Centre for Internet and Society

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.

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

Resisting Revolutions

praskrishna — 2012-05-29T10:28:17Z

Nishant Shah's peer reviewed journal article was published in Democracy, Volume 55, Issue 2.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/resisting-revolutions.pdf

Video Games: A Case Study of a Cross-cultural Video Collaboration

Larissa Hjorth and Nishant Shah — 2014-01-31T12:02:17Z

A new book focusing on Palestinian artists’ video, edited by Bashir Makhoul and published by Palestinian Art Court- al Hoash, 2013, includes a chapter co-authored by Larissa Hjorth and Nishant Shah.

This was published in a book on Palestinian art.

The rise of mobile media is heralding new forms of networked visualities. These visualities see place, politics and images entangled in new ways: what can be called ‘emplaced visuality’. In the images disseminated globally of citizen uprising such as the Arab Spring, it was mobile phones that provided the frame and context for new forms of networked visual politics. In the growth in networked photo apps such as Instagram and Hipstamic, how, when and why we are representing a relationship between place and co-presence is changing. No longer the poorer cousin to professional cameras, camera phones have lead the rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetics flooding mainstream and subcultural media cultures. In networked visuality contexts such as YouTube and Flickr, the aesthetic of what Burgess has called ‘vernacular creativity’[1] has become all-pervasive—so much so that even mainstream media borrows the DIY style.

Now, with locative media added into the equation, these visualities are not only networked but also emplaced—that is, entangled within the temporal and spatial movements of everyday life.[2]

Emplaced visualities represent a new relationship between place (as a series of what Doreen Massey calls ‘stories so far’)[3] co-presence, subjectivity and visuality. This phenomenon is impacting upon video art. In this chapter we reflect upon how mobile media visualities are impacting upon a sense of place and displacement. With the added dimension of Big Data and location-based services (like Google Maps and Facebook Places) now becoming part of the everyday informational circuits, how a sense of place and privacy is experienced and represented is changing. This phenomenon is apparent in the Palestinian cross-cultural video project called Al Jaar Qabla al Daar (The Neighbour before the House) as we will discuss in detail later in this chapter.

With its history of displacement and disapora, Palestinine’s role in contemporary art is increasingly becoming pivotal. This is especially the case with video art as a key medium for reflecting upon representations of place and movement. When we think of Palestinan video art the first artist we think of is Mona Hatoum. Hatoum was a poineer in so many ways. In particular, she gave voice to Arab women. Her work unsetttled the poetics of the everyday by evoking a sense of displacement and entanglement. While born in Beirut of Palestinan parents and then moving to London, she never identified as Lebanese. Despite never living in Palestinian, Hatoum was like a number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon post 1948 who were never able to gain Lebanese identity cards. Unsurprisingly, Hatoum’s experiences of exile permulate her work. In particular, exile, politics and the body have played a key role. This is epitomised in her iconic Measures of Distance (1988) whereby Hatoum superimposes images of her mother having a shower with letters by her mum written in Arabian.

However, Hatoum is not the only artist representing the oevre of Palestinian video art. Over the last two decades—with the rise of mobile media affording easy accessibility to new media tools and networked contexts like YouTube—a new breed of video artists has arisen. An example is Navigations: Palestinian Video Art, 1988 to 2011 (curated as part of the Palestine Film Festival) that explored artists working in Palestine and the diaspora over nearly a quarter of a century. Unsurprisingly, motifs of diaspora and displacement feature throughout the fifteen works by Hatoum, Taysir Batniji, Manar Zoabi, Larissa Sansour and Khaled Jarrar to name a few. In Navigations: Palestinian Video Art key themes include ‘mobility and fluidity: the virtual and the real, the past and the future, the spectacular and the quotidian, the near and the far’.

Another example of an event promoting Palestinian video art is the /si:n/ Festival of Video Art & Performance. Consisting of performances, video installations, lectures, talks, and workshops in various venues all over the West Bank and includes artists from all over the world. The name /si:n/ is meant to linked the words ‘scene’ with ‘seen’ and has been seen as making an innovative context for video artists to share and collaborate in public venue. With themes such as ‘poetical revolution comes before political revolution’, the /si:n/ Festival provides a context that reflects upon exile and place in one of the most contested and politucal spaces, the West Bank. Beginning in 2009, the /si:n/ Festival became the first festival of video art in Palestine.

