.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1] Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2] Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3] More information about the programme can be found here.

[4] Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:14:04Z

Introduction

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

Context

Snapshots

Propositions

About the Authors

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3]More information about the programme can be found at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.

[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground

IRC19: #List - Conference Programme

sumandro — 2019-01-31T06:33:28Z

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

India Game Developer Summit Bangalore 2010

arun — 2010-03-09T16:55:33Z

The India Game Developer Conference held at Nimhans Convention Centre on the 27th of February, 2010 was attended by Arun Menon who is working on The Gaming and Gold Project at The Centre for Internet and Society. The Developer forum brought together game developers from different sectors of the Game Production Cycle, with hardware manufacturers like Nvidia demonstrating their latest 3d technology and Software developers like Crytek and Adobe demonstrating the latest in developer tools for creating and editing games on multiple platforms.

The India Game Developer Summit Lite was sufficiently provocative in showcasing the developer community in India and the latest advancements made by the corporate sponsors. The presentations did not appropriately address creative development and management except for a few made by Keita Iida, Carl Jones, and possibly Varun Nair which stood out for the specific focus on creativity. The overall focus was on PC gaming with inroads into Web, mobile, and a smattering of social games. Console Gaming was present in a few statistics presented but did not figure elsewhere at the conference.

On Presentations

One key feature found in the presentations made by Carl Jones, Keita Iida, and Varun Nair at IGDS was the focus on creating immersive environments and naturally all the three took different approaches suiting their areas of specialization. The other presentations bordered on marketing and sales pitches, promoting the presenters' products, and were not sufficiently detailed other than pushing the presenter’s products and services. These three presentations stand out for their focus on creativity in game development, design, and research with data pertaining to the industry and not limited to their products or companies.

Carl Jones – Envision, Enable, Achieve.

Carl Jones from Crytek made an excellent keynote speech with a focus on their latest advancement; the CRYENGINE 3.0. A demonstration video showcased synchronous editing capabilities for multiple platforms as well as real time 'edit and play' functionality. What you see is [truly] what you get. Their engine is currently not set for a public release but can handle textures and fluid rendering with amazing ease on a standard 500$ machine. The detailed and fluid real-time editing cuts development time from weeks to a matter of days, not a possibility a few months earlier. The technology targets low end machines and has a higher market but both Nvidia and Crytek made it clear that their focus for development is going to be high end devices and technology for high end machines.

Crytek’s entire focus is on the development and sustainability of creativity, so that new technology could provide better rendering at better speeds and visuals. Cryengine 3.0’s capabilities in developing a truly interactive, immersive, and realistic environment were demonstrated at the keynote speech. The destructive environments and fluid/texture rendering made designing and editing seem as simple as using a brush (convinced of its capabilities as an engine but still skeptic about its simplicity in user interactivity). The dynamic lighting, downward light shafts, ocean rendering, view distance, soft shadows and particle rendering (fog, etc) and its real-time synchronous editing capabilities left no doubt as to Cryengine 3.0’s superiority in the competitive game developer market.

The keynote speech recognized one main deficiency in game development, there is a problem incorporating graphics and realistic physics. Jones showcased how at Crytek, the motto ‘the difficult takes a day and impossible takes a week’ works. Looking at the developer tools demonstrated at the summit that motto is quite realistic. Crytek’s focus is to make everything interactive and the CryEngine 3.0 demonstrates that focus. As a matter of fact Crytek has incorporated Star Data from NASA into their games. Star navigation based on the digitally (re)created skies in their games is possibility. The elements they bring in to build in realism to gaming will be interesting to follow, since realism often meant higher graphics requirements.

Keita Iida – Technology and Market Trends in the PC game Industry

The focused session by Keita Iida of Nvidia placed the growth of Indian markets in perspective including online markets (and digital releases) and offline growth plotted through hardware sales. The numbers and statistics presented showcased the strength of the growing gaming market particularly in Asia. The revenues of the Asia segment in the entire MMOG revenues is 76.6 percent globally, the United States and the West is lagging in terms of revenue generation in the MMOG segment but their recent growth is set to shoot up to 1.3-1.5 billion USD by 2013. Similar numbers in the social gaming segment was also reiterated by Sumit Gupta (the CEO and founder of BitRhymes). What they both articulated differently was that there was tremendous money in gaming both online and offline and India had sufficient infrastructure to capitalize on the gaming markets for online as well as offline products and releases.

Keita Iida argued that the online gaming market in India was in excess of 60 million USD assuming that these games were serviced locally. This still leaves out contribution from the Indian segment globally, such figures are also hard to plot out. Some of the numbers that Nvidia made available were from their own sales and marketing statistics. The DX10 capable computers globally were 171 Million as of 2009 and DX9 capable machines around 102million, which had a Geforce installed base. Keita Iida's statistics pointed to one thing - the Asian markets were far ahead of the other markets both in online and offline releases. Nvidia as an organization and developer would provide an ideal space for game developers to reach out to a larger global market provided they were Nvidia technology compatible. Keita Iida made an effective marketing pitch for Nvidia and provided enough data and statistics globally and locally as well as company specific data that made the presentation more accessible. This presentation was one of the few that involved industry movements and statistics with a focus on creative development.

Varun Nair - Quality Asset Creation & Sound as a Storyteller

The most creative presentation was perhaps the one made by Varun Nair on 'Sound as Storytelling and Quality Asset creation'. We had interacted prior to the conference as well as during the presentation and he provided a lot of information on the pre- and post-production cycles where sound design and incorporation was most effective. His presentation was remarkably different and stood out from the others largely because his focus was not on pushing his own projects or company agenda, rather he attempted to place the relevance of the sound design industry in the creative processes of the game’s design stages.

The session focused on the relevance of sound and visuals and the effective placement and modulation of sound to the visuals to communicate the desired effect. The main example used was an FPS where the ambient sounds and the player sounds had to be placed in perspective with the enemy sounds to create an immersive environment. This translates into sounds being modulated and dynamic as gameplay progresses to effectively create immersive structures. The lack of this immersive effect will create confusion and destroy the effect even if the visuals are designed effectively. This is interesting largely because if you hear gunfire not represented in your visuals - as a character - you’re able to react effectively to the enemy based on sound alone. Quite a few games use this strategy to provide and create an immersive structure. There was a good emphasis on the development of sound particularly since it enables a certain human emotional response to that sound and developers of successful AAA games have used this strategy to create emotional engagement of the player with the game narratives. Varun Nair also pointed out the relevance of sound in making connections and here he mentioned using real world sounds and digitally created and re-engineered sounds. The effects he demonstrated with a training exercise, where he played out real world sounds and enhanced sounds to create a suitable environment. On making connections with the ‘experiential residual narrative’ as the Videogame theorist Henry Jenkins would put it, Varun Nair pointed out how sound design is created effectively to cater to certain specific feelings encountered before. Artificial sounds are specifically created to suit the artificiality of an environment and here he used the example of ‘Transformers’, the movie to explain artificial sound effects as well as information overload. The focus of designed sounds is largely towards creating an environment in which the main focus is to reiterate the environments artificiality largely used in Sci-Fi media and gaming.

Most sound designers only receive images and they have to create sounds often from scratch to suit the environment. In his demonstrations he showcased the kind of creativity that sound designers and engineers are capable of in designing the environments we hear and interact with in gaming simulations. Varun Nair also focused on Information Overload and how the effective blend of sound and visuals would form an ideal blend to counter this overload. He went has far as saying that at certain points an underload was preferred since there was less player fatigue due to overload. The design structures have to be suitably different particularly for non linear media such as gaming. Varun Nair mentioned the cocktail party effect where the human mind is able to focus on a few important sounds and tune out the rest as well as the 2.5 theme rule. The 2.5 theme rule emphasizes the perfect Balance between Visuals, Audio, and Sound effects. Among others were quality asset creation and the involvement of the sound designer in the early stages of the game to capitalize on creative development.

