The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 21 to 35.
IRC19 - Proposed Session - #AyushmanBhavah
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah
<b>Details of a session proposed by Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4>Session Plan</h4>
<p>One of the earliest known forms of organised administrative list making in the modern history began with the census. Undeniably, from collection of taxes to understanding power dynamics of a diverse population, lists determine the administrative chain of command, from an era of data documentation to the brand new world of big data. Recently, we have been witnessing the increase in the volume of data and constant formulation of new techniques of list making. However, considering lists as a new infrastructure of knowledge, it is highly important to understand, study and scrutinize their legitimacy, politics, political and cultural economy, authority they fall under, and most importantly their targets.</p>
<p>Indian healthcare is a convoluted administration. There is a need for the healthcare system to effectively permeate into the lowest rungs of society, thereby replacing the existent maladroit structure. This session takes Ayushman Bharat – a Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), as an admirable example which is based on a foundation of a series of lists, prepared for an administrative apparatus, in this case, the public health sector. However, not all reviews of this policy have been favourable to the cause, and the effectiveness to address health at all the primary, secondary and tertiary levels have oftentimes been met with crude skepticism and sardonic critiques. According to Young, a list is not just an organised and processed data, but it is also recorder of a data format that has multiple meaningful relations within its content while also being a window to the economy of selection and exclusion criteria adopted by societies in favour of “the social action it facilitates”. Currently being a crucial policy that involves serious list-making procedures on a large population of India, the need to scrutinize the cultural techniques behind list-making for Ayushman Bharat cannot be unseen.</p>
<p>Lists and network primarily serve in ways twain: the concept might be looked at as a network of information that is systemized to answer the epistemological questions asked by organizations. Additionally, networks clarify the mechanics of progression of an organization by proclivity of head-points. The holistic performance of any organization run by data depends on how well data is predisposed, which is why careful architecture of lists is absolutely essential. For Ayushman Bharat, the creation of lists does not find a pragmatic foundation on which its mettle is rested. The question therefore remains, is the concept of list still a crucial component of the operational infrastructure of the computation and network proliferation of the much talked about universal healthcare system?</p>
<p>We aim to establish two sub-sessions (45 minutes each). In the first half, we aim to:</p>
<ol>
<li>Begin presenting the paper on Ayushman Bharat- how various lists heavily feature in India’s largest healthcare policy, the mechanisms by which it works and what output it yields, the financial interests of the corporates in Ayushman Bharat (insurance companies, private banks and hospitals, for-profit enterprises providing medical services in collaboration with private hospitals, etc), user expectations and consumer behaviour, the problems behind the policy execution, misutilisation and exploitation of political interest groups whether it be businesses, parties or influential individuals.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Discuss issues pertaining to the operations of Ayushman Bharat - how political groups take to social media platforms to disseminate their message, how there exists a wide communication gap intentionally placed to avoid retortion, how logical fallacies in and reasoning mismatches between the displayed progress and actual progress came into the picture, and how they can be removed, or even how the programme affects one’s political participation?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Present findings - research is mainly reliant on secondary material, with the exceptions of verbal interviews that we aim to conduct for our research purposes. These pre-recorded interviews are merely personal opinions of the interviewee that serve to gauge the impact of our narrative and emphasize (or mask) the thesis on which our research takes shape.</li></ol>
<p>We will accommodate a slideshow to describe our thesis with examples from social media accounts of the National Health Protection Scheme and National Health Agency. The second sub-session instead will be more open to interactions and critical appreciations.</p>
<p>The piece of work is an evidence of collaborative effort in an interdisciplinary space of social science – Economics and Media. Both the co-authors hail from different disciplines that need to intertwine in order to address the topic of choice: The whatabouts of Ayushman Bharat. As a result of our diversity, we plan to address our areas of specialization respectively. For the next half of the session, we plan to interact with our peers, thereby preparing a report on the key-takeaways and suggestions of ideas identified in the session.</p>
<h4>Session Team</h4>
<p><strong>Arya Lakshmi</strong> is a journalist and a media researcher. She has worked across India with various news media publications mostly covering politics. She completed her post graduation in Political Communication from Cardiff University, UK with her interests in Big Data, Internet and Electoral Behaviour. She is primarily involved in media research that revolves around internet and politics.</p>
<p><strong>Adrij Chakraborty</strong> is an economics researcher. He is currently an economic analyst with Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, University of Mumbai and is researching with the Government of Maharashtra on the agricultural practices and labour market behaviour in Maharashtra. He attended Edinburgh University as a graduate scholar with the Scottish Graduate Programme in Economics. His interests lie in economic policymaking in Labour Markets, Migration and Political Economics.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-26T13:09:41ZBlog EntryIRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions
<b>Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call" target="_blank">Call for Sessions</a></h4>
<hr />
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-ayushmanbhavah" target="_blank">#AyushmanBhavah</a> - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny" target="_blank">#ButItIsNotFunny</a> - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-callingoutandin" target="_blank">#CallingOutAndIn</a> - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-digitalplatformattributes" target="_blank">#DigitalPlatformAttributes</a> - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy" target="_blank">#EnlistingPrivacy</a> - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo" target="_blank">#FOMO</a> - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-legitlists" target="_blank">#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design</a> - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface" target="_blank">#ListInterface</a> - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase" target="_blank">#ListsAsDatabase</a> - Ria De and Samata Biswas</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-loshaandwhatfollowed" target="_blank">#LoSHAandWhatFollowed</a> - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting" target="_blank">#PowerListing</a> - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-socialmediationasgenderedjustice" target="_blank">#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice</a> - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan</h4>
<h4><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-storiesrecordslegendsrituals" target="_blank">#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals</a> - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh</h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroProposed SessionsInternet StudiesInternet Researcher's ConferenceIRC19Researchers at Work2018-11-28T15:40:58ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #WikiShadows (Techno-Political Contours of Knowledge Production on Wikipedia)
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-wikishadows
<b> This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>Wikipedia is a group project, and people in the group need to have separate pages to discuss changes and improvements to Wikipedia's content, be that an article, a policy, a help page, or something anything else. Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience. Sometimes reading Wikipedia can ruffle feathers.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>E.g. 1:</p>
<p>The song, Jana-gana-mana, composed originally in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, was adopted in its Hindi version by the Constituent Assembly as the National Anthem of India on January 24, 1950. It was first sung on December 27, 1911 at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress. [1]</p>
<p>Whereas Wikipedia entry of National anthem mentions thus:</p>
<p>"<em>Jana Gana Mana</em> is the national anthem of India. Written in highly Sanskritised (Tatsama) Bengali." [2]</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>E.g. 2:</p>