Given this rich tapestry of video art emerging in Palestine, in this chapter we explore the relationship between emergent mobile visualities, diaspora and place through a specific project called The Neighbour before the House. A cross-cultural video collaboration between Indian artists Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Nida Ghouse, with Palestinian and Israeli artists Mahmoud Jiddah, Shereen Brakat and Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, The Neighbour before the House is a video art project that explores quotidian practices of life in a ‘post-surveillance society’. The Neighbour before the House is set in the context of the much contested territories and the relentless re-occupation and re-appropriation of East Jerusalem. Working with cheap surveillance technologies which have become such a ubiquitous part of the landscape of East Jerusalem, the artists use a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) security camera to inquire into the affective dimensions of ‘mobile’ life in the time of turbulent politics. The images that they capture look at jest, memory, desire and doubt, as fragile conditions of trust and life shape the everyday experiences of the region. The camera is given to the residents of a neighbourhood torn asunder by political strife and conflicts, asking them to search for the nugget of truth or morsel of thickness in the otherwise familiar flatness of walls and closed doors, which have been completely depleted of all depth because of the increased distance in the social relations.

The images eschew the tropes of traditional documentary making by and adopting the grainy, lo-res, digital non-frame, DIY aesthetics constantly in search of an image that might become the site of meaning making, but increasingly only capturing the mundane, the inane, the opaque and the evanescent. The image leads the commentary. The live camera operator’s interest and experience shape the image, rendering the familiar or the insignificant as hugely affective and evocative. The project further initiates a dialogue between the neighbours—both from across the contested zones, but also from across picket fences and walls of surveillance—by introducing the images to them, by inviting them to capture the images, and instil in them, the narratives of hope, despair, nostalgia, memory, loss, love, and longing.

The Neighbour before the House reflects upon the relationship between between art, technologies of visual reproduction and political strife. Moving away from the documentary style that has been popular in capturing the ‘real’, The Neighbour before the House refigures the temporality and spatiality through new affective and metaphorical tropes, playing with the tension between the presence of surveillance technologies and the familiarity of these images that breeds new conditions of life and living, trust and belonging, safety and threat, for people in Palestine. In the process, it introduces key questions to the role of the artist, the function of art, the form of video art practice, and the new negotiations that digital video apparatus introduce to the art worlds, beyond the now main-stream ideas of morphing, digitization, remixing etc.

Moreover, The Neighbour before the House reflects upon a shift away from the dominant network society paradigm and towards more contingent and ambivalent mirconarratives of camera phone practices. It toys with the DIY ‘banality’ aesthetics of camera phones in order to consider the ways in which place is overlaid with different types of information—electronic, geographic, psychological and metaphoric. On the one hand, The Neighbour before the House evokes network society metaphors. On the other hand, it suggests a move away from this paradigm and towards a politics of both ‘emplaced’ and displaced visuality. In order to discuss this transformation of the relationship between image, place and information from network society metaphors towards ‘emplaced’ visualities we firstly describe The Neighbour before the House before then reflecting upon a few key themes the project explores: that is, the movement of the networked society to emplaced visualities and the rise of the politics of the phoneur.

The Neighbour before the House 2012): A case study

As aforementioned, The Neighbor before the House is a collaborative video project between Indian, Israeli and Palestenian artists that appropriates, critically responds and insightfully rearranges the notion of art, politics and digital video technologies in its exploration of everyday practices of life in critical times in a networked post-surveillance society. The Neighbor before the House equips eight Palestenian families from East Jerusalem to be in control of PTZ (Pan Tilt Zoom) surveillance cameras mounted at strategic locations in the city, to observe the live feed on their TV sets, recording their reactions and live commentaries at what they see. Here the Big Brother, and its contemporary Big Data, is inverted through everyday citizens being given the omnipresent eye. It plays on the idea of the neighbour being both a friendly eye and when this watching shifts from being benevolent to malevolent.

As the artists write, ‘this footage shot with a security camera, takes us beyond the instrumental aspects of surveillance imaging, introducing us to the architecture of a deliberate and accelerated occupation of a city.’ Here the city is rendered into a cartography of informational circuits. Exploiting the conditions of networked spectacle, the project attempts to remap the real and the everyday through ‘inquisitiveness, jest, memory, fear, desire and doubt’. They use the surveillance cameras—symbols of suspicion and fear—to catalyse stories from Palestenians in different neighbourhoods about what can be seen: ‘messianic archeological digs; Israeli settlement activities; takeovers of Palestenian properties; the Old City, the Wall and the West Bank,’ among other mundane and marvellous details of living life in those precarious conditions.