Sumit Gupta from BitRhymes and Hemant Sharma from Adobe

The presentation by Sumit Gupta was very detailed, with a focus on audience interactivity. The data Sumit used was excellent and placed the entire scenario in perspective; perhaps the overwhelming response to his presentation may have overwhelmed him a little. The data on social gaming in India and the lack of monetization in the current market scenario and the possibilities of monetization was explored in detail. The problem if any was in setting up these structures and infrastructure backing in India which was lacking. Payment systems and methodologies would ensure the creation and transaction of virtual goods. The data on the Chinese and Japanese markets and the Asian and World trends was extremely detailed, so much so that some of these statistics were scary. Most social gamers do not realize that data is being collected on them as they play and this was demonstrated in some of the internal statistics that Sumit presented. The information presented included age groups of the users, their purchasing power, spending power, and the relationship between the users who trade is almost totalitarian in terms of information collection. Privacy laws allow that generic data are collected but the presentation of these data and statistics reminds the viewer on just how much information is accessible to these developers. Hemant Sharma’s presentation later was highly technical and demonstrated the development of games for mobile devices on Adobe Flash CS5 which is currently only out on a beta release. The presentation there also talked about the ways in which a mobile app could gain access to the OS features to run better. Most of these features give undue access to the app developer to geolocationary movement information. Along with access to other apps which may store generic information which is user specific. This talk shed light on the amount of access that a mobile app developer has to the geolocationary and personal data stored on the phone. Although the perspective was to showcase the functionality of Flash Professional CS5, currently released as a beta version, details emerged on the kind of easy access a developer has to change mobile app settings to gather data. The possibilities that a malicious use of the data would compromise user security emerges strongly when reflecting on this presentation.

DSKs Presentation – Sell your Game, Adopt a Game Designer!

DSK Supinfogame had a booth at the India Game Developer Summit along with AIGA the Asian Institute of Gaming and Animation. DSK’s presentation was to be held by Philippe Vachey but a change in schedule had another member from DSK make the presentation. Their focus rested on Gamespot reviews and game journal rankings to showcase the problems that arise due to the lack of relevant design in games that would otherwise have been AAA releases. They had some really important points to make. A 30million USD project is not going to have developers and designers with one year experience and without a cohesive unit centered on design aspects a game may as well not make an AAA rating let alone an A or a B rating.

Networking @ IGDS

Networking at the India Game Developer Summit was one of the main benefits of the summit. The presentations, other than the few mentioned here in detail, were largely oriented towards marketing their own companies and products or sales pitches to this effect. I had already talked to Varun Nair (from bluefrog presenting Sound as Storyteller and Quality Asset Creation) prior to meeting him at the conference and discussed mutual interests in gaming and narrative communication in gaming. Before his presentation I had the opportunity to get a preview of his presentation and its main focus on presenting the relevance of sound design and its ideal placement to create an immersive environment which can be effective or confusing depending on how the visuals and sounds interact with each other to create an ideal immersive environment rather than information underload or worse overload and player fatigue. The discussion also revolved around my current research project and research interests in the Indian Gaming scene. Varun Nair is based in Bombay and works for Bluefrog, a company which specialises in sound creation for games.

Prior to the conference, Rev Lebaredian and Simon Green from Nvidia Corporation were available at the Nvidia booth and right after trying out Batman Arkham Asylum in 3D (with the Geforce 3D stereoscopic vision kit); Varun Nair joined us and we discussed my research interests as well as my project at the Centre for Internet and Society and its requirements. Rev and Simon were very accessible (not mobbed yet) and gave me a lot of details on their partnership programs and their products and upcoming releases. Being engineers they had very little data on the Indian market both virtual and offline, and the approximate industry revenues. Rev and Simon offered details on who might have access to the information I needed and told me some information pertaining to Nvidia might be shared but large part is internal and not for public access.

The interaction with Kiran was the most productive and engaging we discussed games of mutual interest and the goldfarming activities on his own server (one of the highest bids on eBay for an account on his server was above 566 pounds [GBP]) he also focused on goldfarming in India and how that is very little documentation of any sort on these activities. His own research is on improving design in online games to provide better retention, higher virality, and immersive environments.

Post the key note session, the opportunity to speak to Philippe Segard and Lionel Chaze from ‘DSK supinfogame’ presented itself. They were designers engaged with game design training and also had modules that addressed the online gaming segment. On hearing about my project they assumed that I was adopting a critical theory approach to a single game and its content and examining only that (which is also something I am doing as a part of my research read more on my blog). I explained some of my research interests and those of the project in examining the gaming ecosystem in India both virtually and offline, this was more appealing to both Philippe and Lionel who agreed to give feedback on the project as it proceeds. Robin Alter from Kreeda Games was available after his presentation and spoke to me about the future for the Indian markets and the growth they were expecting in the online as well as offline game segments, as publishers most of their focus was on offline products. Robin also spoke about Gold farming in India and how most of it is undocumented and has very little studies conducted on them particularly in the Indian context. Gold farming itself is prevalent in India and is not as minor as thought earlier looking at the responses by Online Server statistics only in India. Playdom’s Business operations manager Nagabhushan Rao also reiterated that there are cases of gold farming on their servers and few cases are logged in India as well. However, as developers they have very few mechanisms to control this activity, largely since their user base is approximately around 2.5 million (aggregate). He also happened to mention how Zynga could afford to proactively target such practices since their large user base would sustain these mitigating blocks. Playdom is developing a few mechanisms to track such usage and abusage of their credit but as of early 2010 they have very few mechanisms that would ban player activity for these practices.

The next Game Developer Conference is expected around the latter part of this year or early next year.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/india-game-developer-summit-in-bangalore-2010

Creative Activism - Voices of Young Change Makers in India (UDAAN)

denisse — 2015-04-14T13:21:22Z

This post is a short account of what happened at UDAAN in December 2013 — a conference that gathered 100 youth from across the country to discuss pressing environmental issues and creative strategies to tackle them. We conducted a survey to map the perspectives of these young change-makers and get a glimpse of how India's youth is now framing and going about making 'change'



CHANGE-MAKERS: Youth (India)

EVENT: UDAAN 2013 organized by 350 India: a global organization building grassroots movements across the country.

METHOD OF CHANGE: Behavioral change, solidarity networks and creative activism.

“Change or making change is to bring about a paradigm shift in the way we do certain things. To alter our general way of life as it remains now into something that is positive and ideal.”

This is one of the many responses we collected from UDAAN participants on what it means to make change in India today. So far, in previous articles, we have looked at organizations working with specific demographics and themes. On this opportunity, we are exploring the ideas behind a group conformed by individuals coming from different walks of life, who embody an array of historical, linguistic and cultural understandings of the world, yet still find an intersection at their intents for change. We addressed the core questions raised in the project's thought piece: Whose Change is it Anyway: “What is the understanding of change with which we were working? What are the kinds of changes being imagened? Whose change is it, anyway?” -to start touching base with the ideas underpinning their actions, and identify how -or whether- it introduces new ways to define this concept.