<p>Are these beautiful waterfalls on the Kaveri River located in Tamil Nadu – or on the border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka – or in Tamil Nadu on its border with Karnataka? Or is it really the Cauvery river, and Hogenakal Falls? [3]</p>
<p><em>Whatever you believe, be sure to bring a (Google) map to the debate, and point out that your opponent's sources are not RS or NPOV!</em></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>E.g. 3:</p>
<p>Born of Serbian parents in a part of the Austrian Empire, which a short time later became a part of the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary and is now in Croatia. He eventually became a naturalized citizen of the US. [4]</p>
<p><em>So was he Serbian? Croatian? Austrian? Austro-Hungarian? Istro-Romanian? Jewish? American? Martian? You decide! But don't forget to leave an edit summary saying how pathetic it is to choose any other version. (Guess who are we talking about?) Clue: He is inventor par excellence.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this day and age where information is often a touch and go process, a forgotten mode, a solitary quest towards creating knowledge sounds romantic (almost). Networked collaborations (such as Wikipedia) which have created Knowledge sites have led to democratic interpretation and assimilation of such knowledge. They also as a basic necessity have sprung up various modes of annotation, verifiability of the Knowledge thus produced and utility quotient of the same. After all, why create and hold on to information that no body really cares about.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>In this discussion session, the co-leaders of the session shall attempt to peel out the benign face of the visible Wikipedia page(there is a hidden world out there) and discuss the political, technological and social contours of information available on Wikipedia. We shall take the participants through the various stages of discussion about a Wikipedia page and how discussions tend to alter the course of an article. How false consensus is proposed, consent is manufactured and how these efforts are usually defeated by 'Answer People' and 'Vandal Fighters'. It is no less of a war than the one between information and mis-information. The discussion on, calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."</p>
<p>This discussion session brings to the table questions of legitimisation of knowledge and the inherent hierarchies that operate even within open networks of collaboration and offers a critique on consumption oriented knowledge production. The session also aims to ask questions around knowledge as an agent that has levelled some of the earlier existing contours but has introduced some of its own and how that has changed our usages and shapes our experiences.</p>
<p>The session will involve an edit-a-thon on a topic that will be selected by the co-leaders of the session and live commentary on the discussion pages will be tracked for further analysis. The session intends to build a dialogue towards attempting to problematise the questions of the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences that have played a significant role in production of knowledge in the era of new knowledge practices. The session also will question the 'best practices' in building consent in the present global techno-economic contours of the internet, and its effect on academic spaces, creative practice and intervention.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<ol><li> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_talk_pages">Using Talk Pages</a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page_guidelines">Talk page guidelines</a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Talk_pages">Tutorial on Wikipedia talk pages</a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_talk_pages/1">Introduction to talk pages</a></li><li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%237reader_Wikipedia.pdf">A Wikipedia Reader (pdf, 6.6 MB)</a><br /></li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-wikishadows'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-wikishadows</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T06:57:02ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #WebOfGenealogies
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-webofgenealogies
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ishita Tiwary, Sandeep Mertia, and Siddharth Narrain.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sessions</h2>
<p>The Internet today, as we know, is one of the most challenging socio-technical systems to understand and theorise. As a hybrid medium that perpetually, reinvents, redesigns and re-markets itself and its publics it defies all forms of historical, social, legal and technological determinisms and/or generalisations. The complex nature of the medium
and the social and cultural lives of the information packets which flow through it can perhaps be better understood by heeding critical attention towards longer histories of media circulation, technology-society relationships and legal regulations.</p>
<p>The panel attempts to understand the way digital technologies (the Internet/the current digital moment) mediate aspects of our contemporary being through the history of media circulation, legal regulation and data infrastructure. The papers in the panel focus on three crucial periods - the 1940s early history of statistical mediation, the 1980s video moment and the early 2000s advent of legal regulation of the Internet. Each of these moments is marked by socio-technical, cultural and legal disruption as seen through both moral anxieties and utopian claims that circulate at the time. The panel attempts to understand media technologies through their technological affordances (unpacking current debates around data analytics through a history of statistical mediation) and the social and legal disruptions that follow their advent (video in the 80s and the Internet in late 90s).</p>
<p>The papers in the panel approach the Internet and networked digital media as an assemblage of media infrastructures, bringing together both conceptual and material layers of their experience. The papers in this panel use a media archaeology approach (Elsaesser, 2004) to engage with the longer history of electronic communication in India by looking at both its material nature (how law produces the representation of digital
media and the Internet), and the history of non narrative framework of databases (the Internet as a massive data infrastructure) which have become increasingly diverse and distributed through a network of institutions, practices and technological platforms.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p><strong>Abstract I: 'What is Video?' Video and the Moment of Legal Disruption</strong></p>
<p>The advent of YouTube changed the way users interact with media content as now they are making videos, watching videos, editing them, sharing them and discussing them at a frantic speed, creating new communities as they go along (Manovich, 2008).</p>
<p>The YouTube phenomenon and its implications cannot be understood without contextualizing it within the broader history of video. In India, the Asiad Games heralded the arrival of analog video technology, although there was no legal producer of video content in the country. In a sense video was an illegal object that spawned a vibrant economy of video films, video magazines and pornography.</p>
<p>Video cassettes were primarily in the pirate economy and circulated all across the country through video libraries and parlours. New Bollywood and Hollywood releases as well as pornographic films were available on video cassettes which initially did not have any film certification regulation. The new mode of circulation made these video exhibition spaces a lynchpin of moral paranoia and economic anxiety for those in authority-video was like a plague that needed to be monitored and regulated. This led to a string of legal regulations to keep the ‘video menace’ in check. Associations, organizations and forums protested the new wave of regulations as it pitched the
medium of video against that of cinema, demanding new medium specific laws instead of amendments to previous laws on cinema.</p>
<p>In this paper, I will examine how the wave of regulations and contesting bodies creates a charged force field of the period that gives one a sense of a social, cultural and legal disruption caused by the arrival of a new technology. Particularly, I want to focus on how video as an illegal object circulates through informal circuits at a rapid pace and how the law deals with this new technological development. By looking at the example
of video, it would be productive to think about the resonances the extended genealogies of how the law is interacting with the current digital moment through the prism of analog video.</p>
<p><strong>Abstract II: Big Data 2.0 -- A History of Statistical Remediation</strong></p>
<p>One of the fast emerging themes in the understanding of the Internet is centred on its various technological affordances to generate, collect, measure, analyse, mine andvisualise data. With the recent (circa 2010) advent of the hype cycles of Big Data and data revolution, the socio-technical imaginaries which reveal the Internet as a massive data infrastructure have been gaining momentum. ‘Data’ which in many ways is an ontological byproduct of the Internet, is now increasingly becoming the object of thought and computation for understanding and analysing the Internet. This moment of flux invites us to reflect upon the genealogies of the concepts, techniques and practices which are consciously or otherwise informing the incredible epistemic investment in data-driven systems. With an aim to unpack some of the long histories of the contemporary data analytics movement and moment, this paper tries to trace some of the inflection points in the genealogies of analytics and statistical remediation in