Through the inversion of the politics of survellience from the Big Brother to the ubiquitous neighbour, The Neighbor before the House provides a rich, evocative and non-representational history of living in East Jerusalem. The networked media spectacles which have come to stand-in for the complex geo-political struggles of the region are displaced. As the low-res cameras reduce the deep geography into an alien flatness on the TV screens, as the camera captures glimpses of what could have been, records traces of blurred movements which require discussions and debates about their possible meaning, and engages the families to communicate their hopes, fears, desires and doubts, the art project also signals us to the new forms, functions and role of video art. Rather than the media event or spectacle,
The Neighbor before the House provides the micronarrative gestures of the everyday. The ways in which the place is a tapestery of subjectivities and experiences, not just a media spectacle.

As artist Shaina Anand mentions in an interview with Shah, this is a new kind of storytelling, where,

… a lot of the practice actually removes the filmmaker, the director, the auteur, and also therefore the cameraman, and also the lens... and offers these possibilities and privileges— of this look and gaze and all—to the subjects themselves[4]

And as the lens makes itself invisible, it also gives new importance to the apparatus of surveillance, seeing and its incorporation in our lives. As Florian Schenider mentions in the introduction to the project, the house upon which the camera is mounted, itself becomes a tripod made of stones. Instead of thinking of the video apparatus as out there, the private conditions of the home, the histories of the family, their relationships with neighbours and communities that they have lost, and strangers that they have inherited, all become the defining circumstances of this new crisis.

Borrowing from a Quranic saying, Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar, which is close to the idea of ‘loving they neighbour’ it explores how the presence of new digital video technologies establishes difference, distance, alienation, proximity, curiosity and surveillance which is not merely a function of governmental structures but also a condition of gamification and everyday engagement for the families in East Jerusalem. For the artists, this also takes up another connotation of ‘checking out your neighbour before you buy the house’ suggesting establishing bounded similarities to seek comfort. The edited footage of the video shows how and when the users got in control of the keyboard and a joy-stick, panning, tilting and zooming the camera, watching the live feeds on their Television sets as they speak live over the footage. These commentaries are personal as they are affective. Sometimes the commentary leads the person to probe the image, deeper, trying to find a meaning that can no longer be supported by the hyper-pixelated image on their screen, but becoming a site through which memories and interpretations

get generated. What begins as a playful probe soon takes up sinister shades, as some generate narratives of loss and death. Others take the opportunity to spy on the new settlers who have sometimes taken over their older houses, wondering what changes they are making to what was their own. There is a sense of rawness and urgency, as they look back, with fear, and anger, but also with resignation at the houses that they were evicted from, and the semblance of life that they can spot from their remote presence.

The final 5 cuts that the artist produce, give us a deep and evocative insight into geography, temporality, and the ways in which we can re-appropriate the network spectacle to look at things that are often forgotten, dropped out of, or rendered invisible in the neat and clean lines of network models and diagrams. The ‘footage’ quality of the probes, the long dwellings on insignificant images, and the panoptican nature of video as witness, video as spy, and video as affective engagement with territories and times that are lost, all give a new idea of what the future of video art would be like. Instead of looking at a tired old Foucauldian critique of surveillance, The Neighbor before the House posits the question of ‘Who watches the watchman?’ in ways that are both startling and assuring.

Visualising the Politics of the Network

One of the key themes of The Neighbour before the House is the changing role of the network society—especially in an age of Big Data and locative-based services (LBS)—whereby privacy and surveillance come to the forefront. The network society has often been cited as one of the defining frameworks of our heavily mediated times. From theorists such as Barry Wellman and Manuel Castells, the network metaphor has burgeoned in parallel with the all-pervasive rise of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) globally. According to Lee Raine and Wellman in Networked, the ‘new social operating systems of networked individualism liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups.’[5]

Raine and Wellman argue that there has been a ‘triple revolution’: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices’.[6]

The ability of networks to explain a range of human personal and social relationships has afforded it great explanatory power, where everything (and hence, by association, everybody) can be understood and explained by the indexicalities and visual cartographies that networks produce. The network is simultaneously, and without any sense of irony, committed to both, examining sketchiness and producing clarity of any phenomena or relationality. The network presumes an externality which can be rich, chaotic and complex and proposes tools and models through which that diverse and discrete reality can be rendered intelligible by producing visualisations.