UDAAN 2013

I had the privilege of joining this inspiring group during a four day conference and got the opportunity to share with students, activists and entrepreneurs from 13 states of India (chosen from a pool of 2000 applicants) involved in social change practices across the country. Despite the diverging world views among participants, the sense of a common purpose was almost undisputed. Every attendee was committed to mitigate the detrimental impact of climate change in their cities, protect vulnerable populations and advocate for justice. However, the most interesting points of contention lied on how to translate this commitment into individual and collective action, create conditions that enable change, and encourage community participation in environmental, political and social issues.

With these questions in mind, the conference focused on providing strategies of action and the attendees explored all sorts of lobbying and political participation mechanisms through its workshops. Three main elements stood out for me. First, the cocktail of tactics provided by experienced campaigners: from direct resistance and non-violent action to story-telling and street theater; participants were inspired to experiment and re-conceptualize activism.

Space Theatre Ensemble

Educators Collective

Second, the use of gamification in the workshops, facilitated by the experiential learning group Educators Collective, was the key to introduce values of leadership, solidarity and sustainability into individual behaviour and team practices. And finally, the add of 'unconference slots' to the program empowered attendees to share their methods, initiatives and projects in an open platform. This fostered peer-to-peer learning and more importantly reinforced the net of support and the immense amount of admiration (that grew exponentially between participants) for each other's work.

Youth and Activism in India

Coming from the perspective of our research project: Making Change, it was second nature to me to question frameworks utilized around "making change". I was pleasantly surprised to find an array of perspectives and experiences floating around panels, workshops and keynote presentations. They were definitely seeking consensus, yet in a way that did not inhibit diversity of thought, intellectual curiosity and self-reflection. This sparked the idea of collecting these views and use them as a sample of the current status of youth activism in India. Particularly considering how many of the strategies taught at UDAAN, while incredibly powerful, require a set of resources (including capital, time and energy) that are not readily accessible for all aspiring activists in the country.

These thoughts are consistent with a couple of articles I referred to for context on Indian youth and activism. Starting with the IRIS Knowledge Foundation and the UN-HABITAT's report: "State of the Urban Youth, India 2012: Employment, Livelihoods, Skills". It states that in only seven years, India will become the youngest country of the world with a median age of 29 years old. This, coupled with the fact that India's youth is the largest group in the working-age population — in a country that is expected to become one of the world's next major economic powers (Ilavasaran, 2013) — has, according to Padma Prakash, led demographers and economists to consider youth as the future of the country's economic growth. Having said that, these promising prospects do not reflect that 87.2% of the unemployed of the country are youth, only 27% of Indian youth is literate and 64% is located in rural areas. These facts display a constant negotiation between precariousness and hope, and particularly the high level of dissonance between the expectations and opportunities surrounding this group. Furthermore, as put by Prakash, despite the amount of economic information we have on this group, we lack a deep understanding of the social constructs underpinning their motivations and actions. On one hand, Ilavasaran suggests precariousness is the trigger behind both their unrest and their activism. On the other, the path they end up taking will depend on how they understand making change and their role within this process.

This dilemma was quite evident at UDAAN. Youth from all over India came together to fervently speak about the grievances climate change is causing in their regions and share the stories behind their struggles. On this note, the conference represented an incubator for their ideas and frustrations. and one of its main goals was to steer all this energy towards a path of constructive positive change. Carpini on his work on civic engagement (2000) outlines three factors that lead to participation: motivation, opportunities and capabilities; and how the interplay of the three result in different patterns of change-making. Hence, what is left to answer is how will this chaotic ecosystem shape youth's ideas of creating change? And to what extent will these conditions determine their motivation, opportunities and capacities of participating in the process? The survey we sent out to participants is only a starting point to reflect on these points. It did not aim to resolve these questions, but instead gather a snapshot of how politically and socially active young citizens are locating change and framing some of the biggest challenges of its generation.

Online Survey

About 25 people participated in the survey. The survey had five questions that explored three concepts analyzed in the Making Change research project: change, civic engagement and methods of change. It was divided into three sections:

a) Definitions: Participants were asked how they understand 'change' and 'making change'.

b) Actors: Participants were asked to reflect on their role and the role of youth in the process of making change. It also touched on concepts of active citizenship and engagement.

c) Methods: This section looked at the practices and methods preferred by youth for making change. Participants were asked to think about strategies and tactics discussed at the UDAAN workshops or other initiatives of interest, and how ICT/technology affect the process.

The purpose was to collate as many ideas and perspectives around change-making from this group and hence, the questions were broad and open-ended. The participants remained anonymous and details about their age, religion, region, socio-economic status, etc., were not disclosed. The language barrier and access (and frequency of access) to social media platforms was a big limitation to obtain a larger sample but the responses still reflected interesting patterns, which were later classified and categorized using a keyword system.

The results were displayed on the info-graphics found below:

Infographic 1* reflects the different ways participants outlined change-making: definitions of 'change' and 'making change', type of change (positive, neutral or confrontational), location of change (individual, society or system) and time of change (now, future, long-term).
Infographics 2* and 3 outline the profiles of a change-maker and an active citizen.
Infographic 4 lists their preferred methods of change -in no particular order. The bottom section reflects the spectrum of opinions around the use of technology.

*The percentages reflect the portion of respondents who reflected this view and the texts are excerpts of the respondents' answers.

This presentation format was chosen for three reasons: first, to facilitate the consumption of raw data collected from the survey and make visual associations between themes. Second, to put into practice some the recommendations from the storytelling workshop to make research more accessible to the public. And third, as a somewhat self-serving experiment to measure a) the ability of a graphic designer rookie, with no previous experience (like me), to create visual aids and graphics with free online tools, and b) explore empirically some of the methods I have encountered through my research: Methods for Social Change. Hence, the following results will not be of an academic nature as previous posts, but will instead clarify some of the patterns, evident in the original responses, that may have been lost in graphic translation.

Locating Change: Definitions

"Change is any alteration from an established status-quo. Making change is creating a system that is self-sustaining and capable of surviving over a long period of time"

In spite of including both concepts on the same question, most respondents differentiated them in their answers. Approximately 50% of the sample responded 'change' was either an irreversible process or an outcome to a process, while the other 50% implicated themselves in the 'change' process, stating it means to shift and modify how we act and think. A similar spirit was reflected about 'making change'. About 29% of the participants acknowledges a break from previous practices, and 29% considers we are implicated through the adoption of a new model of action. Interestingly enough, only 5% considers making change a duty or a responsibility. This low percentage signals making change is understood as non-compulsory which does not affect active politically involved citizens but leaves the more passive and idle off the hook when it comes to acknowledging their role in the process of change.

Moving on to type of change: 38% of the respondents consider making change a neutral process that does not guarantee a positive change (as considered by 33% of the sample). It was defined as an event that merely breaks the norm or from usual practices. A possible reading of this is that a group is not mobilizing its efforts with a plausible positive alternative in mind. Instead, it seeks difference without a deeper considerations of how will it differ from the conditions it is breaking from. This fits into the 'politics of hope' paradigm brought up by Shah in the piece: This approach to change and the idiom 'making a difference' is "so infused with the joy of possibilities" that it doesn't evaluate whether the outcome will lead to further assurance or precariousness, when compared to the earlier structure. This approach limits structural, systemic and sustainable change, an issue that was also evident in the results of the time-line. 0% thinks change must be made immediately but the rest of the sample was divided into making plans for the future (19%) and a smaller number on securing a self-sustaining system (10%) to replace the former.

Infographic 1: Making Change (Generated using: easel.ly-)

Finally, on the question of where is change located, we find the first instance of a pattern that was evident throughout the survey. On this category 38% finds change must occur externally: either in society and others (19%), or through the shift from a status quo that is perpetuating inequality (19%). Yet the largest group (24%) identified that change must occur internally first. The role of the self was also very prominent in the following sections as well.