colonial and post-colonial India, with an emphasis on the works of P C Mahalanobis and the statistical framing of planning and governance in the pre- and post-independence era.</p>
<p>The author will utilise ethnographic and archival material from his on-going fieldwork on emerging data-driven systems in the social sector in India, to reflect upon the shifts in materiality of data, classificatory affordances of paper and software based systems, and their epistemic implications across two different epochs. In addition, as a methodological reflection, the paper will argue that – developing lateral, conceptual connections between pre-digital circulations and meaning making of numbers and their contemporary algorithmic ecologies, is crucial for moving beyond causalities and the Big Data hubris, towards a thicker anthropology of data-driven knowledge production across times, infrastructures and networks.</p>
<p><strong>Abstract III: The History of Internet Law in India</strong></p>
<p>The relationship between law and media technology in India has been broadly characterized as the law catching up with technological change. To unpack this statement, one needs to take into account how the law both shapes and is shaped by media technologies. As the law ‘catches up’ with new technology, it also characterizes this technology, brackets it, and helps reinforce popular perception of technology. This paper will examine the early history of Internet law in India, the debates that arose in the pre web 2.0 era, and the ways in which a wide variety of factors, over a period of 15 years, has gradually shaped the scope and extent of the law that governs the Internet,
the Information Technology Act (IT), 2000.</p>
<p>The IT Act, being relatively recent legislation is an ideal illustration to study the manner in which government policy, public perception, judicial pronouncements, parliamentary committee proceedings, legislative debates, and rapidly changing technology have influenced the shaping of this specific media infrastructure. By examining these
documents I would like to open up a series questions around law and media technology How is the relationship between law and media technology staged through public discourse? What are the ways in which both the extremes – utopian hope and moral panic play out, and how are these then related to the more functional aspects of
technology? Who were the major actors, individuals and institutions, who drove Internet law and regulation at this time?</p>
<p>By addressing these questions, this paper seeks to examine a small slice of the longer history of electronic communication in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Lovink, Geert and Nadiere, Sabine ed. Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.</p>
<p>Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, Introduction, Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Edited by Lisa Gitelman. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2013.</p>
<p>Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Full text of judgement available at <a href="http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf" target="_blank">http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-webofgenealogies'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-webofgenealogies</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:07:18ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #UnconfiedArchivesUnboundHistories
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-unconfiedarchivesunboundhistories
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Kausik Bandopadhyay and Sugata Nandi.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>The archive as we know it today was an official invention of the nineteenth century. It was taken to be a repository of information which aided and validated the creation of a new specialized scientific knowledge called
History. With the archive was born was official histories. Being constituted of official documents the archive served official objectives. The professional historian born with the archive was a practitioner of a new science of the state, who produced knowledge verifiable at the archive. In the nineteenth century the archive served imperialist objectives, from the mid twentieth century it catered to states which emerged from erstwhile
colonies and continued to serve official interests while producing histories which often rendered the earlier histories into mere cultural artifacts of a bygone age devoid of scholarly value. Through this period
historians remained bound to archives which granted them access and they were compelled to narrowly demarcate territories. i.e. states, provinces within them or even smaller areas like a city or a village, which were to
become their subjects. With the coming of the Internet the archive is now taking on a new meaning altogether as it no longer confined spatially. With the easy availability of technology for creation and preservation of documents and their public accessibility , the archive is being constituted and re-constituted continuously. As it is no longer bound down by statist objectives alone the questions come up: a) are we in the threshold of the demise of official histories? And, b) has time come for de-territorialization of histories altogether?</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
Abstracts of three hundred words are invited which critically assess the archive today from this perspective and its implications for history writing taking into consideration three works on archives.
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Michel Foucault, <em>The Archeology of Knowledge (Part III, the Statement and the Archive)</em>, 1972</p>
<p>Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression", <em>Diacritics</em>, 25, 2, Summer 1995</p>
<p>Ann Laura Stoler, <em>Along the Archival Grain</em>, 2009.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-unconfiedarchivesunboundhistories'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-unconfiedarchivesunboundhistories</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:16:34ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #STSDebates (Science, Technology, and State Debates)
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-stsdebates
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>The proposed workshop session is motivated by an interest in historicising contemporary debates on the state's role in development of science and technology in India, and the adoption of both into the processes of government and statecraft. From the DNA Bill to the Digital India initiative, we are experiencing a state that takes science and technology seriously, perhaps a little too seriously.</p>
<p>The debate on state-led organisation of science and technology began in earnest in late-imperial India. The National Institute of Sciences of India met in Calcutta during WWII (1943) to discuss the following questions: “what should be the organisational model for science and technology adopted for post-war and independent India; and how should India benefit from the Commonwealth structure?” In his report at the end of the visit the following year, Archibald Vivian Hill, British physiologist and Secretary of the Royal Society, suggested centralised state-led organisation of science and engineering research as the way forward in India. The debate continues to date.</p>
<p>More recently, especially since 1991, the Indian state has entered into multiple forms of relationships with the science and technology establishments in the country, both public and private. Centralised support for science, technology, and innovation is distributed through various channels that range from regulated oligopolistic markets, to public-private partnerships in fundamental and applied research, to strict governmental control over primary means of communication.</p>
<p>This session is interested in situating present day controversies around the state and internet in India within a historiography of science, technology, and state in India.</p>
<p>Sources on these debates are not readily available in a structured format for direct analysis or visualisation. The session, therefore, plans to make use of the diverse group of participants at the Internet Researchers' Conference to start developing an open data set to understand the key topics, positions taken by the Indian state, institutions, persons, policy directives and statements, and objects involved across the science and technology debates in twentieth century India.</p>
<p>We hope to achieve two goals with this session: 1) to begin to address the challenge of conceptualising contemporary discussions about the internet in a historical frame, and equally, 2) to rethink methods of representing and mapping debates and its components, when the sources are not found readily in digital form.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>The key methodological difficulty faced by this session is that lack of structured data and sources on the topic of science, technology, and state debates in India. Most, if not all, tools and methods of issue, debate, or controversy mapping have dealt with forms of discussions and materials that is either taking place over digital media (for example, social media platforms), or is already made available in a digital format (for example, digitised books). These tools have often developed to address the unique issue mapping challenges and opportunities emerging with the distributed, and often real-time, discussions taking place over the internet (See: <a href="http://www.issuemapping.net/Main/WebHome" target="_blank">http://www.issuemapping.net/Main/WebHome</a>).</p>
