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The Many Languages of Digital Infrastructures
https://cis-india.org/raw/india-seminar-pp-sneha-and-anasuya-gupta-the-many-languages-of-digital-infrastructures
<b>This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Anasuya Sengupta outlines some of the key challenges in digitalisation and representation of non-dominant/marginalised languages on the internet today, through reflections on two recent projects related to languages and the internet. The essay has been published in Seminar Magazine, as part of its thematic focus this month on 'Navigating Language in a Digital Age.'</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The ongoing pandemic has compelled much needed reflection on questions of access and infrastructure in India, especially during a time that has rendered the internet and digital technologies as essential, and in many ways the ‘new normal’.Even as we have been coming to terms with how best to cope with a myriad set of new regulations for public and private life now, framed with the promise of a ‘digital India’ in mind, the need to create diverse, inclusive and equitable information societies has become the need of the hour. Linguistic barriers in particular, in reading, writing and speaking in multiple languages on digital interfaces remain persistent today across the world, especially for marginalized and non-dominant communities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This essay outlines some of the challenges in digitalisation and representation of non-dominant/marginalised languages on the internet today, through reflections on two recent initiatives related to languages and the internet. The first is a forthcoming report on the ‘State of the Internet’s Languages’ (STIL), led by Whose Knowledge? in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute and Centre for Internet and Society. The second is a series of collaborative and exploratory short-term research projects on Wikimedia platforms and communities in India, undertaken by team members of the Access to Knowledge programme at CIS. Both projects aim to map and address some of these issues related to the representation and usability of diverse languages on the internet.</p>
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<p><a class="external-link" href="https://www.india-seminar.com/2021/742/742_puthiya_and_anasuya.htm" style="text-align: justify; ">Click here to read</a><span style="text-align: justify; "> the full essay published in Seminar Magazine.</span></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/india-seminar-pp-sneha-and-anasuya-gupta-the-many-languages-of-digital-infrastructures'>https://cis-india.org/raw/india-seminar-pp-sneha-and-anasuya-gupta-the-many-languages-of-digital-infrastructures</a>
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No publisherPP Sneha and Anasuya SenguptaResearchers at Work2021-06-02T16:05:43ZBlog EntryThe Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance: Call for Review
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem
<b>Re-thinking the Last Mile Problem research project by Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The ‘last mile’ is a communications term which has a specific Indian variant, where technology has been mapped onto developmentalist–democratic priorities which have propelled communications technologies since at least the invention of radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, the ‘last mile’ has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has provided rationale for successive technological developments, and produced an assumption that the final frontier was just around the corner and that Internet technologies now carry the same burden of breaching that last major barrier to produce a techno-nation. The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour.
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<p>The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.</p>
<p>Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.</p>
<p>The monograph has emerged out of the "Rethinking the Last Mile Problem" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:</p>
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<li> <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/leap-of-rhodes" class="internal-link" title="Last Mile Problem">PDF</a></li>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rethinking-last" class="internal-link" title="Rethinking Last">Word</a></li></ol>
<p>We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 30 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkHistories of InternetInternet Studies2015-04-03T10:55:07ZBlog EntryThe Last Cultural Mile
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old
<b>Ashish’s monograph follows the career of a priori contradiction, one that only mandates a state mechanism to perform an act of delivery, and then disqualifies the state from performing that very act effectively. This contradiction which he names as the Last Mile problem is a conceptual hurdle, not a physical one and when put one way, the Last Mile is unbridgeable, when put another, it is being bridged all the time.</b>
<p>This monograph provides a set of four case studies of the Indian State. The case studies address four technologies, television, telecommunications, networked higher education and the Unique Identity project. It also looks at Wireless-in-Local Loop (or WLL) technology that constituted the first revolution in telecommunications in the early 1990s, the arrival of satellite television also in the 1990s, the low-end IT ‘device’ with which the Ministry of HRD plans to use digitized distance education to increase enrolment of Indian students by five per cent of the overall population, and the celebrated Aadhaar.</p>
<p><strong>Download the Monograph <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf" class="internal-link"><span class="external-link"><span class="external-link">here</span></span></a></strong></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old</a>
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No publisherkaeruDigital GovernanceInternet HistoriesHistories of InternetResearchers at WorkPublications2015-04-03T10:59:23ZCollection (Old)The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination
<b>This post by Divij Joshi is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Divij is a final year student at the National Law
School of India University, Bangalore and is a keen observer and researcher on issues of law, policy and technology. In this essay, he traces the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and looks at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>On the 14th of August, 1995, the eve of the 48th anniversary of Indian Independence, India began a new, and wholly unanticipated tryst with destiny - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched India's first full Internet service for public access [1]. In 1998, just a few years after VSNL introduced dial-up Internet, around 0.5% of India’s population had regular Internet access. By 2013, the latest estimate, 15% of the country was connected to the Internet, and the number is growing exponentially [2]. As the influence of the Internet grew, the law and the courts began to take notice. In 1998, there were four mentions of the Internet in the higher judiciary (the High Courts in States and the Supreme Court of India), by 2015, it was referred to in hundreds of judgements and orders of the higher judiciary [3].</p>
<p>The revolutionary capacity of the Internet cannot be understated. It has played a critical part in displacing, creating and enhancing social structures and institutions – from the market, to ideas of community – and its potential still remains unexplored. The Internet has also unsettled legal systems around the world, because of its massive potential to create very new forms of social and legal relationships and paradigms which extant law was unequipped for. The dynamism of the Internet means that legislation and statutory law, being static and rigid, is inherently ill suited for the governance of the Internet, and much of this role is ultimately ceded to the judiciary. In a widely unregulated policy background, the role played by this institution in identifying and dealing with the peculiar nature of regulatory issues on the Internet – such as the central role of intermediaries, the challenges of intellectual property rights concerns, the conflicts of law between different jurisdictions, and the courts’ own role in being a regulator – is tremendously important. In this article, an attempt is made to weave a thread through judicial decisions as well as judicial <em>obiter</em> (or peripheral text) regarding the Internet, to explain how the judiciary has captured and defined the Internet and its capacities, potentials and actors, and what effects this has on the Internet and on society. Inter alia, this article examines how judicial disputes have shaped internet policy in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Internet and the Role of the Courts</h2>
<p>The relationship between the law and technology is reminiscent of the famous paradox posed by the greek philosopher Zeno – Achilles and a tortoise agree to race. The tortoise has a head start, and, by the logic of the paradox, Achilles is never able to catch up to him. Every time Achilles covers the distance between himself and the tortoise at any point, the tortoise has moved ahead some distance, which need to be covered once again. As Achilles covers that distance, the tortoise has once again moved a distance away, and so on, to infinite progression, proving that Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise [4].</p>