Agents of Change

After locating change, the project also intends to understand who are the main actors and stakeholders lumped into the category of 'citizen' or 'citizen action'. On this survey, these actors were dubbed 'change-makers'. Respondents were free to describe what they understood by the term and the social construct determining the model they were working towards (as aspiring change-makers themselves). The second actor we inquired about was 'active citizen'. The concept of citizenship is ambiguous terrain, yet there seems to be a connection between the identity confered by the 'citizen' status and the respondents' inner call for action.

a) The Change-Maker:

"I think that all of us can be change-makers. We need to be sure of what and why we need to change and have a vision of how the world will be after making the change"

The Change-Maker (Infographic 2) was defined by the four characteristics outlined below.

Infographic 2: The Change Maker (Generated using: easel.ly )

Each characteristic was coupled by actions that reinforce this behaviour. For example, understanding the issue (33%) comes hand-in-hand with inciting motivation through information: 'If one aspires to change, then one must first understand what is to be changed, how it is to be changed and what would replace the changed system. The primary step is to realize and acknowledge the problem, educate others and then action” (Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) Another interesting example is how the 28% that identified the individual as the source of change, also recommend self-reflection on how to create the most impact: "[My role as a change-maker is] practicing what I preach and learning to critique myself constructively and in a manner that helps me improve" (Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) This brings a different light to Carpinis categorization of 'capabilities' in social change. It is no longer about participation in an external movement but more about how the individual secures sustained change through his own consistent and coherent behaviour.

b) The Active Citizen

"An active citizen is who follows the constitution, understands and takes responsibility for himself and for influencing his family and community for the betterment of life's social, economic and environmental issues"

Self-awareness was a key point in how the active citizen was personified. It was one of most emphasized points, placing more responsibility on the role of the citizen as opposed to on the issue at hand. Attitudes such as 'realizing the problem', 'taking responsibility' and 'taking initiative' reflect that the individual is finding motivation on taking ownership of his choices and decision-making power. The individual is focusing less on antagonizing the structure and is instead elevating his identity to a fearless, noble status -the citizen is becoming the hero of its own narrative. This ego-emphasis, is also motivating the citizen to invest on increasing its own knowledge capital and attain a thorough understanding of the issues, to then heighten individual and collective awareness around them. The objective is either local -give back to its community- or normative -work towards justice and equity- but there seems to be consensus on the starting point.

Infographic 3 - The Active Citizen (Generated using: easel.ly)

Methods for Change

“By going out there and making the change! Get down and dirty. Then use those examples in the form of story, pictures, etc. and inspire others around you to first change themselves and then help change society!”

Finally, infographic 4 displays a mapping of the methods brought up by participants. Again, awareness and behavioural change were the most popular, placing information and the individual at the epicenter of change-making. The impact of the theater and story telling workshops on participants was also evident, on several mentions to the power of 'artivism'.

Infographic 4: Methods for Social Change (Generated using: easel.ly )

In regards to communication and technology, I was surprised to find that many respondents find it insufficient. They instead recognize the need for strong offline communities making sure activism online translates into the offline realm. “[online platforms] are vital in building quick connections amongst those who feel alike towards bringing change. But eventually, all struggles for change have to be offline [...] technology could be the first step that eventually leads the path to more offline and personal connections.”(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) : Others were wary about its power and they recognize it can be used to both help and contain the activist with the same intensity: "Technology can either blind people or give them sight."(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) These views reflect youth has moved on from the tech hype that pervades the digital activism discourse. The role of technology was not excluded from the conference's tactic package and the group perceives technology as a powerful complement, yet it still places a lot more emphasis on creating sustainable change through education, behaviour and offline interactions than through digital interventions.

Conclusion

Comments at the aftermath of the event reflected participants had undergone a collective mental shift on how to create social change. We arrived looking outwards: accustomed to pointing fingers and scouting for common enemies that personify the misdoings of inequality perpetrators. Five days at Fireflies later and after UDAAN's intervention, I can safely say we left looking inwards. We are now determined to seek information and identify the most effective ways to mainstream it and make it accessible; we are impelled to reconnect with our creative and artistic selves and put them at service of communication; we are encouraged to share our personal stories and have them inspire solidarity and movement in our communities, and above all, we will continue to pursue the level of behaviour-action consistency that legitimizes our efforts at making change. The conference turned out to be a very organic experience and it provided all of us with a space to connect with ourselves and one another in a time of growing loneliness and isolation in the digital age.

Furthermore, the thoughts that surfaced on the survey are important pointers to continue uncovering what drives civic engagement among youth. Seeing these activists locate change in the self was a refreshing break from the times we used to overindulge in the possibilities of technology-mediated change. It seems that the digital is already so embedded in our interactions and ecosystems that it has not only has ceased to be novel, but it is recognized as insufficent, and hence, the attention has returned back to the user and its offline communities. With this in mind, the group that attended UDAAN, as part of the demographic who represents "the promise and future of India's growth", is taking up the challenge of strengthening ideas of making change in their networks. Have them succeed, and this 'growth' will be met by a current of better informed, better armed young activists working to secure a self-sustaining system for the generations to come.

** Thanks to everyone who participated on the survey, Special mention to UDAAN organizers, Educators Collective and the wonderful UDAAN 2013 group**

Sources:

HABITAT, UN. "State of the Urban Youth, India 2012.", (2013)
Ilavarasan, P. Vigneswara. "Community work and limited online activism among India youth." International Communication Gazette 75, no. 3 (2013): 284-299.
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. (April 30, 2013).

Resources:

Easel.ly: To create and share visual ideas online: www.easel.ly/‎
Info.gram: Create infographics: infogr.am
More on UDAAN: http://world.350.org/udaan/
More on Global Power Shift (350) - http://globalpowershift.org/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/young-voices-udaan

Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education

Sara Morais and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2015-04-17T10:53:17Z

The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. To discuss these changes and what it means for research work, a multidisciplinary consultation was held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on July 13, 2013.

Hosted by HEIRA, CSCS, Tumkur University, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai the Center for Cultural Studies (CCS) and Access To Knowledge Programme of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), the consultation addressed what it meant to be a Digital Humanities researcher and how to curricularize something that refuses to confine itself to disciplinary boundaries. The introduction note had Tejaswini Niranjana of HEIRA-CSCS & TISS speak of the promise of free and democratic education on the Internet, which had so far failed in a sense that scholarship was having difficulties with justifying work produced online. Especially in India the question of integrating scientific work in local languages was of importance, as mainly research is happening in and for the English-speaking world.

However, as Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS pointed out when taking over the second part of the introduction, projects like the Indian language Wikipedia project are making an attempt to fill that gap. One of the key aspects to digital humanities is that knowledge should be free and open source and providing Wikipedia in Indian languages is a step towards more accessibility. Of course the field is not easy to define. The digital humanities embrace everything technological, which means that often one could be doing digital humanities work without actually realizing it, as Vishnu Vardhan exemplified with the media archive work he had been doing before the term "digital humanities" was properly coined.

This example serves for one of the many ways in which digital humanities is work that involves not just reading theory but actually "building", as Stephen Ramsay had called it. As has been hinted at in the previous blog posts on digital humanities, this calls for a new set of tools and skill sets for students entering the "field". Again, there is little clarity on whether or not the digital humanities can be seen as a field, however, for the sake of simplicity, I address it as one. It should be stated, though, that this field does not have the classical confines and closed boundaries of disciplines, but is conceived as an open, ever-changing space in which work is being done in a trans-disciplinarily way. Within this field, new questions arise: What exactly is this producing? Is the archive the number one research output? And if yes, what does that mean for the humanities field? As the way archives are produced influences the very content of knowledge, digital technologies being implemented must have an impact on today's knowledge inventory. Passing knowledge and improving scholarship is therefore an important factor for accessibility and an equalizing societal factor.