<p>In this session, however, we are interested in debates both after and before internet became a commonplace technology in India. Our energies are focused on generating a data set on debates on topics of science, technology, and the state in twentieth century India, which is 1) structured, so that it can utilised for various kinds of analysis and visualisation, 2) expandable, so that we can continue to add information, and 3) open, so that it can be modified and used by other researchers.</p>
<p>The workshop will begin with a quick overview of science and technology projects by the Indian state in the last century. We will be attentive to the vocabulary of the imaginaries within which these projects were proposed.</p>
<p>The participants will be divided into groups, each focusing on one thematic area of science and technology debates (for example agriculture, space, and biotechnology)). Each group will use a spreadsheet software (say, Libre Calc or Microsoft Excel) to document the key aspects of the debates concerned along the following categories: 1) fundamental question of the debate, 2) position taken by the state, 3) institutions involved, 4) persons involved, and 5) objects involved.</p>
<p>This documentation will be done using a pre-designed schema so that the resultant data can be combined and visualised to test the robustness and feasibility of the project.</p>
<p>The final 30 minutes of the session will be kept for combining all collected data, visualising it, and doing some initial exploration of the linkages foregrounded by the gathered data.</p>
<p>We will use RAW, developed by Density Design, and possibly Google Charts library to create the preliminary visualisations.</p>
<p>All collected data, along with documentation of the data creation process, will be published under open standard and license with appropriate credit attribution.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Caroll, Patrick. 2006. “Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation: Theory and Analysis.” In Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. 11-27. <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10533.ch01.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10533.ch01.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Density Design. RAW. <a href="http://raw.densitydesign.org/" target="_blank">http://raw.densitydesign.org/</a>.</p>
<p>Marres, Noortje. 2015. “Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. 40(5). 655-686. <a href="http://sth.sagepub.com/content/40/5/655.full.pdf+html" target="_blank">http://sth.sagepub.com/content/40/5/655.full.pdf+html</a>.</p>
<p>Phalkey, Jahnavi. 2013. “Introduction: Science, History and Modern India.” Isis. 104. June. <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950" target="_blank">http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-stsdebates'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-stsdebates</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:08:58ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #SpottingData
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-spottingdata
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>The proposed workshop will focus on internet usage in India and the possibilities that the internet offers for representation of data. The workshop will be divided into two parts, the first, of a more general nature, and the second, will focus on one specific aspect of data—representation. While the first part will be more of a documentation exercise, the second part will be a hands-on exercise of some data representation tools that are available on the internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p><strong>Part I: The Nature of Internet Usage in India</strong></p>
<p>The workshop will engage the participants in trying to map the ways that they use the internet in their daily lives, such as circulating emails, using social networks, downloading software, online commerce, academic research, circulating audio and video, etc. This part of the workshop will try to study ‘the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the [internet] in India’. The study will try to distinguish between those who are consumers of data and systems and those who, in addition to consuming, also produce data and systems. Various types of production of data will also be looked at, such as crowdsourcing data (such as in Wikipedia, or restaurant review or hotel review websites).</p>
<p>The workshop will be conducted in an interactive manner, where the participants will enter their responses in an online collaborative platform (Google Sheets), which will be editable by all the participants. This brief documentation exercise will also be used to prepare a report at the end of the conference.</p>
<p>After completing this exercise of mapping the usage of the internet, the second segment of the workshop will try to explore various ways of representing data. This exercise will be done by using tools available online.</p>
<p><strong>Part II: Representation of Data</strong></p>
<p>This part of the workshop will deal with various kinds of data representation, of various kinds of data that users contribute to the internet through websites, such as social networks, blogs, etc. The workshop will try to look at the various existing ways in visualising and representing such data through the internet, such as chronology timelines, location mapping, network mapping, enhanced text representation such as through display of XML-Text Encoding Initiative (XML-TEI) files, etc. so as to enhance the data and open up other aspects of the data not usually evident in forms such as lists and spreadsheets.</p>
<p>The participants will be led through to the creation of small <strong>chronology timelines</strong> and <strong>location mapping</strong> in particular. Therefore participants will be requested to contribute data in the form of simple and small English texts which have either several markers of time, or several markers of location, so as to enable such visualisation. Examples of such texts include biographies, travel narratives, etc. The workshop will discuss how to filter ‘structured data’ from prose text to get desirable result from the softwares.</p>
<p>This part of the workshop will try to answer the question as to ‘how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?’ The workshop will use open-access tools and software so as to highlight the low-investment infrastructure that is often sufficient enough to represent and enhance data.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Participants are requested to look at two visualisation tools in particular (both of which were developed by the Knight Lab in Northwestern University, USA), one for creating a chronology timeline (<a href="https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/timelinejs" target="_blank">https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/timelinejs</a>) and the other for creating a location map (<a href="https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/storymapjs" target="_blank">https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/storymapjs</a>).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-spottingdata'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-spottingdata</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:11:12ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #SmartThings (Conceptualizing Internet/Digital Technologies in the Age of "Smartness")
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-smartthings
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ravi Shukla and Bharath Palavalli.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>With the increasing focus on making things - devices, services, cities, even planets - smart, there is a need to engage with the idea of smartness. What constitutes it? Who decides? Is there a need to re-conceptualize our understanding of these increasingly pervasive technologies and if so, how do we begin to do so?</p>
<p>The session engages with two inter-related questions - a) What constitutes a smart city? and b) How can we approach internet/digital technologies as enablers of basic, urban public services?</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>The session is broken up into three sections of half an hour each.</p>
<p><strong>Content Overview</strong></p>
<p>The first section involves the presentation of the findings of a survey across different social groups of what constitutes a "smart city". This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.</p>
<p>The second section involves presenting the findings of a pilot project using SMS technology as an enabler for public services within a community. This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.</p>
<p>The third section involves asking people in the audience to list 5 characteristics that constitute (or in some cases, *don't* constitute) public services in a "smart" city. Depending on the size of the audience, either these responses can be collected individually or it can be broken into groups of 3-5 people. The responses are then collected and shared with the audience - either during the session (if time allows) or over email/website.</p>
<p><strong>Expected Outcomes</strong></p>