<p>The legal regulation of the Internet follows a similar path. The Internet was not an immediate concern for law and policy, which meant that its evolution was largely determined in a space free from centralized governmental regulation. By the time parliaments and courts began to understand the implications of Internet regulation, it was apparent that such regulation would be constrained by the very features of the Internet. The core feature of the Internet is decentralization of control, which is necessarily antithetical to creating a centralized legal regulation with. Moreover, the constant mutation in the function and use of the technology renders statutory law incredibly ineffective in being an adequate regulator. Even where legislatures determined a need to step in and draw special regulations for the Internet, they need to be either so broad or vague that they cede much of the regulatory space to interpreters – the courts – or be so specific that much of the regulation quickly becomes obsolete. Most importantly, the final authority to determine matters of constitutional import such as the content and scope of fundamental rights rests with the higher judiciary. In this scenario, the courts become the <em>de facto</em> policy makers for regulating technology. In light of our current political and social context, where the level of legislative debate on issues of public importance and constitutional import is negligible, the judiciary’s analysis of Internet regulation becomes even more important [5].</p>
<p>The judiciary is thus in a unique position to decide Internet policy and governance. The preliminary question is whether there is even a need to talk about the Internet as a special system with distinct policy concerns. The regulation of the Internet is certainly fundamental to the development of knowledge and education in societies, but do its unique features merit a departure from traditional law? The second and connected question is whether the law can actually play a role in determining how the Internet is shaped, i.e. how does technology respond to the law? The architecture of the system that defines the functionality of the Internet – like the TCP/IP protocol – has embodied certain values such as decentralization, autonomy, openness and privacy [6], which have to a large extent underlined the social and ethical implications of the Internet – the way it is used, the way it functions and the way it grows. These were the values explicitly introduced into the systems we use today to communicate and interact on the Internet [7]. However, there is no <em>a priori</em>, fixed nature of the Internet. The form the technologies that make up the Internet take, depend upon its architecture and its design, which are malleable, and to which laws contribute by incentivizing certain values and encumbering others. The legal regulation of the Internet, therefore critically affects the architecture of the system, and promotes and secures certain values.</p>
<p>Recognizing the effect of law upon the architecture of the Internet is critical to any balancing exercise that the judiciary has to conduct when it decides disputes about the Internet. The Internet is a unique public resource, in that its participants are (mostly) private actors pursuing a vareity of goals and interests. The values outlined above emerged in this context, where control was decetnralized and regulation depended to a large extent upon how these disparate parties act. However, the same values also disturb existing structures to control information for legitimate causes - such as protecting intellectual property rights or preventing hate speech. Adjudicating these values, often in the absence of any explicit social or political moral framework (with respect to lack of legislative or constitutional guidance on these values), the judicial responses end up as policy directions that shape the Internet. Seen outside a broader, progressive social context, which takes into account the impact of shaping technologies to reflect values, interests on the Internet are generally adjudicated and enforced as proprietary rights between private actors, which ultimately results in changing the dynamics and relative distribution of control over the technologies that make up the Internet. This proprietory conception of interests on the Internet is highly insular, and tends to undermine the intersts of the public as a stakeholder in the regulation of the Internet. This can play out in many ways – from regulation being overwhelmingly determined according to private interests like restricting new technologies in order to protect intellectual property; or with private actors imputed as the focal point of regulation, and therefore given massive control over the Internet. However, the courts can take a different approach to regulating the Internet. The judiciary, especially the Indian Supreme Court, has a generally activist trend, especially in environmental matters [8]. One of the most elegant principles invoked by the courts for the protection of the common environment, has been the public trust doctrine, which postulates that certain (environmental) resources exist for the public benefit and can only be eroded upon to ensure that they develop in the most beneficial way for the common resources [9]. A commons approach to the Internet would require a comprehensive evaluation of the roles played by different actors across different layers of the Internet and how to regulate them [10], but would be principally similar, in that rules of private property would be constrained by potential spillover effects on intellectual information resources.</p>
<p>As a prelude to examining the judicial analysis of the Internet, it is interesting to examine the judiciary’s own perception of its role in Internet regulation. Courts are constrained in their exercise of power by rules of jurisdiction, which become incredibly convoluted on the Internet. A broad assertion of state power over the net can potentially fragment it, which is an obvious problem. At the same time, state sovereignty and protection of the interests of its citizens and laws has to be balanced with the above concerns [11]. The judiciary in India first attempted to grapple with the problem by exercising ‘universal jurisdiction’ over all actions on the Internet, which allowed the Court to claim jurisdiction over a defendant as long as the website or service could be accessed from within its jurisdiction [12]. This broad-reaching standard was antithetical to the development of a harmonized, unfragmented Internet and created problems of jurisdictional and sovereign conflict. As the implications of such a direction became clear, the court evolved different standards for jurisdiction which were based on whether the Internet service had some connection with the territorial jurisdiction of the court in question. The judiciary began to develop caution in its approach towards exercising personal jurisdiction in Internet cases, first applying the ‘interactivity test’ and then the ‘specific targeting’ standards for questions of jurisdiction [13]. However, the judiciary continues to adhere to a ‘long-arm’ standard for copyright and trademark violations, which allows it to extend its jurisdiction extra-territorially under those laws, through rather specious analogies with pre-internet technologies. For example, in <em>WWE v Reshma</em> [14], the Court explicitly analogized sale of services or goods on the Internet with contracts concluded over the telephone. Although analogies provide a comfortable framework for analysis, they also shield important distinctions between technologies from legal analysis. Problems arising from Internet cases – where many actors across many jurisdictions are involved in varying degrees – are unique to Internet technologies and such analogies ignore these important distinctions. Morever, in all the above cases, the judiciary’s assertions of power over the Internet seems to be restricted only by pragmatic regulatory concerns (such as whether personal obedience of the defendant can be secured) and its evolving understanding of questions of jurisdiction are explicitly linked to changes in the use and perception of the Internet and an understanding of interactivity and communication on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Early Internet and Judicial Perceptions</h2>
<p>The Internet crept into the judicial vocabulary in 1996; a year after public access was made available, when the Supreme Court first took cognizance of ‘Internet’ as a means of interlinking countries and gathering information instantaneously [15]. Several other cases in the High Courts also spoke of the ‘Information Highway’ [16] and the various services that companies were offering, which could be availed by individuals on the Internet [17]. This corresponded with the popular understanding of the ‘first wave’ of the Internet, mostly relating to business providing services and information to users on the World Wide Web or as a space for limited personal interaction (such as through email) [18].</p>