These visualisations are artefacts—in as much as all mapping exercises produce artefacts—and operate under the presumption of a benignity devoid of political interventions or intentions. The visualisations are non-representational, in terms that they do not seek to reproduce reality but actually understand it, and thereby shaping the lenses and tools to unravel the real nature of the Real. In this function, the network visualisations are akin to art, attaining symbolic value and attempting to decode a depth that the network itself defies and disowns, simulating conditions of knowing and exploring, emerging as surrogate structures that stand in for the real. Thus the rich set of actions, emotions, impulses, traces, inspirations, catalysts, memories, etc. get reified as transactions which can be sorted in indices, arranged in databases, and presented as an abstract, symbolic and hyper-visual reality which can now be consumed, accessed and archived within the network, thus obfuscating the reality that it was premised upon.

This phenomenon is what Shah calls the spectacle imperative of the network. Especially with the proliferation of ubiquitous image and video recording digital devices, this ability to create subjective, multiple, fractured spectacles that feed into the network’s own understanding of itself (rather than an engagement with a reality outside) has become the dominant aesthetic that travels from Reality TV programming to user generated content production on video distribution channels on the internet. This networked spectacle, without a single auteur or a concentrated intention—so the videos from the Arab Spring on YouTube, for example, range from small babies in prams to women forming barricades against a marching army, and from people giving out free food and water to acts of vandalism and petty thefts—has become the new aesthetic of video interaction, consumption and circulation. It invites an engagement, divesting our energies and attentions from the physical and the political, to the aesthetic and the discursive. Which is to say that when we consume these spectacles (or indeed, produce them, not necessarily only through the images but also through texts), we produce a parallel universe that demands that we understand the world ‘out there’ through these cultural artefacts which require an immense amount of decoding and meaning making. The network, in its turn, offers us better and more exhaustive tools of mining and sifting through this information, sorting and arranging it, curating and managing it, so that we build more efficient networks without essentially contributing to the on-the-ground action.

This peculiar self-sustaining selfish nature of the network, to become the only reality, under the guise of attempting to explain reality, is perhaps the most evident in times and geographies of crises. Where (and when) the conditions of politics, circumstances of everyday survival, and the algebra of quotidian life becomes too precarious, too wearisome, too unimaginable to cope with, the network spectacle appears as both the tool for governance as well as the site of protest. Hence, the same technologies are often used by people on different sides of the crises, to form negotiations and get a sense of control, on a reality that is quickly eluding their lived experiences. Surveillance cameras storing an incredible amount of visual data, forming banal narratives of the everyday, appear in critical times and geographies as symbols of control and containment, by authorities that seek to establish their sovereignty over unpredictable zones of public life and dwelling. The gaze of the authority is often criss-crossed by the cell-phone, the webcam, the tiny recording devices of everyday life that people on the streets and in their houses use, to record the nothingness of the crisis, the assurance of normalcy and the need to look over the shoulder and beyond the house, to know that whether or not god is in the heavens, all is well with the world.

The Place of the Visual: Towards a theory of emplaced visuality

However, with the rise of mobile media and its micronarrative capacity, the politics of network, and its relationship to a sense of place changes. Far from eroding a sense of place in the growing unboundness of home, mobile technologies reinforce the significance locality.[7] Mobile media also signal a move away from earlier depictions of the network society. Through the growth in camera phone practices overlaid with location-based services, we see new forms of visuality that reflect changing relations between place and information. With the rise of technologies in an increasingly mobile—physically and technologically—place has become progressively more contested. As Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin note in Mobile Technologies and Place, place is one of the most contested, ambiguous and complex terms today.[8] Viewing it as unbounded and relational, Wilken and Goggin observe, ‘place can be understood as all-pervasive in the way that it informs and shapes everyday lived experience—including how it is filtered and experienced via the use of mobile technologies’.[9] As social geographer Doreen Massey notes, maps provide little understanding into the complex elusiveness of place as a collection of ‘stories-so-far’:

One way of seeing ‘places’ is as on the surface of maps… But to escape from an imagination of space as surface is to abandon also that view of place. If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and of what is made of them… And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the specificity of place.[10]

For anthropologist Sarah Pink, place is increasingly being mapped by practices of emplacement.[11] With location based media like Google Maps and geotagging becoming progressively part of everyday media practice, how place is imagined and experienced across geographic, psychological, online and offline spaces is changing. This impacts upon the role of ethnography and its relationship to geography and place. As Anne Beaulieu notes, ethnography has moved from co-location to co-presence.[12] In this shift, we see the role of ethnography to address the complex negotiations between online and offline spaces growing.