<p>At the end of the session we expect a set of responses on what characterizes public services in a "smart" city. These are seen as helping in drawing out a research/practice agenda on how internet/digital technologies may act as enablers of public services.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>None.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-smartthings'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-smartthings</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T06:59:58ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #PoliticsOnSocialMedia
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-politicsonsocialmedia
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dr. Rinku Lamba and Dr. Rajarshi Dasgupta, with Dr. Mohinder Singh, Professor Valerian Rodrigues and Professor Shefali Jha as co-members.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>Indian politics had witnessed the entry of new social movements in the 1970s, adding a whole set of new issues, actors, and ways of activism to the older nationalist tradition. We suggest a similar change is now taking place, as different ways of governance and interventions aided by latest technologies are emerging in the social media. Websites, blogs, tweets, emails and online petitions are creating a new virtual space for politics, through information, propaganda, debates, appeals and mobilizations.</p>
<p>The proposed session will discuss this emerging field of power, critically considering its democratic potential and interrogating the political issues and ideas at stake in it. The aim is to tackle the new forms of civic and
public-political engagements witnessed in the domain of social media, and analyze their implications for the theory and practice of democracy. In the process our papers would explore conceptual notions such as agency, political act and participation as well as notions of selfhood and subjectivity.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>We will present four papers, with a question-answer and discussion session at the end. The papers will be addressing broadly three kinds of concerns.</p>
<ul><li>The first concern is to identify novel understandings of the political and political acts in the social media. We ask the following questions in this regard: What are the political issues and ideas at stake and how do they affect conventional understandings of democracy? Who are the new actors outside the fray of party-centered politics and how do they see what is political in the acts of internet-users? How are political institutions including parties reacting to the phenomena?<br /><br /></li>
<li>The second concern relates to probing the new forms of political subjectivity that are emerging in this process. The questions here include: What kind of political actor is getting shaped by the forms of political participation engendered by the social media? How does the virtual nature of practice impact on questions of location and identity as determinants of political membership and political action? Is this nature of virtual participation too fluid for the state to control?<br /><br /></li>
<li>The third concern relates to the forms of exclusion and inclusion that virtual participation entails. This involves questions like: What kind of social capital is necessary for talking part in the process and does it cut across cultural and economic divisions? What kinds of interest drive the social media? How does it shape the meaning of political concepts like representation and rights, accountability and political agency?</li></ul>
<p>It is likely that we will raise more questions than we can answer at this point. However, we think it is important to raise them all the more in keeping with the questions that make up the focus of the conference,
especially, the first question of how do we conceptualize, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>None.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-politicsonsocialmedia'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-politicsonsocialmedia</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T06:51:03ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #MinimalComputing
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-minimalcomputing
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>The triumphal mythic narrative of India’s relatively high and rapid rates of Internet penetration is underpinned by the country’s access to data via mobile devices. The black box proprietary technology of the iPhone, or the less explicitly restrictive nexus (pun unintended) between the Android OS with device manufacturers, has meant we have large swathes of technology users whose only encounter with online content has been via these closed ecosystems.
Minimal computing is both an intellectual intention and pragmatic response that seeks to disrupt these systems by subverting existing frameworks and creating new infrastructures, acknowledging the ground realities that exist in India, such as lack of resources and access. This position essentially privileges “ease of use, ease of creation, increased access and reductions in computing—and by extension, electricity” (Gil). The intention of this workshop is to explore, discover, discuss and build resources that observe these tenets, under different heads, such as physical computing, archives, interface, database.</p>
<p>One of the obvious outcomes of the growth of digital technology in the region is the increasing intersection with the scholarly record – be that a theorizing of these new contexts, as is the case at this conference, or in the building of dissemination tools for memory institutions or academic scholarship. As such scholarship (which would be considered under the rubric of the digital humanities) is still in its early stages, it is incumbent upon us to set an example for other scholars when we build these resources; fast to load, easy to build and administer, which can function in low-bandwidth areas – especially as we embark on larger scale projects that are now possible through advances in digitization of different forms of content, as well as of Indic language character sets.
Uses of technology in India are often anarchic, and the digital is constantly imbricated with the analogue and these grassroots, informal practices could usefully inform scholarship in this area, and possibly be transposed to other similar environments, such as those found in the global south.</p>
<p>The other crucial exploration that will be undertaken in this workshop will be how to use guerilla computing and other methods to safeguard our fundamental human rights both online and offline, strategies increasingly essential in a country where censorship against individuals and misuse of personal data is rapidly on the rise. The online citizen must be encouraged to think about the virtual space in which s/he works and plays, and learn how to navigate it responsibly, by being alert to the dangers of the networked world being overly regulated, and this workshop will also discuss surveillance and collection of personal data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers, and how to circumvent it using relatively simple methods.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>At the outset of the workshop, participants will be introduced by the co-leaders to some examples and concepts in #minimalcomputing, and then to a range of tools and resources such as Markdown, Jekyll, Pan.do/ra, Pandoc etc., as well as simple encrypting methods. Participants will also be encouraged to share examples of good practice that they might have encountered in their own contexts.</p>
<p>Participants will then be asked to consider a digital project that they might be in the process of building, or envisioning, or to reflect on their personal digital footprint and be facilitated by the co-leaders on how to rebuild and reimagine these using a minimal computing perspective, and to document these ideas so they might be shared with the rest of the group, and promote more discussion.</p>
<p>The aim of the workshop is to draw upon collective expertise to create a handbook of sustainable, scalable resources that can be created without over reliance on third party infrastructures, in order to retain agency over projects initiatives and digital identities; and provide a roadmap for an alternative Internet that meets the needs of users in both personal and professional contexts.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Budish, Ryan and West, Sarah Myers and Gasser, Urs. Designing Successful Governance Groups: Lessons for Leaders from Real-World Examples (August 2015). Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2015-11. Available at SSRN: <a href="http://ssrn.com/abstract=2638006" target="_blank">http://ssrn.com/abstract=2638006</a>.</p>
<p><em>This reading sets out how an effective multistakeholder governance group might be structured, convened and operate and its stated values of inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and effectiveness might serve as a useful guide to how we might envision a #minimalcomputing community.</em></p>
<p>Gil, Alex. The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make. Minimal Computing website. (May 2015). Available at: <a href="https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/">https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/</a>.</p>
<p><em>This reading sets out some of the underlying concepts of #minimalcomputing and raises important questions that might be flagged up for discussion during the workshop.</em></p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/xpmethod/dhnotes/">https://github.com/xpmethod/dhnotes/</a></p>