<p>Some of the earliest cases where the Courts had the opportunity to examine the nature of the Internet were related to Intellectual Property on the Internet, specifically trademark and copyright in the online world. The Domain Name System, which serve to identify devices accessible on the Internet, was one of the first regulatory challenges on the Internet. Domain name disputes were unprecedented in the analog world of intellectual property, since domain names were uniquely scarce goods due to the limitations of the DNS technology. In India, the Delhi High Court in the case of <em>Yahoo v Akash Arora</em> first took cognizance of regulatory challenges of the DNS system on the Internet, a space which it conceptualized as a large public network of computers, and held that domain names serve the same functions on the Internet as trademarks. This case saw the recognition of the Internet as a separate, regulable space, which the Court defined as <em>“a global collection of computer networks linking millions of public and private computers around the world.”</em> The Court recognized some of the core, democratic features of the Internet: <em>“The Internet is now recognized as an international system, a communication medium that allows anyone from any part of the lobe with access to the Internet to freely exchange information and share data.”</em> In this case, the Court upheld traditional trademark rights in the case of use of domain names. The Court’s first recognition of trademark on the Internet heralded the imputation of proprietary interests on the decentralized, shared network that was the Internet, and was a precursor to the many such cases, which mostly focused on private commercial concerns. Even as the Court understood the importance of the Internet commons, i.e. the information and architecture that makes up the Internet, it chose to ignore concerns of public interest in the openness of those commons, in its balancing of proprietary rights for trademark cases. The commercial significance of the Internet was echoed in the <em>Rediff</em> case, where the Bombay High Court opined that <em>“Undoubtedly the Internet is one of the important features of the Information Revolution. It is increasingly used by commercial organisations to promote themselves and their product and in some cases to buy and sell”</em> [19]. Moreover, in these early cases, the law of the analog age was applied wholesale to the Internet, without examining in-depth the possible differences in principle and approach, providing no precedent for the development of an ‘internet law’ [20]. Overly focussed on the proprietary nature of Internet interests, the conception of the Internet as a non-commercial space for collaboration at a decentralized or an individual level is absent from the judicial vocabulary at this stage.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Private Actors and Public Interest</h2>
<p>The Internet permits decentralization in the hands of several private actors, which makes control of information over it so difficult. However, the information and technology that makes up the Internet are also highly centralized at certain nodal points, such as the services which provide the physical infrastructure of the Internet (like ISPs) or intermediaries which create platforms for distribution of information. Since the Internet has no centralized architecture to enable governmental control, these private intermediaries fall squarely in the crosshairs of regulatory concerns, specifically concerning their liability as facilitators of offensive or illegal content and actions. Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and Google are examples of private actors that have emerged as dominant service providers that host, index or otherwise facilitate access to user-generated content. Other forms of intermediaries, such as software like Napster or torrent databases like The Pirate Bay, are responsible for driving the growth of Internet-based technologies, like new modes of information sharing and communication. These services have emerged as the most important platform for sharing of information and free speech on the Internet. Most of the interaction and communication on the Internet takes place through these intermediaries and therefore they are in a position to control much of the speech that takes place online. The implications of regulating such actors are quite enormous, and its context is unique to the Internet. These private actors now control the bulk of the information that is shared online, and many of them have almost monopolistic control over certain unique forms of information sharing – think Google in the case of search engines. Developing an adequate regulatory mechanism for them is therefore critical to the future of the net. If the laws do not adequately protect their ability to host content without being liable for the same, it is likely that these actors will lean towards collateral censorship of speech beyond that which is prohibited by law, simply to protect against liability. Secondly, such liability would tend to disincentivise the creation of new platforms and services that increase access to knowledge, which have been integral to innovation on the Internet [21]. The issue of intermediary liability at this scale is unique to the Internet. The court has to adequately frame policy considerations which strike at the fundamental nature of the Internet, such as intellectual property and access to information. At the same time, concerns about legal accountability need to also be addressed. The approach that courts have taken towards the role of intermediaries is therefore critical towards any examination of Internet regulation [22].</p>
<p>In India, the first court to explicitly examine the public importance in issues of online intermediary liability was in the context of regulation of pornography, specifically child pornography, which has been a mainstay of regulatory concerns on the Internet. The case prompted legislative action in the form of creating rules to secure intermediary immunity. In this case the Court imputed liability for the listings of certain offensive content upon the owners of the website, Bazzee.com. Hard cases make bad law, and the same was true of this case. Referring to the challenges of regulating content on the Internet, due to the <em>inability</em> of methods to screen and filter such content, the Court held that intermediaries must be strictly liable for all offensive content on their site. The Court held that:</p>
<blockquote>The proliferation of the internet and the possibility of a widespread use through instant transmission of pornographic material, calls for a strict standard having to be insisted upon. Owners or operators of websites that offer space for listings might have to employ content filters if they want to prove that they did not knowingly permit the use of their website for sale of pornographic material…even if for some reason the filters fail, the presumption that the owner of the website had the knowledge that the product being offered for sale was obscene would get attracted.</blockquote>
<p>Intermediaries, therefore, were imputed with the liability of controlling ‘obscene’ speech – a vague and over-broad standard which did not account for the realities of online speech [23]. The above analysis reflects the judiciary’s refusal to take into account the technical concerns on the Internet which ultimately shape its architecture – and the limitations of the judiciary in reflecting upon their own role in policy making on the internet. Ultimately, the decision was overturned by a legislative act, which invoked different standards of liability for intermediaries.</p>
<p>In <em>Consim Info Pvt. Ltd vs Google India Pvt. Ltd</em> [24], the Madras High Court considered “Keyword Advertising” and the liability of search engines and competitors for ‘meta-tags’ that resulted in search engine results which may divert a trademark holder’s traffic. Google’s AdWord programme, which allows purchase of certain ‘keywords’ for the search engine results, and can potentially enable certain forms of trademark infringement, was at issue [25]. Trademarks as AdWords or search terms fulfil and important social utility of information access [26]. However, the Court’s reasoning was conspicuously missing an analysis of the public interest in protecting and promoting search engines, which were important concerns taken into account when these issues were deliberated in other forums [27]. The Court saw this dispute only taking into account private property interests and not public interest considerations, such as the general public benefit of technology which enables new forms of searching and indexing. In fact, an argument by the defendant based on the fundamental right to free (commercial) speech was raised and ignored by the court. The Court therefore ignored the public importance of search engines in favour of protecting proprietary interests which arose in a different context.</p>
<p>Copyright law also has tremendous implications on the Internet. As the Internet became the primary mode for the distribution of different kinds of information and creative content, the very ease of sharing that contributed to its popularity made it prone to violations of copyright, and this created a conflict between the interests of traditional rights holders and the development of the Internet as a means of better sharing of information and knowledge. The problem of holding intermediaries liable for conduct has been compounded in cases where the Court ordered ex-parte ‘John Doe’ orders against unknown defendants likely to be infringing copyright, and imputed the liability for removal of such content on the intermediaries or ISP’s, effectively issuing wide blocking orders without considering their implications or even providing a fair hearing [28]. In <em>RK Productions</em> [29], for instance, when holding that ISPs could be liable for failure to follow blocking orders against infringing content, the Madras High Court described the role of ISPs, such as Airtel and VSNL, as <em>“vessels for others to use their services to infringe third party works.”</em> Once again, the court took a particularly pessimistic view of the Internet’s capabilities, limiting its analysis to the ISP’s function in facilitating infringement and holding that <em>“Without the ISPs, no person would be in a position to access the pirated contents nor would the unknown persons be in a position to upload the pirated version of the film.”</em> In <em>Myspace</em>, the Delhi High Court held that no different standard for secondary infringement (by intermediaries) applied on the Internet, and imputed the same standard as in the 1957 Copyright Act. (In fact, it explicitly compared Myspace to brick and mortar shops selling infringing DVD’s or CD’s) [30]. The Court held that the principles of immunity under the IT Act were overridden by the provisions of the Copyright Act, and then went on to impute a strict standard for intermediaries seeking safe harbor for infringing material, including, inexplicably, that provision of some means to tackle infringement would be sufficient proof of knowledge of actual infringement, and therefore implicating mere passive platforms as infringers. Further, the Court expressly rejected a post-hoc solution for the same, and held that the intermediaries must ensure prior restraint of infringing works to escape liability. The claims that arise in cases of infringement of intellectual property on the Internet, specifically in the liability of intermediaries, are unique, and have unique implications. The inability or refusal of the judiciary to identify claims of freedom of speech and freedom of information of the larger public within the internet commons, in response to broad censorship orders for preventing infringement means that implicitly, policy takes a direction that favours private interests.</p>