In the first session of the day Amlan Dasgupta from Jadavpur University, Kolkata addressed the problems of curricularising digital humanities. As it is a field that deals with contemporary social factors, which are ever-changing, it is difficult to set up a course much in advance, which will match the expectations it produces. Nonetheless, the instability of digital platforms is not only negative. While a course should have a certainty about what it needs to deliver, the openness of digital humanities seminars enable venturing into unknown research territory with possibly unpredictable and therefore fruitful outcome. While the internet suggests a world wide collaboration possibility, little research is being done in local Indian languages, as optical character recognition is a problem online. Which is why India has experienced what Dasgupta calls an 'archiving moment', several older texts and research work are being digitally archived so as to make them more accessible and increase the native language portfolio. This is part of what can be called the first wave of digital humanities, where mainly non-digital material are transferred into a field of digital operability.

The so-called second wave of digital humanities focused on things "born" digital, inherently digital experiences, like computer games, 3D modeling, GIS mapping and digital surrogates. In the digital age, all cultural experiences have a digital part. While aforementioned categories are purely digital, cultural and societal objects are not necessarily that easily defined. We are experiencing the merge of the digital and analog, it is impossible to think the one without the other. This is where the digital humanities step in, as they are not only about using these experiences, but actually about making them. Therefore, the field could be about evolving tools, free and open-source tools, which ensure access, build databases and create metadata. It is essential that one develops ones own methods and tools to do digital humanities work. Metadata should be community held and a collaborative process, not only to include many voices but also because authorship is evolving and there is no one single heroic individual who processes data.

	Ravi Sundaram from Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Devloping Society added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and
therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.

Ravi Sundaram from Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Devloping Society added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and

therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.

Nishant Shah, joining in on Skype in digital humanities manner, explained his first encounter with digital humanities arising the hopes of his science fiction dreams finally coming true. The encountered reality, however, faces many challenges amidst the number of possibilities it brings. Digital humanities are complex as the field incorporates the object of study, just as it uses it as a methodology. As it uses the very tools and methods which define its existence, questions of humanities scholarship are getting reframed. Digital humanities rephrase questions of the social, cultural and political, making them more and more about infrastructure, turning the information society mainly into a data society. The critical skills of human intervention are now being replaced by new skills required in the time of data. This leads to a naturalization of data, which carries the danger of seeing knowledge once again as a given. As was explained in the last blog post, data is just as subjective as information and hiding this factor by neutralization and naturalization is a concern digital humanities need to address, as data has now become a structural component of being. When it was just information we were talking about, it was easy to distinguish between information and reality, as information was about reality. With data, however, this distinction is no longer possible as the data produces a reality. Therefore, data is a metaphor, which stands for the structure of our experiences. The problem is that most of the data being created is invisible to the human. What we post, blog or tweet creates a lot more behind the surface of computer interfaces. Facebook is not information technology like cinema was. It produces data which is not for human consumption, namely algorithms, which are read only by artificial computer programs. We are in the service of producing data which cannot be neutral as we can not read it. In this way data dislocates the human and traditional humanities work is no longer sufficient. So in digital humanities work we need to see what it cannot reflect. How do we translate humanities political idea to data management? This implies that digital humanities are not a continuum from traditional humanities, as digital humanities challenges aspects of humanities skills and beliefs. However, this does not mean that humanities have become dispensable. In fact humanities and digital humanities should not compete with, but add to each other. So the thought process should not be what the digital can do for the humanities, but what the two fields could do for each other.

Returning to scholarship, Tanveer Hasan and Sneha PP introduced the Pathways to Higher Education project they had been working on, which focuses on language and technology in the undergraduate space. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of access in higher education and focused on the linguistic and digital divide in India. Workshops were organized on social change and collaborative learning, in which students could look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement, raising the question of how that defines the way someone looks at a project. As students are stakeholders in knowledge production, their input is much required and forms academia. There seems to be the perception that the digital is only for a certain group of people and predominantly produced in english. However, the course of the project showed that the digital can be produced in alternative, non-hegemonial spaces and realities. Digital platforms join debates based on global and local knowledges, so it is vital to employ them so as to strengthen community knowledge. However, digital debates are not easily accepted in the classroom, as social media platforms like Facebook are frowned upon by teachers, who see them only as a socializing tool. One of the challenges digital humanities face therefore surely is the skepticism it receives upon trying to produce knowledge outside of classical academic institutions. Related to this the question arose on how this 'doing' in digital spaces translates into 'learning' in an academic sense. Many of the scholars in the project were very happy to produce visual material. However, when they were asked to write in their local languages, text production was reluctant or not happening at all. One suggestion the project made to this was to stop devaluating Wikipedia as a source and scholarly tool, and instead to get students to contribute to its knowledge repositories as it is included in academia.

Video

In a session of participants responding to the presentations, many anxieties in doing digital humanities was addressed. A fear was voiced that digitization might be destroying archives, just as it attempted to reconfigure them. The relationship with text was becoming more difficult, as digital humanities tend to reject written work, feeling it was becoming more and more of just an add-on, which felt artificial. This could result in an analytic vs. artistic divide and the question formed was how to play with text in digital humanities work in a less frontal and confrontational manner.

It was noted that even as data is becoming synonymous with reality, interpretational challenges persevere. Entering a google search query can generate meaning, however its outcome is obscured by algorithms. A difficulty, especially in India, is that databases are only being implemented in a low percentage, once they are produced. So creating data is not enough to overcome knowledge gaps. Digital humanities are faced with the challenge of making information and data literacy increase. This needs to happen in collaboration with governmental organs, as India's government has difficulties with patent licenses and digital rights. As the perception remains that the digital is natively english-speaking, less value is given to resource material in local languages. As all computer updates, etc., run in english language, the fact that knowledge can and should be produced in one's own native language is obscured.

The expressive potential of these minority languages is therefore decreasing, a matter of concern for Indian academia. Knowledge production of educational material must be included into scholarly work, to work against this decline. In this sense, the importance of the community was addressed. When experimenting with tools and technology, it is vital to exchange experiences and build a communal exchange. However, it was lamented that often ICT courses remain at a basic office-tools level. The content of digital humanities work cannot remain at a simplistic level but must include values and methods which go into greater detail and implement guerrilla methods. If we are not able to articulate a way of understanding the problem through these contexts, what is the good in sources of voices? The fear is that digital humanities is undergoing a shift from representation to segregation of knowledge repositories.

The digital age does not only influence knowledge repositories in the academic sense. In his talk, Ashish Rajadhyaksha describes the political perspective of digital humanities by the example of the UID project in India as something that has inhabited the digital ecosystem. Within the digital, what used to be public space is now perceived more as public domain – a trend towards making data compulsory. As one can see with UID and the condition of transfer from a state to an e-state in which India seems to find itself, forced digitization can increase the digital divide and marginalize certain groups of people. Rajadhyaksha's "Identity Project" looks at what it means to have a digital identity and how it can occupy space within digital ecosystems. This project is transparently documented under Pad.ma, encouraging alternative publishing methods, such as QR-codes in text sequences leading to the video interviews they refer to. With this explosion of data being created, it should be considered that it impacts on personal views of privacy. One theory is that the anonymity rises in the sea of data, another could be that personal inhibition thresholds are lowered. It also gives rise to the question, what it means to have free digitization. As we can see with the example of google's data mining, free internet does not mean you are not paying in some way. Apart from the data you provide in exchange for online services, these are of course always gadget-based, forcing users to invest in new appliances. If digital humanities relies on the hardware and software of mainstream corporations, can it express capitalistic critique?