In The Neighbour before the House, we are made to consider the changing role of visuality in how place is experienced and practiced. By deploying a surveillant and multivalent gaze, The Neighbour before the House asks us to reconsider privacy and surviellance in an age of locative media. The rise of the network society has witnessed numerous tensions and ambivalence, especially around the the relationship between agency, information and place. This is epitomised by the second generation camera phones practices whereby with the added layer of LBS—where and when images were taken—becomes automatic by default. Whereas first generation of camera phone practices noted gendered differences.[13] through LBS, these differences take on new dimensions—particularly in terms of its potential ‘stalker’ elements.[14] While notions of privacy differ subject to socio-cultural context, LBS do provide more details about users and thus allow them to be victims of stalking (Cincotta, Ashford, & Michael 2011).

The shift towards second generation camera phone images sees a movement away from networked towards emplaced visualities (Pink & Hjorth 2012; Hjorth 2013; Hjorth & Arnold 2013). On the one hand, this overlaying of the geographic with the social highlights that place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2002; Hjorth 2005). Far from eroding place, mobile media amplify the complexities of place as something lived and imagined, geographic and yet psychological. LBS enable mobile media users to create and convey more complex details about a locality. On the other hand, LBS create new motivations for narrating a sense of place and the role of amateur and vernacular photography.

Shifts in contemporary amateur photography highlight the changes in how place, co-presence and information is navigated, performed and represented. This issues are particularly prevalent in contested location like Palestine. Last century it was the Kodak camera that epitomized amateur photography and played an important role in normalizing notions of the family as well as ritualizing events such as holidays.[15]

As Lisa Gye notes, personal photography is central to the process of identity formation and memorialization.[16] The shift towards camera phones not only changes how we capture, store, and disseminate images but also has ‘important repercussions for how we understand who we are and how we remember the past’.[17]

Moreover, with the rise in possibilities for sharing via social media like microblogs and Twitter, camera phone photography not only magnifies UCC, but also provides filters and lenses to enhance the “professional” and “artistic” dimensions of the photographic experience.[18]

For Daniel Palmer, smartphone photography is distinctive in various ways, with one key feature being the relationship between touch and the image in what he calls an ”embodied visual intimacy” (2012: 88). With the rise of high quality camera phones, along with the growth in distribution services via social and locative media, new forms of visuality are emerging (Pink & Hjorth 2012). The added dimensions of movement and touch becoming important features of the camera phone with the emphasis on networked is shifting to “emplaced” visuality. Images as emplaced in relation to what human geographer Tim Ingold has called a “meshwork” and entanglement of lines (2008). Images themselves are part of such lines as they are inextricable from the camera and person who took them. In this sense camera phone images are not simply about what they represent (although they are also about that) but are additionally about what is behind, above, below, and to either side.

By using different smartphone photo apps, respondents tried to inscribe a sense of place with emotion. This practice is what anthropologist Sarah Pink identifies as the “multisensorality of images.” That is, they are located in “the production and consumption of images as happening in movement, and consider them as components of configurations of place” (Pink 2011: 4). Drawing on Tim Ingold’s conceptualization of place as “entanglement” (Ingold 2008), Pink notes, “Thus, the ‘event’ where photographs are produced and consumed becomes not a meeting point in a network of connections but an intensity of entangled lines in movement… a meshwork of moving things” (Pink 2011: 8).

While the surveillant eye of Big Brother now takes the form of Big Data, the emplaced nature of camera phone images can help to contribute to a changing relationship between performativity, memory and place that is user-orientated. Rather than operating to memorialize place, camera phone practices, especially through LBS networks, are creating playful performances around the movement of co-presence, place and placing (Richardson & Wilken 2012). As noted elsewhere, Pink and Hjorth argue that camera phone practices are highlighting a move away from the network society towards emplaced visualities and socialities (2012). Emplaced visuality means understanding camera phone practices and the socialities that create and emerge through them in ways corresponding with non-representational (Thrift, 2008) or ‘more-than-representational’ approaches in geography which according to Hayden Lorimer encompass:

… how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions (Lorimer, 2005: 84).