<p>An analysis of the above cases shows that important implications of intermediary liability such as the effect on the public’s access to information and the freedom of speech in the context of the Internet did not play a role in the Courts decisions. In particular, the examination of cases above shows that private disputes are now at the forefront of issues of public importance. The Courts have unfortunately taken an insular view of these disputes, adjudicating them as inter-party, without considering the public function that private players on the Internet provide, and how their decisions should factor in these considerations.</p>
<p>However, the recent case of <em>Shreya Singhal v Union of India</em> [31], decided by the Supreme Court this March, hopefully announces a departure from this insular examination of the Internet towards a constitutional analysis, where framing an appropriate public policy for the Internet is at the forefront of the Court’s analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Shreya Singhal and Constitutionalizing the Internet</h2>
<p>In March, 2015, the Supreme Court of India struck down the notoriously abused Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which criminalized certain classes of speech, and hopefully heralded a new phase of Internet jurisprudence in India, which imports constitutionalism into matters of cyberspace. Section 66A, premised on the pervasiveness of the Internet, criminalized online speech on vague grounds such as ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘menacing’. The Court’s examination of the nature of the Internet is particularly important. While dismissing a challenge that speech on the Internet should not be treated as distinct from other speech, the Supreme Court opined that <em>“the internet gives any individual a platform which requires very little or no payment through which to air his views”</em>, and by this reasoning concluded that to a limited extent, specific offences could be drawn for online speech. However, this understanding of the features of the Internet – the democratization of knowledge sharing by making it cheap and expansive, was implicit throughout the Court’s judgement, which upheld the idea of the Internet as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ and a space for free and democratic exchange, and struck down the impugned restrictive provisions as unconstitutional, in part because of their vagueness and likelihood to censor legitimate speech, bearing no relation to the constitutional restrictions on free speech under Article 19(2). Moreover, the Court understood the importance of collateral censorship and intermediary safe harbor, although only briefly examined, and read down expansive intermediary liability terms under the IT Rules to include prior judicial review of takedown notices [32].</p>
<p>Hopefully, the Shreya Singhal judgement marks the beginning of constitutional engagement of the judiciary with the Internet. At this moment itself, the Supreme Court is grappling with questions of limitations of online pornography [33]; search engine liability for hate speech [34]; intermediary liability for defamation [35]; and liability for mass surveillance. How the Supreme Court takes cognizance of these cases, how they ultimately proceed, and how they take into account the principles sounded by the <em>Shreya Singhal</em> court, will have a tremendous impact on the internet and society in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>This article was an attempt to study the Internet in India, and look at the relationship between the judiciary and the Internet. But ‘the Internet’ is not some fixed, immutable space, and any study has to take this into account. The function of the Internet depends upon the values built in to it. These values can be in favor of free speech, or enable censorship. They can protect privacy, or enable mass surveillance. The growth of the Internet as a medium of free speech and expression has been fuelled to a large extent in the spaces free of legal regulation, but the law is perhaps the most important regulator of the Internet, in its ability to use state power to create incentives for certain values, and to change the nature of the Internet. This study, therefore, charted the dynamic relationship between judicial law and other factors responsible for the regulation of the Internet.</p>
<p>For a technology which is so pervasive in our daily lives, and growing in importance day by day, it is surprising that the Supreme Court of India has only recently taken cognizance of constitutional issues on the Internet. While important internet-specific issues have arisen in disputes before the judiciary, judicial examination has generally ignored technical nuances of the new technology, and furthermore ignored the wider implications of framing Internet policy by applying rules that applied in other contexts, such as for copyright or trademark. Without a clear articulation of political and moral bases to guide Internet policy, a clear policy-driven approach to the Internet remains absent, and the regulatory space has been captured by fragmented interest groups without an assessment of larger interests in maintaining the Internet commons, such as allowing peer-based production and sharing of information.</p>
<p>There is, however, reason to be optimistic about the courts and the Internet. The Supreme Courts reaffirmation and identification of the freedom of speech on the Internet in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, will, hopefully, resonate in the policy decisions of both the courts and legislators, and the internet can be reformulated as a space deserving constitutional scrutiny and protection.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>[1] VSNL Starts India's First Internet Service Today, The Indian Technomist, (14th August, 1995), available at <a href="http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html">http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Internet Statistics by Country, International Telecommunication Union, available at <a>http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx</a>.</p>
<p>[3] Source: <a href="http://manupatra.com/">http://manupatra.com/</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Nick Huggett, Zeno's Paradoxes, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/</a>.</p>
<p>[5] See: <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/">http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/</a>; Publicly available records of Lok Sabha debates also show no mention of this controversial law.</p>
<p>[6] I take values to mean certain desirable goals and methods, which could be both intrinsically good to pursue and whose pursuit allows other instrumental goods to be achieved. See Michael J. Zimmerman, Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/</a>.</p>
<p>[7] Hellen Nissenbaum, How Computer Systems Embody Values, Computer Magazine, 118, (March 2001), available at <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf">https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>[8] S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism: The Indian Experience, 6 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 29, (2001).</p>
<p>[9] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Ors., 2000(5) SCALE 69.</p>
<p>[10] Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52(3) Federal Communications Law Journal, 561, (2000).</p>
<p>[11] Thomas Shultz, Carving up the Internet: Jurisdiction, Legal Orders, and the Private/Public International Law Interface, 19(4) European Journal Of International Law, 799, (2008); Wendy A. Adams, Intellectual Property Infringement in Global Networks: The Implications of Protection Ahead of the Curve, 10 Int’l J.L. & Info. Tech, 71, (2002).</p>
<p>[12] Casio India Co. Limited v. Ashita Tele Systems Pvt. Limited, 2003 (27) P.T.C. 265 (Del.) (India).</p>
<p>[13] Banyan Tree Holding (P) Ltd. v. A. Murali Krishna Reddy & Anr., CS(OS) 894/2008.</p>
<p>[14] World Wrestling Entertainment v. Reshma Collection (FAO (OS) 506/2013 (Delhi).</p>
<p>[15] Dr. Ashok v. Union of India and Ors., AIR 1997 SC 2298.</p>
<p>[16] Rajan Johnsonbhai Christy vs State Of Gujarat, (1997) 2 GLR 1077.</p>