In several ways the answer to that question remains unclear. While traditional humanities addressed social inequalities and expressed critique, a technologized humanities concept has different aims, as Arun Menon of CSCS explains. Digital humanities has a scientific approach which does not reflect in humanities work. The computational turn has taken scientific work towards an affirmative and essentialist perception of truth, which claims to be exact and precise. This is the crisis the humanities are facing and that require a reshaping of the new arising field that is the digital humanities in India. Menon believes that digital humanities does not have content per se, but works along the boundaries of the humanities and the sciences. In this sense it cannot be a discipline or a field of its own, but can address the gray areas being left out by other disciplines and create new research paradigms by co-opting humanities with sciences.

James Nye addressed the materiality of digital humanities by discussing what it meant to have and to hold them – materially and physically, as well as virtually. Physical resources are not enough but must be provided in local languages and virtual spaces. Good dictionaries are important resources for language knowledges not only on the basis of the commonest meaning but also its social connotations. The need is for librarianship to change to accommodate these diverse features.

The last presentation of the day had Souvik Mukherjee addressing the non-boundaries of digital humanities again, stressing the fact that the digital humanities did not exist. Rather, a multiplicity of digital humanities had arisen to incorporate topics like data mining, games studies, software studies and digital cultures. These study areas, rather than disciplines, are not always connected with concerns of humanities, but still make up a large part of digital humanities work. They, too, produce narratives as does any other research, however, often these narratives can be completely fictional and take place in digital realms. Facebook micro story telling serves as an example, just as gaming narratives do. While involved in gameplay, users create, read and write narratives as they play. At the same time they create identity and involvement, which can be diverse according to the digital space that identity is occupying. Therefore it definitely plays a part in deconstructing rigid ideas of identities. Tools like Poll Everywhere, Zotero or Posterous make academic work just as playful in a digital realm and create narratives similar to the ones in videogames as they construct an informational cloud on a discourse, which is not limited to ones immediate peers but invites a collaborative process. The suggestion is that discussions and research will remain fertile as long as they are not limited. Therefore digital humanities should be seen as an emerging field of enquiry rather than a discipline or even a non-discipline, embracing the intellectual culture of convergence that is happening online.

Summarizing the consultation, Ashwin Kumar articulated four rubrics under which the single presentations could be grouped. A large part of the presentations discussed digital humanities for and in pedagogy. These talks discussed what digital humanities was doing for the classroom, for teachers and teaching situations and academia in general. A second module saw digital humanities as a research modality and a tool developing discipline. The third rubric formed around seeing digital humanities as a new social skill, which enables a new way of sociality and mirrors society for it to be open for scrutiny. Another fourth rubric was around seeing the digital humanities as a new way of archiving, of storytelling and transmitting knowledge.

The question now is how to collaborate so as to take each of these areas forward and to evolve in the digital humanities under its redefined premisses. The data being produced cannot just be categorized and put on an x/y axis. So when humanities seems to have the systematic problem that it struggles to find the technology to accompany its work, for the digital humanities it seems to be the other way around. This implies a certain lack of content in digital humanities and it is a necessity to look beyond algorithms. The questions of digital humanities cannot simply be how many times a word comes up in a text. Digital humanities will generate this kind of enormous data which in itself is meaningless but will push us to ask the right questions. It will strengthen research by adding a new dimension to data. So anxieties about what it will do to the field are misplaced. Much more, the hope is that it will introduce new objects in questions on the paths we take to find new tools.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education

Tech transformation: how agriculture is being redefined through digital innovation and startups

Admin — 2018-07-06T15:39:53Z

At a recent YES Bank panel and digital startup competition, it was evident that India’s digital boom was lending the Indian startup ecosystem a distinctly agri-flavour.

The blog post was published in Your Story on June 29, 2018. CIS was mentioned in the report.

The convergence of mobile networks, broadband internet, cloud platforms, IoT, AI and open data is helping transform one of the world’s oldest professions. This is of great significance as agriculture and related sectors like dairy production form the backbone of the Indian workforce. Today, tradition is merging with technology as the IT services sector is helping open up new opportunities for both seasoned and emerging entrepreneurs.

New fronts are opening up across the sector from organic farming and hydroponics to drones and agri apps. Startups are also playing a key role in transforming agriculture, which accounts for half of India’s workforce, but only about 13 percent of its GDP.

Entrepreneurship trends

An interesting trend to watch for is the rise of the number of agri-entrepreneurs, many of whom have no background in agriculture. There is more interest now in this sector compared to even five or ten years ago. Another indicator is the number of agri-tech competitions, awards and investors that are emerging. India’s demographic dividend is also attracting more youth segments to the agricultural sector, with cross-fertilisation across states, economic sectors, and scientific fields.

The challenges seem formidable, but need to be acknowledged and tackled. Thousands of farmers commit suicide each year due to debt problems, as documented by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). This is a sad reality in states such as Maharashtra, Odisha, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and others.

Many issues being tackled by startups relate to productivity and distribution, according to Sahil Kini, Vice President, Aspada Investment. There are large yield gaps in Indian farming as compared to its global counterparts, due to inadequacies in domains ranging from farm inputs and equipment to farming practices and retail connects. Multiple intermediaries, poor refrigeration during transportation, small farm sizes, and lack of fairness in financial stakeholders are other challenges.

Agri-tech startups

Today, the agri-tech sector is witnessing a number of startups in India disrupting everything from organic farming and equipment rentals to connected supply chains and cloud-based analytics. The startups in this report showcase the diversity in the sector, followed by an analysis of the broader ecosystem. Some cover pricing of produce, others include equipment marketplaces; still others cover digital workflow and smart supply chains.

Farms2Fork offers farmers water monitoring solutions that ensure better productivity by reducing water wastage. The solution includes IoT wireless soil sensors, AI support, and real-time analytics. While earlier agri-tech solutions were based on batch processing of data, Farms2Fork operates on real-time data.

Agribolo, founded in 2015, is a farming services platform spanning activities such as information dissemination, quality input procurement, market linkages, irrigation facilities and farming equipment. The franchise network, launched in Rajasthan, uses the aggregator model to connect farmers to experts, development institutions, financial services, and training institutes.

AgroWave, founded by an IIT Delhi alumna in 2017, aims to optimise agriculture supply chain using research, analytics, and technology. Demand and supply analytics connect farmers in Panipat, Sonipat, Harpur, and Rajasthan to caterers, retail shops, restaurants, and canteens.

Truce, founded by an IIT Bombay alumnus, is a B2B web and mobile platform that directly connects farmers and suppliers to wholesalers and retailers. The app is available in Hindi, English, Marathi and Gujarati, and enables tracking quotes and orders.

Farm Again has converted 2,500 acres of land into organic farms, along with tech tools to trace the product’s origin, when sold in outlets such as Reliance Retail, Big Bazaar, and More. IoT devices are used to monitor and record moisture content and soil conditions, with pipes for water and fertiliser inputs.

Crofarm, a Delhi-headquarted agri-supply chain startup founded in 2016, buys fresh produce directly from farmers and supplies them to online and offline retailers. It supplies nearly 8-10 tonnes of fruits and vegetables from its two distribution centres in Delhi NCR, and connects 100 retailers to more than 5,000 farmers.