<p><em>A growing resource for relevant material and information on #minimalcomputing – start here.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-minimalcomputing'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-minimalcomputing</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T06:57:20ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #ManyPublicsOfInternet
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-manypublicsofinternet
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Sailen Routray and Khetrimayum Monish.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>The discussion in this session will focus on the cultures of practices around digital / information networks. The objective would be to open up the understanding around notions of identity and rights in the context of governance on one hand, and the proliferation of various subcultures on the other. The objective is to try and understand the political and cultural imaginations 'of and as the public' enabled by internet and digital technologies. In this, we are trying to connect the whole discussion to the first two questions the conference focuses on:</p>
<ul>
<li>How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?<br /><br /></li>
<li>How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>Each discussant will present for 20 minutes after which the session will be thrown open for discussion amongst all the participants of the session.</p>
<p><strong>Abstract I</strong></p>
<p>Internet in India has led to the proliferation of practices and notions of governance and citizenship simulated by information networks and data. On one hand, the internet has captured the imagination of citizens and the reassertion of user agency; on the other, the experiences with the internet reflects the new ways of how the state imagines itself and the citizens. Hence, not only a critical mass replete with the possibilities of user agency, but also one aggregated by the state as part of a political project. Initiatives such as Digital India, the Aadhar project, rural internet and increased emphasis on mobile internet services are some of ways through which the logic of access and participation now operates. The paper will draw perspectives from four case studies in Assam - the
Mahanagar Project (internet and mobile services), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) update, the Aadhaar Project and rural internet kiosks (Common Service Centers). With these, it focuses on the larger context of the cultures of digital practices; and techno-politics through the various sites and projects through which the internet operates in India.</p>
<p><strong>Abstract II</strong></p>
<p>Those of us who have jumped or meandered across to the wrong (or perhaps the right) side of thirty by now, first came to consume internet in what were called, and are still called, cyber cafes or internet cafes. Their numbers in big Indian cities is dwindling because of the increasing ubiquity of smartphone, and netbooks and data cards. The cyber café seems to be inexorably headed the way of the STD booth in the geography of large Indian cities. The present paper is a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experience of running and using internet cafes. With ethnographic fieldwork with cyber café owners and internet users in these cafes in the Chandrasekharpur area of
Bhubaneswar (where the largest section of the computer industry in the state of Odisha is located), this paper tries to capture experiences that lie at the interstices of ‘objects’ and spaces - experiences that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city. By doing so it tries to ask and answer the question - what kinds of publics does the consumption of the internet in spaces such as cybercafes create?</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Escobar, Arturo, et al. 1994. Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture [and Comments and Reply]. <em>Current Anthropology</em>. 35(3): 211-231.</p>
<p>Nayar, Pramod K. 2008. New Media, Digitextuality and Public Space: Reading "Cybermohalla". <em>Postcolonial Text</em>. 4(1):1-12.</p>
<p>Kurian, Renee and Isha Ray. 2009. Outsourcing the State? Public–Private Partnerships and Information Technologies in India. <em>World Development</em>. 37(10): 1163-1173.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-manypublicsofinternet'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-manypublicsofinternet</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:06:54ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #LiterarySpaces (Online Literary Spaces in India)
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-literaryspaces
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>The last decade has seen a slow but steady emergence of online literary spaces in India, marked by the ubiquitous nature of the internet and digital technologies, growing mobile phone penetration and increased access to devices such as tablets and e-readers. By literary spaces we refer to online journals, magazines and blogs, as well as reading groups and discussion spaces focused on writing in English and Indian languages. These range from those exclusively focusing on contemporary literature to others that feature writing on news, culture and arts. These spaces raise some intriguing questions about the growth a new online or digital literary culture, which may be mapped through the evolution of reading and writing practices as very explicitly technologized practices, and the changes in the notion of text and textuality, scholarship and pedagogy, among other things.</p>
<p>Some examples of such spaces that have come up in the recent years are <em>The Little Magazine</em> <strong>[1]</strong>, <em>Muse India</em> <strong>[2]</strong>, <em>Kritya</em> <strong>[3]</strong>, <em>Coldnoon: Travel Poetics</em> <strong>[4]</strong>, <em>Kindle</em> <strong>[5]</strong>, <em>Almost Island</em> <strong>[6]</strong>, <em>The Indian Quarterly</em> <strong>[7]</strong> and among several others. Many of these journals have both an online and print presence, while some are purely online and seek to reach a diverse audience featuring different genres of writing. While many carry an eclectic mix of creative and critical writing, perceptions about readership on the internet often dictate the form and manner of writing that is featured. The much anticipated and debated ‘disappearance’ of long form writing is one of the questions that may be asked of the emergence of these literary journals, which have in some way re-imagined this form in the digital sphere and have been instrumental in its growth. So even as there are books on twitterature <strong>[8]</strong>, there are interesting ways in which online literary journals have tried to define the space of contemporary writing on the internet in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>This panel discussion proposes to examine this phenomenon of the growth of online literary journals to understand the imagination of the ‘digital’ in their practices of writing and publication, whether as medium, content or context, as a way to explore how writing and reading practices today have been shaped by these changes. This also includes questions on methods of literary analysis that may have changed with the advent of the digital, and from a broader perspective, the production of literary scholarship and pedagogy in India. Some questions that could be points of discussion are as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>What is the pedagogical role, if any of digital/online journals? Are they simply cost-effective modes of production of knowledge or are they indicative of some other form discrimination? Perhaps a discrimination between what gets read and what does not? Is a voluminous archive of nineteenth century writings of the same pedagogical merit as a list of 100 Hollywood romantic comedies? If the former is arguably much more educational, why then is the latter the source of the greatest traffic? Is pedagogy then a misnomer, and a non-entity in the world of online magazines?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Can the rise of online magazines be related with the rise of print culture and the subsequent rise of the novel? The novel was educational and, while English was still a very evolving language in the 17th and 18th centuries, the form helped both shape the language and educate the masses, bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy about the nuances of the still-nascent English language. Can a similar function be said to have been fulfilled by online journals? Or have they failed in playing this radical role of disseminating new language and new vocabulary, which is required to articulate new modes and conflicts within modernity--sexualities, queerness, televised elections, middle-eastern (Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi) mayhem in times of democracy, globalization, urbanization, travel, genocide, partition, terrorism, and so on? Are there any exceptions among the journals in being able to somehow fulfil the criteria of engendering a new language? What are the examples, if any? How popular are they?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Is online literature less literary than print? Is it more amenable to news, while print continues to be literary? Or is this only a misconception? Is online literature prone to non-serious, or populist sources of pedagogy, which serve more to titillate through trolling, humour, half-baked information, gossip, or is it playing a serious role too in portions? Apart from those newspapers and journals/magazines which also have print components, which are possibly the portals that create viable, meritorious, and universal categories of knowledge? Or, invocation of 'merit' and 'universal' essentially a flawed mechanism to judge online literatures?</li></ol>