<p>[17] Union Of India And Ors. Vs. Motion Picture Association And Ors, 1999 (3) SCR 875; Yahoo!, Inc. vs Akash Arora & Anr., 1999 IIAD Delhi 229 – “The Internet provides information about various corporations, products as also on various subjects like educational, entertainment, commercial, government activities and services.”</p>
<p>[18] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.</p>
<p>[19] Rediff Communication Limited vs Cyberbooth & Another, 1999 (4) Bom CR 278.</p>
<p>[20] Even when the Supreme Court finally recognized these concerns a few years later, when the Internet had morphed into a massive commercial platform and an important forum for free speech, in the Satyam Infotech case (2004(3)AWC 2366 SC), it discussed the unique problem of domain name identifiers and scarcity of domain names, yet went on to hold that an even higher standard of passing off for trademarks should apply in domain names, disregarding the prior standard of an ‘honest concurrent user’.</p>
<p>[21] Jack Balkin, The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age, 36 Pepperdine Law Review, (2008)</p>
<p>[22] Id.</p>
<p>[23] Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), 3 Comp. L.J. 364 (2005).</p>
<p>[24] 2013 (54) PTC 578 (Mad)</p>
<p>[25] The judgement also reveals the predominance of Google’s search engine service. The Court defines the operation of “search engines” as synonymous with Google’s particular service – including adding elements like the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option as defining elements of search engines.</p>
<p>[26] David J. Franklyn & David A. Hyman, Trademarks As Search Engine Keywords: Much Ado About Something?, 26(2) Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 540, (2013).</p>
<p>[27] Id.</p>
<p>[28] Reliance Big Entertainment v. Multivision Network and Ors, Delhi High Court, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham</a>; Sagarika Music Pvt. Ltd. v. Dishnet Wireless Ltd., C.S. No. 23/2012, G.A. No. 187/2012 (Calcutta High Court Jan. 27, 2012) (order); See Generally, Ananth Padmanabhan, Give Me My Space and Take Down His, 9 Indian Journal of Law and Technology, (2013).</p>
<p>[29] R.K. Productions v. BSNL Ltd and Ors. O.A.No.230 of 2012, Madras High Court.</p>
<p>[30] Super Cassetes Industries Ltd. v. Myspace Inc. and Anr., 2011 (47) P.T.C. 49 (Del.)</p>
<p>[31] Shreya Singhal and Ors. V Union of India and Ors., W.P.(Crl).No. 167 of 2012, Supreme Court, (2015).</p>
<p>[32] The courts refusal to address important questions of intermediary responsibility has also been criticized, see Jyoti Pandey, The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India?, Centre for Internet and Society, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability</a>.</p>
<p>[33] See: <a href="http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/">http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/</a>.</p>
<p>[34] See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination</a>.</p>
<p>[35] See: <a href="https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/">https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination</a>
</p>
No publisherDivij JoshiInternet StudiesInternet LawJudiciaryRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-09T05:26:50ZBlog EntryThe Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities
https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities
<b>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 fourth among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <strong>The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</strong></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
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<p>In an article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly describing the emergence of the term cyberinfrastructure, Patrik Svensson speaks of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the humanities, pointing towards a seemingly new found interest and investment in resources and tools for humanities research, pedagogy and publication in many universities and other knowledge institutions (Svensson 2011). Though the term has not been significantly used otherwise, it is interesting to note the implications of such a statement in the context of other such important ‘turns’ in the history of ideas, such as the linguistic or cultural turn. Particularly in the predominant debates around digital humanities, which are largely Anglo-American, infrastructure is an important and inherent component of any thinking around this area, as it derives many of its theoretical and practical concerns from a history of humanities computing. A lot of early work in DH was done in in the area of digital archives and knowledge repositories, such as The Walt Whitman Archive, Rossetti and Blake archives (Gold and Groom 2011, Drucker 2011), where digitization and algorithmic querying were important developments in terms of imagining and opening up the archive. From there to seemingly complex projects on data mapping, visualization, distant reading and cultural analytics, which require parsing through a huge corpora of humanities data, the growth of infrastructure has been a key aspect of these developments, although this many not be emphasized in the early literature about the field. The use of computational methods and the move towards the use of big data in the humanities has been an important change in terms of objects of the enquiry and methodology, and infrastructure is an essential condition of both these changes.</p>
<p>Like with other disciplines the nature of infrastructure and resources available to the humanities – in the form of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and now online repositories, language laboratories, and bibliographic, writing and editing tools and software – have also in some manner influenced the nature or scope of questions that could be asked of an object or text. It is therefore useful to explore the influence of infrastructure at a very conceptual level, in terms of what new ways of enquiry have been made possible with digital technologies and the internet. Now with new tools that can parse many pages of text at a go, or an algorithm that can derive patterns from a data set of images, video or other cultural artifacts, the scope of the enquiry seems to have increased exponentially, as much literature around DH suggests (Berry 2011). Indeed this point is also a bone of contention for many traditional humanities scholars, as it not only seems to be a technologically deterministic notion, but also one that takes away from more conventional methods of humanities research, which are based on close reading and interpretation of texts. In the Indian context however, these possibilities still seem distant owing to several gaps in terms of requirements of infrastructure, resources and material. In many institutions, the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in the form of libraries, classroom teaching-learning resources and access to the internet and other digital tools for the humanities continues to remain a problem. Existing institutional infrastructure is lesser that what is required, and mostly outdated.</p>
<p>This conflict over whether new tools and resources for the humanities is taking away or adding to humanities research is better understood in the light of how the concept of infrastructure has been understood, and specifically in the context of communication and research. Brian Larkin (2008) describes infrastructures as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense”. He talks about both technical (such as transport, telecommunications, urban planning, energy and water) and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as the knowledge of a language, or cultural style and religious learnings. He therefore defines infrastructure as “this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” This definition opens out the understanding of the term a little more, for it brings within the ambit different kinds of goods – such as knowledge, and proposes that infrastructure has the power to bind people within collectivities, thus emphasizing both its limitations as well as potentialities.</p>
The notion of infrastructure as not being neutral to culture is further emphasized when Larkin talks about its mediating capacities, brought about by a layering of new technologies over old ones. "Infrastructures…mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of infrastructures themselves" (Ibid.: 6). Thus the understanding of infrastructures as merely a means of the execution of ideas is one of the obstacles in terms of imagining them as more central to the work of the humanities. Often, the notion of infrastructure has been understood in terms of the institutional infrastructure in place, and not in terms of the smaller networks, tools or resources that build it, which are often located at the level of individuals. Ownership is a key aspect of the problem here, because the ownership of such infrastructure is largely with the state or large corporate entities, and not something within the ambit of small and private institutions or even individuals, and this often mandates the manner of their use. Indeed in the case of DH, there are certain kinds of technologies and resources that cannot be replicated easily at all, as such it is something that needs investment from the state and large knowledge institutions such as the university. Another problem, as rightly identified by Svensson is that the imagination of research infrastructures has been primarily in terms of the needs of the natural sciences, as a result of which resources, tools and materials for the humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment. Thus not only is there a challenge in terms of the availability of infrastructure, but also with respect to the optimum utilization of what is available.