Aibono improves farm yields by using AI on a cluster of parameters like weather and soil condition. The testing and measurement services indicate parameters such as crop stress, along with recommendations on the right fertiliser mix to be used based on the soil condition.

Gold Farm, founded in 2012, helps farmers book farm equipment such as solar-powered pumps in districts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Beneficiaries have included over 25,000 farmers on ground, who tap the services of 250 booking agents and over 500 tractor owners connected via a mobile app. The equipment is also tracked with IoT devices, resulting in rich data sets for analysis and forecasting.

Earthy Tales, founded in NCR in 2016, works with farmers across 11 states to provide chemical-free fruits, vegetables, groceries, and dairy products. These include snacks, jams, preserves, and pickles, provided direct to consumers. Other services include mentoring for farmers and farm cooperatives.

ONganic Foods works with small farmers to boost their organic produce. Based on contract farming, it identifies higher-priced grains and spices and gives quality inputs to farmers to increase their yield. It connects farmers to various government schemes as well as e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Spencer’s Retail.

Oxen Farm Solutions offers agricultural equipment on rent using a ‘Farming as a Service’ (FaaS) model. The platform connects farmers, farm equipment manufacturers, and government schemes. Access to such machinery can boost farm productivity in an affordable manner. The company operates in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha, and connects to corporates such as PepsiCo and Yes Bank.

Farmizen is a mobile-based platform that lets users grow vegetables and fruits on mini-farms, and monitor the process of growing food on a real-time basis. Located in the outskirts of Bengaluru, users get pictures and live videos of their farm plots. The startup also provides recommendations based on real-time inputs from the field as well as pre-defined schedules for over 50 different types of crops.

Harvesting, founded by in 2016, has offices in California and Bengaluru, and offers smart farming solutions based on analytics and AI. It also uses farmer profiles to build creditworthiness profiles for financial organisations. The idea is to provide both increased farm productivity and better financial services.

SatSure uses IoT and Big Data to provide financial security to farmers, via its 15-year database of satellite images. It makes recommendations clustering techniques for farmers to get an estimate of the total agriculture production, and provides this data to agri-insurance companies as well.

Organic Thelawala enables a transparent pricing mechanism so that the consumer knows the price of the produce as well as how much of the selling price actually goes to the farmer. It is s assisting 13,000 farmers to switch to organic farming, thereby, creating a positive impact on bio-diversity, soil contamination, water, and air pollution. Further, by providing free thelas (pushcart), the team promotes micro-entrepreneurship among pushcart vendors and farmers.

Earth Food, based in Pune, provides chemical-free produce at market price. It has collaborated with Reliance Fresh and Nature Fresh. It uses a healthy mix of traditional methods and innovation to keep pollution and wastage to a minimum, thereby benefitting both consumers and the environment.

Jayalaxmi Agrotech, founded by alumni of IIMB and VEC helps farmers minimise crop loss and improve productivity via its many crop- specific mobile applications in local languages that provide timely information on agriculture and animal husbandry.

Gramophone, based in Indore, is a platform that combines both advisory and sale of inputs under a single roof. Farmers can access mentors for help with everything from crop selection to land productivity and more.

Triton Foodworks, based in Delhi, is a hydroponics startup growing fruits and vegetables. It has reportedly set up more than 2 lakh sq ft of hydroponic farms across three locations in India, and produces more than 700 tons of fruits and vegetables each year.

vDrone, based in Bengaluru, uses drones and thermal imaging to increase yield. It analyses areas of the farm that need attention, and helps the farmer cater to these needs. Parameters include soil, cropping pattern, and use of fertilisers.

Ninjacart, based in Bengaluru, enables retailers and merchants to source fruits and vegetables directly from farmers without resorting to middlemen. It connects 2,500 farmers and handles 14,000 tons of fruits and vegetables, accounting for revenue of around Rs 4 crore every month.

BigHaat, based in Bengaluru, is an online agro e-store for farmers that lets them buy seeds, crop protection nutrients and solutions, and agro instruments. Last-mile connectivity is enabled via logistics partners like India Post and Ship Rocket. The footprint spans 50,000 farmers across 20 states.

Ravgo is an agri-equipment rental marketplace based on the model of the sharing economy. It is solving the farm mechanisation problem among India farmers who cannot afford to buy the farm machinery. The target market is currently small farmers based in Punjab.

Kisanmade, launched in Moradabad, UP is an e-commerce platform set up in Moradabad to empower farmers by eliminating the intermediary between the farmer and the consumer. It also aims to increase the farmer’s income and decrease the kitchen’s expense by 10-15 percent.

FlyBird Innovations, founded in Bengaluru, uses sensors in the soil to detect moisture content and control irrigation in farms across South India. The information is used to optimise irrigation practices, improve crop yield, and save water, time, and labour. It claims 25-30 percent savings of water and improvement of crop yield by 10-15 percent.

Kamal Kisan reduces labour costs with innovative agri-equipment, with reported savings of up to 50 percent. Tools include sugarcane planters, versatile mulch layers, bed makers, vegetable handy planters, and power weeders.

farMart connects farmers who own machinery with those who need it but don’t have access to it. Large farmers put underutilised agri-machinery up for rent on the farMart platform, and are connected to farmers who need such machinery; they can then book it via app or call centre. The database includes 300 villages and 1,500 farmers.

AgroStar, a Pune-based m-commerce startup, sells agricultural inputs directly to farmers. The platform can be accessed online or giving the company’s 1800 number a missed call. Products are sourced from national and multinational brands, and include seeds and nutrients.

CropIn leverages GIS and data science to deliver a range of services apps to farmers and other players in the agri chain. It feeds real-time data and advice on practices related to a range of crops.

Other notable agri startups are NubeSol (soil fertility maps) and Sree Sai Aerotech Innovations (drones for monitoring crop health). Some industry players are also leveraging the platform model – such as Trringo, launched in 2016 by India’s largest tractor maker company, Mahindra and Mahindra. The franchisee network enables farmers to access tractors at an affordable price. Over 100,000 farmers have signed up, from West and South India.

There are also international players in the Indian agri market, such as PEAT. The German startup is working with 30,000 farmers across India to help mitigate crop damage. It identifies patterns of plant diseases, pests, or nutrient deficiencies via crop images.

Ecosystem

The broader agri startup ecosystem includes a number of think tanks, research labs, incubators and accelerators. For example, ONganic is supported by the Technology Development Board, Government of India and Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprise and incubated at the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata.

Goa has an agri-focused incubator called Centre for Innovation and Business Acceleration (CIBA). TiE Bangalore and NUMA have held startup showcases in collaboration with Villgro, featuring agri-entrepreneurs.

At the recent YES Bank Transformation Series (YBTS) speakers and panelists included Ramanathan Ramanan, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog; Raju Kapoor, Head, Corporate Affairs, Dow AgroSciences India; Hemendra Mathur, Venture Partner, Bharat Innovations; Nitin Puri, Senior President, Food and Agribusiness Strategic Advisory and Research, YES Bank; and Amardeep Sibia, CEO, SatSure.

At the 2017 edition of YBTS three agri-tech winners were awarded out of 15 finalists. Winners included teams from IIM Shillong (Rs 5 lakh for a smart soil sensor proposal), IIM Bangalore (Rs 3 lakh for a solar-powered drip technology proposal), and ISB Hyderabad (Rs 2 lakh for IoT-based SIM-enabled farm data sensors).

The Government of India is also catalysing agri- entrepreneurship with programmes like the Agri-Udaan Accelerator and the Agri Grand Challenge. Government-backed funding agencies like the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) is incentivising banks to lend at highly affordable rates to startups.