<p>Addressing some of above questions through a study of two or more online journals, this session will attempt to open them up to a broader discussion on the nature and growth of an online literary culture in India, and the need for and significance of research in this area.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>None.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.littlemag.com/" target="_blank">http://www.littlemag.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.museindia.com/" target="_blank">http://www.museindia.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.kritya.in/" target="_blank">http://www.kritya.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://coldnoon.com/" target="_blank">http://coldnoon.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://kindlemag.in/" target="_blank">http://kindlemag.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://almostisland.com/" target="_blank">http://almostisland.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://indianquarterly.com/" target="_blank">http://indianquarterly.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307055/twitterature-by-alexander-aciman/9780143117322/" target="_blank">http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307055/twitterature-by-alexander-aciman/9780143117322/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-literaryspaces'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-literaryspaces</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T06:59:25ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #KnowledgeCommunity (Computing, Community and Knowledge Production: Problems and Prospects)
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-knowledgecommunity
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ravikant.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>Our session will approach the history of digital knowledge production and dissemination in India from the standpoint of community-oriented experiments and practices in tool making and resource-sharing in the vernacular domain, mainly Hindi. It will attempt to demonstrate that Hindi public domain represents a depth and diversity that is normally not visible to the monolingually-trained, English-only mode of cognition. We wish to argue that the diversity of content is symptomatic of a culture of deeply-ingrained culture of sharing in South Asia. Free software movement, especially its localisation units, Wikipedia and Web 2.0 platforms in general have played a stellar role in handing us the tools of creation, consumption and sharing beyond scripts. But the full potential of how much we can produce and share has not been realised.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>We will try and present successful and unsuccessful cases in order to understand why certian efforts worked and not others, and try and suggest a few possible strategies of creative engagement with bhasha communities in general.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>None.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-knowledgecommunity'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-knowledgecommunity</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T06:54:54ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #InternetMovements
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-internetmovements
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Becca Savory, Sarah McKeever, and Shaunak Sen.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>Since its early days the Internet has been conceived in terms of both movement and landscape - from “cyberspace” to the “Information Superhighway” - and in popular perception is often viewed as a boundless space imagined in terms of limitless possibilities. Indeed, across our research fields, from digital media to performance and social activism, we find that the Internet is frequently perceived as a space of mobilisation: where moving bodies are
remediated within online content; where the movement of images, ideas and bodies can occur freely, with the rapid transmission of the “viral”; and where movement(s) frequently spill over into physical geographies.</p>
<p>Yet increasingly the Internet is also a space of fractured and fragmented movement(s): of blockages and blockades, discontinuities and disappearances. Landscapes become territorialized and movement(s) confined or obstructed. On this basis, we propose an interdisciplinary discussion session around the theme of
"#InternetMovement(s)". We ask how we can conceive of movement(s) in relation to the Internet in India, in terms of both mobility and immobility, fissure and flow.</p>
<p>To encourage fluidity, we propose to structure the session around three "nodes" rather than three separate research papers. Our nodes are as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>How can we conceive of movement(s) in relation to Internet research in India?</li>
<li>What are the forms that movement(s) take in our respective fields?</li>
<li>What "stop" or blocks" movement in these cases?</li></ol>
<p>The three co-conveners will each prepare a 5-minute response to each of these nodes, based on our specific areas of research. At each nodal point we will then allow time for wider discussion, enabling inter-disciplinary discussion and flow to underpin the session.</p>
<p>We perceive the session to speak to the first of the conference’s core questions: “How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?”</p>
<p>Each of the three co-convenors is approaching this question in their own research, asking how online media and communications mediate, remediate and transform the fields of film-media, social activism, and performance. We also ask the corollary: what are the limits and impediments to those transformations or mediations? The following section outlines the co-convenors’ approaches in more detail.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p><strong>Statement of Intent I</strong></p>
<p>The internet increasingly impresses traces on nearly all media technologies everyday. The once stable film body, gets disaggregated into various new forms of loop videos, GIFS, photo-memes, as clips and stills from disparate films get extracted, re-edited, patched and re-moulded into new user-generated media material. Solitary moments and gestures from films (a menacing wink by Jack Nicholson from The Shining, a clap from Charles Kane, a tear from the Tin-Man in The Wizard of Oz) get completely unchained from the original narrative context and used as discrete independent communicative units (Kane’s a popular Birthday wish gesture, while Nicholson’s Is a common linguistic unit signifying playful flirtation.) One of the primary ontological pegs of cinema - movement, today becomes the center of urgent debate around the status of photographs, movement-image forms like GIFs, and traditional moving images as the basic configuring elements of contemporary cinema. Using the film-GIF form as its primary vector this paper opens up the category of ‘movement’ philosophically as well as a constituent form to understand cinema today within the context of India.</p>
<p>As the cinematic object disperses into thousands of fragments hurtling through innumerable new online contexts, questions related to stardom also get radically transformed. I will be investigating a particular site of cinematic re-instansiation - the recent Alok Nath meme phenomenon. Long relegated to the margins of films as the venerable Hindu middle class father, the ‘’Alok Nath is so sanskaari..’’ set off a viral maelstrom that suddenly recast his cinematic body and the memory of a whole host of films (the Suraj Barjatya Hindu joint-family films). The paper focus on questions around movement as a philosophical arena as well as radical new form re-inscribing the cinematic in hitherto unprecedented shapes today.</p>
<p><strong>Statement of Intent II</strong></p>
<p>An examination of social movements with digital components in India begs several questions: What forms do social movements take in the digital world? How do we conceptualise social movements using digital and physical evidence? How does the context of India – as a functioning democracy - allow or restrict digital and physical social movements and define what is an “acceptable” protest movement? Engaging with these questions demands an interdisciplinary perspective, and exploring the interplays between the physical and the digital in regard to social issue protest movements.</p>
<p>Movement in my particular research area is understood in two aspects: the physical mobilisation of individuals to protest against perceived grievances and the movement of information around specific issue areas. The physical movement of bodies in public places is intimately connected to flow of information throughout digital networks, generating entangled and complex interfaces between the digital and the physical and creating new imagined
possibilities of the efficacy of social protest (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012). Examining recent social movements in New Delhi allows us to explore the linkages and disjuncture between the physical and digital, using theoretical developments in social movement theory to anchor the study (Earl, Hunt, and Garrett 2014; Krinsky and Crossley 2014).</p>