<p> </p>
<p>Some of the practitioners and scholars interviewed as part of this mapping have also repeatedly brought up a number of concerns about (or the lack of) infrastructure they have had to use, modify and develop as part of their projects and research. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore finds it rather ironic that a city like Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal has such little thinking in the humanities. There are of course several reasons for this, she says, and in many places infrastructure development is restricted for certain reasons, like for example in Kashmir, where the use of internet and mobile phones is regulated strictly due to security concerns. The key question of course is to have more of a dialogue between places to ensure that they are not functioning in isolation. She also emphasizes that the problems are also at a more basic level, like with transcription for example <strong>[1]</strong>. The advent of the digital has brought with it several new possibilities, but she also talks about the many misconceptions that seem to be prevalent with regard to the digital, particularly in terms of preservation and storage capacity. The question of format is of great importance and a determining factor in much of research that mobilizes digital technologies. As part of her work on archiving oral histories, she has often had to emphasize that there are specific formats for a digital oral archive. As she says:</p>
<blockquote>You should not switch to say MP3 just because it’s cheaper, more convenient and a lighter file. I often have people arguing that I just bought a recorder, it gives me a clear recording [in the MP3 format] etc. If you were to archive that file you would find that within a few years you begin to lose data on that file. The digital archive has also made people think a lot more about what they are preserving, in what format. These are things you then teach yourself, you do not archive in certain formats, or rely on an archive of MP3 files, because every time you copy them onto something it would have lost a little bit of its description. So these are things that make the historian more oriented, you think a lot more about what you are doing.</blockquote>
<p>She therefore warns against these presumptions that a digital archive will resolve completely problems of space and preservation, as a change in format can easily render your data inaccessible and essentially useless. The idea of ‘loss of data’ and lack of space is something easily missed, as there a notion of the digital being an endless space, but that too comes at a cost. As Jonathan Sterne (2013) explains in his work on the MP3 as a cultural artifactiv, it is a format that works through compression and elimination of excess sound, which eventually greatly affects the quality of the sound object itself. The notion of the digital rendering a certain quality of sound, and by implication generating a ‘better’ digital artifact itself, is therefore highly debatable.</p>
<p>There are other considerations to bear in mind as well. As Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the CPH points out, the context of such work in the global south is very different, and lack of good infrastructure is definitely one of the major problems. There are issues of bandwidth, problems such as surveillance, and issues with regulation of internet access, now the issue of network neutrality and so on, all of which have implications for possible digital humanities work and specifically work on digital archives. A significant challenge she sees is that we don't have mechanisms to translate between/ from Indian languages. She says that:</p>
<blockquote>It would be amazing to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages which at the moment is an impossibility. This is where a place like Bangalore comes into the picture... We need to pull on resources that are being pioneered in places like the IITs, or institutions here working with natural language processing...technologies that we cannot in a humanities context create, but pull those in to use them for humanities research. But the questions that we are asking are necessarily quite different, from what we have in the West.</blockquote>
<p>The problem with Indian languages brings out the problems that are specific to the global south and therefore the infrastructure needs of humanities research work. Padmini Murray mentions Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University as an effective illustration of the challenges faced by researchers working in languages other than English. She explains “The very level of creating the code for Bichitra was different, because it had to be done from scratch. Finding a set of reliable Bangla characters is difficult because the ligatures get mixed up, so they created a character set from scratch to create Bichitra, and for Prabhed [the collation software] which works within it.” The problem of a lack of standardization for Indic language inputs is therefore an immediate practical concern for archival work in different languages in India <strong>[2]</strong>.</p>
<p>Indiancine.ma <strong>[3]</strong>, an online archive of Indian film, has similarly been experimenting with different ways of reading and annotating film text, with a focus right now on films that are out of copyright. It uses an open-source platform named Pandor/a <strong>[4]</strong> for media archives, which helps to organise and manage large, decentralized collections of video, to collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations, and to archive as a desktop-class web application. The editing tool enables a user to pause, cut and annotate a particular scene or sequence in the film according to a time code, thus creating enormous new possibilities in terms of how we engage with the film text at several levels. The different ways of organising content through different filters also helps map content in unique ways and read them. According to Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert, who are part of the team that developed the archive and its predecessor Pad.ma <strong>[5]</strong>, Indiancine.ma is a work in progress, and it will always be, so as to allow new opportunities to present themselves with every change in the software and tools being used. They are particular about the archive being open to a variety of users and uses – that is, it is not only a tool or space of publication for humanities researchers, but is also a software project, a resource for a film fan club, and many other things as it is open to interpretation. It is meant for people to build together and have conversations across domains and disciplines. In their work with people from both the humanities and sciences, they do see a void or gap between domains, and reiterate that it is very difficult for people to have a conversation across their disciplinary moorings. Infrastructure development has also become divided across these lines, and suffers from a kind of tunnel vision which often prevents it from being developed in response to the needs of the communities it is meant to address. As Sebastian recollects the experience of creating Pad.ma, a similar online video archive using the same platform, Pandor/a, he speaks of collaborating with people from a non-technology background, at the artists collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[6]</strong>, and how the lack of a hierarchy between technologists and non-technologists only contributed to making these projects better. A lot of the early software projects in India suffered due to this distance between people from technology and non-technology backgrounds, and the lack of a common language for them to communicate. Both Sebastian and Jan themselves come with training and experience in diverse areas, ranging from philosophy and visual arts to software development, and believe that their contribution to this archive is more conceptual than technological. They also see the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) culture, then a rather incipient movement in India when they had just begun work on these projects, as one that can foster more conversations and collaborative work in technology and research in India. When they had started out of course, it was very difficult to convince people to use free and open source software, or even get filmmakers to release their footage for an open access platform like Pad.ma. CAMP was one of the few spaces then that had this open source culture, and it encouraged people to collaborate extensively, across areas of expertise. As Sebastian says “You deal with a relatively complex informatics system, but you are fully aware that you can modify and change things, and deal with them in a transparent way, which is great.” Both claim that nobody owns Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma, but everybody looks after it in a way, because they all use it differently depending on their interests, and this nurtures and builds the platform in different ways. The availability of this somewhat outside/alternate space for collaboration, and working within the open source context has been instrumental in the growth of these two online open access archives.</p>
<p>The computational aspects of Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and even Bichitra to some extent is may be something to look forward to for researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of such research with these platforms. Given that both are essentially large corpora of material, introducing new algorithmic tools to work with them is not a distant possibility, something that has also been the core of a lot of DH work in the Anglo-American context. Jan and Sebastian have tried this already with one of their earlier projects, 0xdb <strong>[7]</strong>, which is another online archive of cinema, by running a color recognition algorithm on it. There is an instance of face detection and speech recognition software that could be run on this platform, with interesting results. The existing filters on Indiacine.ma also make it possible to search for images or sequences based on colour and object recognition. For instance, an interesting experiment is to search for ‘telephone’ in the archive, which pulls up images containing telephones from across the entire corpus, outlining an interesting trajectory of the use of the instrument. While helpful in terms of querying and searching over a large corpus, they also emphasize the need to be able to make sense of it in a meaningful way. As Jan says “Most of this software is developed really as a means of control, in the area of surveillance etc., and not for exploring; it is more of a content identifying tool rather than to discover things. Clustering or referencing credits are other possibilities, but its more statistical analysis of the footage; are they really adding anything qualitative to cinema studies is still an open question”. Given this disjuncture in what these tools are developed for and how they are finally used, a point of concern is whether the research questions are also driven by the possibilities and limitations of the software itself. While that remains a broader question, Sebastian feels that more than a software, this is a new digital eco-system itself, and using these platforms in different ways, in fact even beyond what they were imagined for, will drive the technology in new directions. The limitation of computational tools as he sees now is really the speed, and given the expenses involved, they may not be feasible to implement and expect results anytime soon.</p>