Incubators in this space include Villgro, a-IDEA, ABI-ICRISAT, Startup Oasis, IIMC Innovation Park, IIT Kanpur SIIC, KIIT TBI, and CIIE, IIMA. They provide mentorship and connects to farmer cooperatives, NGOs, channel partners, and individual farmers in some cases.

Indigram Labs Foundation (ILF), supported by Department of Science and Technology via the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board, Government of India, is a technology-based incubator founded in 2015 to promote creativity and innovation in agriculture, renewable energy, and rural healthcare industry. Its host organisation is Indian Society of Agribusiness Professionals (ISAP).

ISAP has set up more than 1,800 agri-based ventures through its Agri-Clinics and Agri-Business Centres (ACABC) programme and has around 50 agri-business experts in various verticals who help in mentoring incubates, according to Manisha Acharya, CEO, Indigram Labs Foundation.

It has graduated 18 startups, such as New Leaf Dynamic Technologies(refrigeration system powered by farm waste), Intello Labs (AI-based deep-tech solution for crop inspection and agricultural products grading), Sainhun Ventures(honey by-products), Nutrelis Agro Foods (organic groceries, beverages), and Innosapiens Agro Technologies (phenomics device for pre-detection of pests).

Indigram takes an equity of up to 5 percent in the startup. In the long run, agri incubators need support in areas like trained manpower, pilot testing costs, rural outreach, and patent advisory services, according to Acharya.

International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) hosted an agri-business investors camp in Hyderabad on June 12. The camp addressed three themes: agri-technology, agri-engineering and food processing.

IIM Ahmedabad’s technology business incubator, Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), has launched a food and agri-business accelerator in partnership with a-IDEA, the business incubator at Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s (ICAR) National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM). Top teams are provided seed investment of up to Rs 30 lakhs each. CIIE also has a sustainability focused fund called Infuse Ventures.

Funding

Recent reports have tracked the investment line-up for Agricx Lab (Ankur Capital, CIIE), Agrostar (IDG Ventures, Aavishkaar Venture Management), Agrowave (Daffodil Software), Airwood (StartupXseed Ventures), Arya Collateral (Aspada), Farm Taaza (Epsilon Venture Partners), Farmizen (Venture Highway), FarmLink (Pioneering Ventures, Syngenta), Gobasco (Matrix Partners India), KisanHub (Notion Capital, IQ Capital, Calibrate Management), KrishiHub (INVENT accelerator, Villgro Innovation Fund), NinjaCart (Trifecta Ventures), RML AgTech (IvyCap Ventures), Utkal Tubers (CapAleph Indian Millennium SME Fund, Zephyr Peacock India), and VillFarm (Unitus Seed Fund, Rianta Capital).

Crofarm has received funding from angels such as Rajan Anandan (MD, Google India) and Jitendra Gupta (MD, PayU India). Gold Farm raised funds from Infuse Venture and the Mahindra Group. Truce was funded by 3one4capital, Beenext, FreeCharge founders, Snapdeal founders and Anupam Mittal, CEO, People Group. CropIn, raised funds from Ankur Capital; Agrostar received investments from Aavishkar. Other active agri-focused funds include Omnivore Partners and Rural Agri Ventures; Germany development agency GIZ has also roped in international partners for further cooperation.

Among Indian states, Karnataka formalised an agri-startup fund in 2017 through K-BITS with a corpus of Rs 10 crore, with an additional Rs 8 crore planned for 21 agri-startups this year. A centre of excellence for agriculture is also planned, where startups will work with farmers.

Other government initiatives, according to Sahil Kini of Aspada Investment include Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme, 2008; and Money Lending (Regulation) Act, 2008.

Entrepreneur tips

A number of mentor panels and pitch jurors have offered guidance for agri-entrepreneurs. These include, for example, the importance of customer immersion. Here are some of the tips they have shared.

On-the-ground realities in emerging economies are shifting rapidly, and founders should have a finger on the pulse of effective trends and aspirations.
Disciplines like design thinking offer useful and actionable frameworks.
Metrics should be holistic and include activity, business, and social impacts. There should be one or two key success metrics for primary focus, and the rest should be supporting or complementary metrics. This helps founders monitor their progress and assists investors in assessing the long-term viability of the venture.
Founders should build a well-rounded team, with a mix of engineering, design, and social science backgrounds. Sometimes founders get too carried away with the technology; having a holistic mix in the core team will help contextualise the offerings, use and impact.
India’s social problems call for bold and ambitious innovators who can tackle challenges at scale. The social cost of failure is high for social enterprises (as compared to merely pivoting an app design); hence collaborative partnerships are important.
Social entrepreneurs should learn how to work with partners who are not social enterprises. They should be clear about their offerings, values, and philosophy. Partnerships are an art and a science. Partners should be picked carefully, and the relationship should evolve over time.
Founders will frequently need to pitch to funders, investors, partners, regulators, customers, and employees. The pitch should focus less on product features and more on problem resolution. Techniques like storytelling are effective here.
Founders should enumerate the range of risks involved, eg. regulatory and lack of ecosystem trust. Secondary impacts should also be assessed, since some risks are more indirect than others.

The road ahead

This is a great time to integrate different domains of knowledge and skills in agri-innovation. In addition to fresh farm produce, there are lucrative opportunities in processed products such as pickles, papads, chutneys, and murabbas. This calls for effective post-harvest management infrastructure such as storage, preservation, cold chain and refrigerated transportation.

New models such as the FaaS model can lead to more sustainable paths to profitability. The platform model can leverage data analytics to identify emerging business trends and opportunities and thus attract more venture capital, according to a report published by Bain and Company in partnership with Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Such models are also getting significant corporate backing, such as Trringo by Mahindra and Mahindra for tractor rentals and John Deere (with EM3 Agri Services) for harvester fleets.

Smartphones powered by affordable mobile broadband networks are helping improve workflow of farms and dairies. This opens the door to new pay-per-use business models and innovation stacks, connecting the farm to the fridge and fork. Banks and financial organisations also need to step up to the challenge and offer more creative models of financing for farmers, entrepreneurs, incubators, and accelerators.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a target for farmers’ incomes to be doubled by 2022, India’s 75th year of Independence. Schemes like the government’s Startup Agri India scheme, the Digi Gaon (Digital Village) initiative, and Bharat Net project can all work together towards making this a reality. Initiatives like agri-hackathons can also bring together aspiring entrepreneurs from diverse sectors.

However, there are certain challenges:
Pricing decisions should be made more transparent and less politically driven (particularly before elections), with sufficient market validity and testing. This includes setting the price of onions and sugar, and promising ‘free’ electricity for farmers.
Increased promotion and adoption of open data are other trends to watch for. An open data ecosystem can grow India’s GDP by $22 billion by 2020, according to report by YES Bank and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). India’s Open Government Data (OGD) platform can step up to this challenge.
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is pushing for these initiatives to reach ordinary people and marginalised communities. Other sources of data include rural internet kiosks, community e-centres, and online agricultural systems.
Agri-tech entrepreneurs can go beyond incremental change to truly effect exponential change, and transform the agricultural sector while also giving back to society. Successful agri-preneurs in India can also take their innovations global.

The agricultural sector is now shedding its rustic persona to emerge as a trendy space to be in. Inclusive, sustainable, and scalable solutions are the way ahead.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/your-story-june-29-2018-tech-transformation-agriculture-redefined-digital-innovation-startups

DML 2013 Conference

praskrishna — 2013-03-21T09:48:33Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dml-2013-conference.pdf

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.

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