<p>Examining the repercussions and strategies of physical/digital mobilisation can lead to a confrontation between the “imagined” possibilities of digital mobilisation and the realities of technological and physical blockages. These blockages can exist at the level of the network – both in digital and physical limitations – but also at the level of digital informational flow and who is allowed to view data? Confronting the “imagined” capabilities with the reality of entrenched power networks contests the notion of the digital as a free superhighway of information into a series of blocks and stoppages, restricting what is possible and feasible. By exploring question of movement(s) in New Delhi, I will explore the disjuncture between the imagined possibilities and the restriction of information – by nature of the algorithms that govern our capabilities and our own social networks – and complicate the triumphal narrative of the affordances of digital mediums on protest movements.</p>
<p><em>References</em></p>
<p>Castells, M. (2012) Networks of Outrage and Networks of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press</p>
<p>Earl, J., Hunt, J., and Kelly Garrett, R. (2014) ‘Social Movements and the ICT Revolution’ in van der Heijden (Ed.) <em>Handbook of Political Citizenship and Social Movements</em>, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pgs. 359-383</p>
<p>Gerbaudo, P. (2012) <em>Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism</em>, London: Pluto Press</p>
<p>Krinsky, J. and Crossley, N. (2014) ‘Social Movements and Social Networks: An Introduction’, <em>Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest</em>, Vol. 13, No. 1. Pgs. 1-21</p>
<p><strong>Statement of Intent III</strong></p>
<p>My research centres on the recent history of flash mob performance in India and analyses the transformations that have taken place within the genre: firstly, as an initially American, then “global,” performance form becomes re-situated and adapted within an Indian context; and secondly, as the form has evolved over time in relation to the transitioning of the Internet from a predominantly text-based medium to a predominantly image- and video-based one (see Strangelove 2010).</p>
<p>In the field of flash mob performance, we see moving bodies becoming re-mediated as moving images, and mobilised into the flow of global circuits of online reception. My underlying concern when approaching this research is: who is mobile in these contexts? Who becomes visible through movement, and by extension, who may disappear in these
same moments?</p>
<p>I intend to approach this session by examining what is enacted through the movements of flash mob performance, focusing on the more recent phase of the genre in which flash mobs become mobilised through online video-sharing practices. I argue that they perform mediated representations of “New India” for an online national and international audience, valorising the new “non-places” (Augé 1992) of Indian supermodernity, through the acts of a
mobilised “digerati” (Keniston 2004). If we consider that performance can play a role in the construction of cultural memory (Roach 1996; Taylor 2003), and that the Internet as an archive can become a repository of performances and thus memories(Gehl 2009), I ask if online performance in these contexts may be seen as an aspect of the processes that structure a “politics of forgetting” (Fernandes 2006) in globalising India. Which narratives are rendered visible and which invisible through these performances? Who appears and who disappears? Movement on the Internet thus becomes a political question concerned with comparative mobilities, visibilities, and participation in the narratives of “India” that are constructed for global circulation.</p>
<p><em>References</em></p>
<p>Augé, M., 1992. <em>Non-places : introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity</em>. Translated by J. Howe. 1995. London & New York: Verso.</p>
<p>Fernandes, L., 2006. The politics of forgetting: class politics, state power and the restructuring of urban space in India. In Y. Lee and B.S.A. Yeoh eds., <em>Globalisation and the Politics of Forgetting</em>, London; New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Gehl, R., 2009. YouTube as archive: Who will curate this digital Wunderkammer? <em>International Journal of Cultural Studies</em>, 12(1), pp.43-60.</p>
<p>Keniston, K., 2004. Introduction: The four digital divides. In K. Keniston & D. Kumar eds., <em>IT experience in India: bridging the digital divide</em>, New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.</p>
<p>Roach, J.R., 1996. <em>Cities of the Dead: Circum-atlantic performance</em>. Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press.</p>
<p>Strangelove, M., 2010. <em>Watching YouTube: Extraordinary videos by ordinary people</em>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.</p>
<p>Taylor, D., 2003. <em>The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas</em>. USA: Duke University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>Noys, B. (2004) Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film. In <em>Film Philosophy</em> Vol. 8 no. 22. Available at: <a href="http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n22noys" target="_blank">http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n22noys</a>.</p>
<p>Couldry, N. (2015) ‘The Myth of ‘Us’: Digital Networks, Political Change and the Production of Collectivity’, <em>Information Communication and Society</em>, Vol. 18, No. 6. Pgs. 608-626 .</p>
<p>Appadurai, A., (2010) How histories make geographies: circulation and context in a global perspective. <em>Transcultural Studies</em>, 1. Availabile at: <a href="http://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/6129" target="_blank">http://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/6129</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-internetmovements'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-internetmovements</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:04:11ZBlog EntryIRC16 - Proposed Session - #FutureBazaars
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-futurebazaars
<b>This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Maitrayee Deka, Adam Arvidsson, Rohini Lakshané, and Ravi Sundaram.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session</h2>
<p>Up till now digital technologies have mostly served to create new markets opportunities for the large capitalist monopolies like Facebook, Apple and Google that dominate the global information economy. But what happens when the potential for disintermediation and market making that comes with digital technologies hit the bazaars for of the worlds 'other economy,' what Ravi Sundaram has called 'pirate modernity.' Indeed this is already happening in two inter-related ways.</p>
<p>First, the availability of cheap, copied or pirated digital goods like Shanzhai cell phones or pirated video games support a reinvigorated bazaar economy made up of small traders who eek out a living while providing informational goods to the broad popular market segments that large brands do not cater to. This is already an emerging phenomenon in India, Africa and large parts of South America, but similar forms of what Gordon Mathews and his colleagues call 'globalisation from below' are gaining an influence in Europe as well.</p>
<p>Second, the potential for disintermediation on the part of digital technologies like WhatsApp today and blockchain technologies in the near future provide a technical infrastructure for strengthening the organizational basis of such bottom-up markets and enable them to strengthen their standing vis-a-vis capitalist monopolies. Can the 'pirate economy' launch its own institution, its own capital markets and its own brands?</p>
<p>In this session we want to explore the future of bottom-up markets. What happens when traders on Delhi’s electronic bazaars can bypass middlemen connecting directly to their Chinese suppliers via WhatsApp; what happens when informal financial circuits like Hawala networks start operating blockchain technologies? Extrapolating from research on what is going on know we want to collectively imagine what the future might bring. What sort of economic social and, importantly political consequences might these changes bring about? How can we theorise this emergence and how does it challenge and force us to rethink basic categories like capitalism, markets and agency?</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Plan</h2>
<p>The sessions will start with presentations on traders in Delhi's pirate bazaars, blockchain and the democratization of financial markets, impact of mobile connectivity on business and family interaction, and relationship between peer-to-peer, pirate economies, and large media corporations within cultures of circulation. The presentation will be brief (about 20 mins.) and will serve to open up discussions and constitutions form workshop participants.</p>
<p>Discussions will be centred on:</p>
<ul>
<li>What are interesting areas of study in understanding how digital technologies are changing the balance of power in the digital economy in India?</li>
<li>What is the potential of digital technologies in relation to the mediation and transformation of bottom up economic processes in contemporary India?</li>
<li>What are the new forms of injustices and/or imbalances are arising form these transformations?</li>
<li>What is the political potential in digital disintermediation in relation to markets, beyond the ‘official paradigm of ecommerce and Uber-like platforms?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Readings</h2>
<p>None.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-futurebazaars'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-futurebazaars</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroIRC16Proposed SessionsInternet Researcher's Conference2016-01-03T07:08:30ZBlog Entry