<p>Both the above platforms demonstrate a certain ability to read texts both closely, as well as from a distance through the use of algorithmic tools, thus demonstrating the possibilities of analysis afforded by the infrastructure it has been built with. More importantly, they also highlight the limits of such tools and resources due to several challenges posed by the material itself. In the case of Bichitra, the problems of developing a code for Bengali characters has put forth a number of technological challenges; a pointer towards one among many problems for archiving materials in Indian languages. Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are more symptomatic of the context in which new technologies can develop today given the support and space for collaboration and conversations across domains of expertise. The problems of format and technological obsolescence brought up by scholars at CPH is an important one; while colluding with proprietary software is inevitable in some cases, as suggested by the practitioners and researchers behind these platforms, keeping back-ups of material and being able to migrate out of a digital platform at any given point is also extremely essential. Such flexibility of material, and immense interoperability – across domains, formats and social-cultural contexts including language is something that researchers in DH, or for that matter in any field that actively engages with the internet and digital technologies would look for in the infrastructure that they build for research, scholarship and pedagogy. Infrastructure continues to remain a critical aspect knowledge production and dissemination, and it is imperative now more than ever, that it is addressed at the conceptual level of any research intervention involving digital technologies and knowledge production.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See section on <em>Archives</em> for a more detailed discussion on this issue: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See the section on <em>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</em> for more on this: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="https://pan.do/ra">https://pan.do/ra</a></p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">http://pad.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/">http://studio.camp/</a></p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">https://0xdb.org/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2011. <a href="http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440">http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440</a>.</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a>.</p>
<p>Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5</a>.</p>
<p>Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In <em>Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria</em>. London: Duke University Press, 2008</p>
<p>Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' <em>New Media and Society</em>. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006</p>
<p>Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities'>https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:07:06ZBlog EntryThe Digital Other
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other
<b>Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One of the binaries posited as the Digital ‘Other’ -- ie, a non-Digital Native -- is that of a Digital Immigrant or Settler.</b>
<p>I am not comfortable with these terms and they probably need heavy unpacking if not complete abandonment. Standard caricatures of Digital Others show them as awkward in their new digital ecologies, unable to navigate through this brave new world on their own. They may actually have helped produce digital technology and tools but they are not ‘born digital’ and hence are presumed to always have an outsider’s perspective on the digital world order.</p>
<p>As I’ve interacted with young people in the Global South, one thing suddenly started emerging in dramatic fashion -- that many of the youth working extensively with digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts often shared characteristics of the Digital Other. In countries like India, where the digital realm became accessible and affordable to certain sections of the society as late as 2003, there is a learning curve among youth that does not necessarily match the global thinking on Digital Natives. Even though these young people might be considered Digital Natives, because they are at the center of the digital revolution in their own countries, there is no doubt they are also Digital Others relative to Global North and West conceptions of young people in digital networks.<br /><br />There is a very popular tweet that was making the rounds recently, which suggested that Digital Natives don’t have an account of the digital just like fish don’t have a theory of water -- they take to the digital as fish take to water. In this analogy lies a very important distinction between Digital Others and Digital Natives. Out of necessity, Digital Others have a relationship of production, control and design with the technologies they work with. They have a critical engagement with technology, as they code, hack, design, and create protocols and digital environments to suit their needs and resources. Digital Natives, on the other hand, have a purely consumption based interaction with the technology they use.<br /><br />I want to repeat that. The Digital Natives I’ve observed have a purely consumption based interaction with the technologies they use. I know this sounds weird in the face of widespread perceptions that Digital Natives have participatory, engaged, intuitive relationships with technology. We are supposed to be living in prosumer times, where the user on the Infobahn is a consumer and producer of information. But Web 2.0 entities like Facebook have created a business where the user is not just consuming but indeed the user is the consumed. While Facebook and Twitter revolutions are interesting in how users have been able to ‘abuse’ information censorship and create new communities of political protest, we still have to remember that the technologies that supported these revolutions were closed, proprietary, and coercive -- often even putting users in danger.<br /><br />From my perspective and my research, we have conflated access to information with access to technology, and we have misread this increased access as a sign of intimate relationship with digital technology and the Internet. However, for many youth, media production and information sharing are actually merely forms of consumption.<br /><br />What is most alarming to me is that the individual’s relationship with original production and design of technology is on the decline. More and more, technology platforms and apps that Digital Natives interact with are closed hardware and software systems. Private corporations produce and shape the tools of interaction, producing seductive interfaces and information engagement choices that make opaque the actual working of the technologies we use. I am concerned that, increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so.</p>
<p>Banner image credit: World Bank Photo Collection <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/</a></p>
<p>Nishant wrote the original blog post in DML Central. Read it <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/digital-other">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:07:42ZBlog EntryThe Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden
https://cis-india.org/raw/the-digital-humanities-from-father-busa-to-edward-snowden
<b>What do Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower behind the NSA surveillance revelations, and Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit, who worked for almost his entire life on Saint Thomas Aquinas, have in common? The simple answer would be: the computer. Things however are a bit more complex than that, and the reason for choosing these two people to explain what the Digital Humanities are, is that in some sense they represent the origins and the present consequences of a certain way of thinking about computers. This essay by Dr. Domenico Fiormonte, lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre, was originally published in the Media Development journal.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Cross-posted from <a href="http://www.waccglobal.org/articles/the-digital-humanities-from-father-busa-to-edward-snowden">Media Development</a>, Vol. LXIV 2/2017. Published on May 13, 2017.</em></p>
<hr />
<p>What do Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower behind the NSA surveillance revelations, and Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit, who worked for almost his entire life on Saint Thomas Aquinas, have in common? The simple answer would be: the computer. Things however are a bit more complex than that, and the reason for choosing these two people to explain what the Digital Humanities are, is that in some sense they represent the origins and the present consequences of a certain way of thinking about computers.</p>
<p>Although it is true that computer science was born from the needs of calculation (i.e. computing), in other cultures and languages the usual term is “informatics”, or the science of information. The difference is not trivial, and in fact the encounter between the computer and words, or rather with language, can be considered a cultural watershed. Father Busa himself was one of the protagonists of this meeting which came about in 1949 when he visited New York to ask Thomas J. Watson Sr, the president of IBM, for permission to use computers to study the vocabulary of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Jones, 2016). That endeavour is considered by many to have signalled the birth of computer-based “Natural Language Processing”, the inter-disciplinary field behind many of the digital tools that we use in our everyday life: from the technologies of T9 on our smartphone to voice recognition and synthesis, etc.</p>