Thus we see camera phone photography as a part of the flow of everyday life, an increasingly habitual way of being that is sensed and felt (emotionally and physically). Yet, because camera phone photography involves the production and sharing of images, it also compels us to engage with the relationship between the representational and the non-representational. Emplaced visualities see images as embedded with the movements of everyday life. Tim Cresswell has suggested that we consider ‘three aspects of mobility: the fact of physical movement—getting from one place to another; the representations of movement that give it shared meaning; and, finally, the experienced and embodied practice of movement’ (Cresswell, 2010: 19). These three aspects of mobility are deeply interwoven and entangled. In camera phone photography the experience and representation of camera phone photography is enacted in the ‘flow’ of everyday life at the interface where digital and material realities come together. These emplaced visualities are often abstracted through the mechanics of Big Data mega surveillance. But as The Neighbour before the House demonstrates, the perpetual movement of emplaced visualities is in sharp contrast with the unmoving, omipresent Big Data eye.

This contrast between the moving and unmoving, micro and macro information overlaid onto place can also be reflected as part of the shift from the flâneur to the phoneur. The notion of mobility—as a technology, cultural practice, geography and metaphor—has impacted upon the ways in which twenty-first century cartographies of the urban play out. Through the trope of mobility, and immobility, rather than overcoming all difference and distance, the significance of local is reinforced. While nineteenth-century narrations of the urban were symbolised by the visual economics of the flâneur, the twenty-first century wanderer of the informational city has been rendered what Robert Luke calls the phoneur. [19] The conceptual distance, and yet continuum, between the flâneur and the phoneur is marked by the paradigmatic shift of the urban as once a geospatial image of, and for, the bourgeoisie, as opposed to the phoneur which sees the city transformed into informational circuit in which the person is just a mere node with little agency. Beyond dystopian narrations about the role of technology in maintaining a sense of intimacy, community and place, we can find various ways in which the tenacity of the local retains control. In particular, through the tension between mobile media and Big Data, we can see how the local and the urban can be re-imagined in new ways.

The flâneur (or the wanderer of the modern city), best encapsulated by German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire’s painting, has been defined as an important symbol of Paris and modernity as it moved into nineteenth century urbanity. Thanks to the restructuring of one third of the small streets into boulevards by Baron Hausmann, Paris of the nineteenth century took a new sense of place and space.

Luke’s phoneur, on the other hand, is the ‘user’ as as part of the informational network flows constituting contemporary urbanity. If the flâneur epitomised modernism and the rise of nineteenth-century urban, then for Luke, the phoneur is the twenty-first-century extension of this tradition as the icon of modernity. As Luke observes, in a networked city one is connected as part of circuit of information in which identity and privacy is at the mercy of system. The picture of the urban city today painted by Luke is one in which the individuals have minimal power in the rise of corporate surveillance.

Neighbour before the House problematises Luke’s dystopian view of the phoneur. The picture painted by Neighbour before the House is much more ambivalent. However it does make the audience reflect upon the changing nature of surveillance in an age of Big Data.[20]

These tensions around the dystopian phoneur and a more embodied and emplaced version can be found running as an undercurrent in the work of Neighbour before the House.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have explored the cross-cultural video collaboration, The Neighbour before the House, to consider the changing relationship between a sense of place, information and the politics of visuality. As we have suggested, with the rise of location-based camera phone practices and Big Data we are seeing new forms of visuality that are best described as emplaced rather than networked. The notion of emplaced reflects some of the tensions around contemporary representations of mobility and movement, particularly prevalent in the often displaced and diasporic experiences of Palestine.

Filmed in Palestine,The Neighbour before the House explores the notion of place as entangled and embedded at the same time as displaced through the rise of ICTs. By providing some of the paradoxes and ambivalences surrounding contemporary media practices and its relationship between information and place, it allows for a space for reflection and contemplation about the surveillence and privacy.

[1]. Jean Burgess, Vernacular creativity and new media (Doctoral dissertation), 2007. Retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16378/

[2]. Sarah Pink and Larissa Hjorth Emplaced Cartographies: Reconceptualising camera phone practices in an age of locative media’, Media International Australia, 145 (2012): 145-156.

[3]. Doreen Massey

[4]. Shaina Anand interviewed by Nishant Shah, December 2012.

[5]. Raine, L. and B. Wellman 2012, Networked, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Mizuko Ito, ‘Mobiles and the Appropriation of Place’. Receiver 8, 2002, (consulted 5 December 2012) http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/evs/readings/itoShort.pdf ; Hjorth, L. (2005) ‘Locating Mobility: Practices of Co-Presence and the Persistence of the Postal Metaphor in SMS/MMS Mobile Phone Customization in Melbourne’, Fibreculture Journal, 6, (consulted 10 December 2006) http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_hjorth.html.

[8]. Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin, ‘Mobilizing Place: Conceptual Currents and Controversies’, in R. Wilken and G. Goggin (Eds) Mobile Technology and Place, New York, Routledge, 2012, pp. 3-25 (5).

[9].Ibid 6.

[10]. Doreen Massey,For Space, London, Sage, 2005 (130).

[11]. Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, London, Sage, 2009.

[12]. Anne Beaulieu, ‘From Co-location to Co-presence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge’. Social Studies of Science, 40 (3) 2010: June. 453-470.

[13]. Dong-Hoo Lee, ‘Women’s creation of camera phone culture’. Fibreculture Journal 6, 2005, URL (consulted 3 February 2006) http://www.fibreculture.org/journal/issue6/issue6_donghoo_print.html; Larissa Hjorth, ‘Snapshots of almost contact’. Continuum, 21 (2) 2007: 227-238.

[14]. Alison Gazzard, ‘Location, Location, Location: Collecting Space and Place in Mobile Media’. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17 (4) 2011: 405-417.

[15]. Lisa Gye, ‘Picture this: the impact of mobile camera phones on personal photographic practices,’ Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 21(2) 2007: 279–288.

[16]. Ibid 279.

[17]. Ibid 279.

[18]. Søren Mørk Petersen,Common Banality: The Affective Character of Photo Sharing, Everyday Life and Produsage Cultures, PhD Thesis, ITU Copenhagen.

[19]. Robert Luke, ‘The Phoneur: Mobile Commerce and the Digital Pedagogies of the Wireless Web’, in P. Trifonas (ed.) Communities of Difference: Culture, Language, Technology, pp. 185-204, Palgrave, London, 2006.

[20]. Sites such as www.pleaserobme.com, that seek to raise awareness about over-sharing of personal data, highlight not only the localised nature of privacy but also that privacy is something we do rather than something we possess.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/palestinian-video-art-larissa-hjorth-nishant-shah-video-games-a-case-study-of-cross-cultural-video-collaboration

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

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:47:04Z

In Book 4, To Connect of the Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? series, we try to understand digital natives through their environment. Digital natives do not operate in a vacuum, their actions are shaped by the fast changing geo-political landscape, interaction with other actors and the global architecture of technology. In our Digital Natives with a Cause? research, it has become clear that at the heart of all digital natives discourse lies the question of power. Along with power, questions of race, class, gender and socio-economic situation cannot be ignored when talking about digital natives. We found that on one hand digital natives are destabilising existing power structures and challenging the status quo. On the other, the geo-political context in which digital natives live, affect their activities, beliefs and opinions. Then there are actors that can destroy, influence or support digital native activity which give rise to questions of control that resonate within this new generation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook4

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

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:40:51Z

In Book 3 of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? collective, we enter into dialogue with some of the severest and most heated debates around digital natives and their ability to effect change. To Act collides with the discourse on young people’s ability and role in technology mediated processes of change, heads-on. It deliberates on some very dense questions about how digital natives execute their visions of change using new forms of mobilisation of resources and sharing/production of information.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook3

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

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:35:43Z

We started the Digital Natives with a Cause? Knowledge programme, with a series of questions, which were drawn from popular discourse, research, practice, policy and experiences of people engaging with questions of youth, technology and change. Our ambition was to consolidate existing knowledge and to look at knowledge gaps which can be addressed in order to build new frameworks to understand the role that digital natives see themselves playing in their own understanding and vision of change. This Book 2 To Think, takes up the challenge of constructing new approaches and each essay in this book, through case-studies, analyses and divergent perspectives, offers a novel way of understanding processes of technology mediated citizen-driven change.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook2

Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report

radha — 2012-03-13T10:43:09Z

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf

Internet Monitor

praskrishna — 2014-01-09T07:33:02Z

Malavika's piece on India's Identity Crisis is published in this report.

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

Beyond Public Squares, Dumb Conduits, and Gatekeepers: The Need for a New Legal Metaphor for Social Media

amber — 2021-05-31T10:19:33Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/beyond-public-squares-dumb-conduits-and-gatekeepers.pdf