<p>But these tools, although fundamental, are not the most striking (or perhaps disturbing) results of this age of transformation. Through the gesture of entering words in a computer, Busa framed the basis of a new concept of hermeneutics that was no longer based solely on purely subjective interpretation, but also on automatic processing of linguistic data, and hence in some sense “objective”. Busa’s undertaking founded the discipline of Humanities Computing (although years later it was renamed Digital Humanities), but above all it laid the groundwork for a profound epistemological and cultural transformation. And at the heart of this revolution was the “written document”, the text, understood as an alphanumeric sequence. In an effort to best explain this revolution, I will concentrate on one aspect, the representation of the document, and return to the hermeneutical aspects in the final part.</p>
<h3>The epistemological revolution of the digital document</h3>
<p>My own association with Digital Humanities (DH), as for many humanists of my generation, came from philology and textual criticism. My first foray into electronic textuality was in 1990, when it became clear that the confluence of informatics and the humanities would revive an inherent, almost arcane dualism: in the beginning was the data… But I was unprepared to tackle the conflict between information retrieval and interface, or between a textual paradigm based on the idea of information (text=data) and a vision of the textual document as a stratified historical-material reality, visualized not only as information, but also as an object (or series of objects), to be ultimately used and enjoyed. This dualism certainly did not only come about as a result of the encounter between informatics and text, but what we can say is that the process of digitization from this point on would “enhance” certain characteristics of the document at the expense of others.</p>
<p>The problem of the digital document in fact cannot be understood unless one first understands what digitization is and how it works: that is to say, the process of translating what we who undertake the work call “encoding” or more generally “representation”. The pioneers of informatica umanistica in Italy (Tito Orlandi, Raul Mordenti, Giuseppe Gigliozzi, etc.) taught the students of my generation two key concepts: 1) the passage from the analogue to the digital implies a process that formalizes the object of research (from the single character to the more complex structures of the historical artefact); 2) each act of encoding, or rather each act of representation of the specific “object” via a formal language involves a selection from a set of possibilities and is therefore an interpretative act (Orlandi, 2010).</p>
<p>The fundamental difference is that the human language and its writing systems were always many and various, whereas formal computer languages are based on a codex universalis, an Esperanto derived for the most part from the English language. As George Steiner wrote in After Babel, “the meta-linguistic codes and algorithms of electronic communication are founded on a sub-text, on a linguistic ‘pre-history’, which is fundamentally Anglo-American” (Steiner, 1998: xvii). Digital “standards” always reflect a cultural bias, and the act of encoding is never neutral, but tends to assume (and overlap with) universalizing discourses that on the surface are hard to see.</p>
<p>An important standard for character representation with ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange created in the 1960s. That technology is continued today by Unicode, an industrial standard, which purports to represent the characters of all written languages. Beside the fact that it is directed by the usual mega-corporations, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc., Unicode is underpinned by an alphabet-centric logic that penalizes non-Western systems of writing. Given this weakness, it should come as no surprise that it has attracted criticism on several fronts, including the charge of ethnocentrism (Perri, 2009; Pressman, 2014: 151), and also because it ignores the difficulties faced by languages of low commercial value in their efforts to be properly represented (and therefore at risk of extinction). To paraphrase Alexander Galloway, “technical is always [geo]political” (Galloway, 2004: 243).</p>
<p>Even if our lack of awareness as humanists might have deceived us into thinking that the translation from the analogue to the digital was a neutral and painless process, we would soon have realized that, as with any change of format, digital representation can change and influence both the life of the original object and its digital future. And we would have discovered the “multiple biases” inherent in the digitization process. So in one respect we have entered in a post-Busa phase where interpretation is not something you can have without defining both the object and the source of your knowledge.</p>
<p>Busa never showed much interest in theoretical questions or in the link between hermeneutics and epistemology (and even less between semiotics and politics), or between the interpretation of the object and the nature of its representation. Perhaps this was because the question “What do I want to represent, and how?” would have provoked a series of more disturbing questions: “What is knowledge? Who produces it, how, and for what purpose?” These questions probably would have threatened to paralyze his pragmatic approach. On the other hand, it cannot have been easy to ignore the problem, since many philosophers, starting with Plato when discussing the transition from orality to writing, kept asking questions about the formats and systems of knowledge representation (Stiegler, 2006).</p>
<p>As humanists we then begin to understand that the problems information technology appeared able to resolve, soon created new problems which were not limited to a single discipline, like philology or textual criticism. To ignore the epistemological (and also ethical or political) problems generated by the confluence of the humanities and information science was certainly possible: but at what price? The more pragmatic among us would have been content to use machines for what they could immediately offer: the tremendous possibilities and tools for representing, archiving and automatic analysis of humanistic objects and artefacts. This approach seemed prevalent in the first historical phase of DH, reflected in canonical definitions like “the application of computational methods to humanities research and teaching” or “researching the Humanities through digital perspectives, researching digital technologies from the perspective of the Humanities” <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<p>But what are the effects of these methods and technologies? The answer to this question coincides with the new phase that DH is actually in at the moment, a phase that forces us to consider the costs of all of the above, the ethical, social, and political implications of the instruments, resources and infrastructure, and the cultural biases inherent in their conception and design.</p>
<h3>The social and political implications of DH</h3>
<p>Fr Busa’s “hermeneutic” approach has been the main focus of the past 20 years of DH, while the methodological and epistemological concerns have been pushed to one side. The reason for this is fairly simple. Since the overwhelming majority of evidence on which the memory of people is based (particularly in the West) is the written text, the computer, a manipulator of alphanumeric symbols, has been shown to be a powerful agent of their preservation and management. This need to unravel the concept of the “text as data”, as mentioned above, has pushed aside for the moment the question of interface, that is, ways for the text to be used and read.</p>
<p>The materiality of written documents, given their incredible linguistic and cultural diversity, their visual and pragmatic dimensions, etc. (especially holographs and manuscripts) does not marry all that well with the limited possibilities offered by information science – or at least doesn’t fit with what has been produced by those who have guided its development thus far. Therefore, up until the early 2000s, the Digital Humanities focused especially on the design of tools and resources for the analysis and preservation of written documents. The spread of the Web from the mid-1990s, despite the first rumblings on the theme of user interface development (which Busa always considered to be a minor problem), ended by confirming this tendency.</p>
<p>There was in my view a precise moment when this concept of “text as data” reached a point of crisis, by showing its dark side. As humanists we would probably have preferred to continue our work quietly as if nothing had changed, but at a certain point something monumental happened, an event which has changed our relation with the digital dimension of knowledge, and hence of research. And this moment was the 6th of June 2013, when the Washington Post and the Guardian began publishing the documents supplied by Edward Snowden about mass surveillance by the NSA. The immensity of this event was immediately clear: a document published by the US National Security Agency and its British twin (GCHQ), said that in one month alone over 181 million records had been collected, including metadata and content (text, audio and video [Gellman and Soltani, 2013]).</p>
<p>The news that in July 2016 half of Silicon Valley, from Amazon to Google, had been co-opted by the Pentagon (Collins, 2016), and the dynamics of the last presidential elections in the USA confirmed, that the Net has become the field on which the geopolitical balances of the planet are played out. And at the centre of this “new world” is the idea of the “universal archive” where all data (past, present, and future) are stored. It is here that both the hermeneutical and epistemological questions fall down. In modern times, knowledge and interpretation depended on history, which we conceived as a linear process, i.e. based on space and time. But the dynamics of digital data seem to escape the logics of space and time, because the digital archive is ubiquitous and eternally present.</p>
<p>In my opinion, the heritage of Busa is reflected by the obsession with control (collection) and the analysis (interpretation) of data by government agencies and high-tech multinationals. Both have committed to the “hermeneutic” vision (although of the bare bones variety), or rather to the analysis of huge amounts of our data as the basis of their interpretation of the world. Welcome to the fantastic world of Big Data...</p>
<p>The question is no longer what the document is or how it is represented (an epistemological question) or how it is to be interpreted (a hermeneutical question). Even if the better forces of DH have insisted on this point and on the necessity of proceeding in this order (because interpretation of the object is inseparable from the circumstance of its representation), these “humanistic” scruples appear suddenly irrelevant. The actual question is in fact “who are we really?” Or rather not us, but the creation through our digital footprint of an alter ego that the algorithms of Google or Facebook decree is more “true” than the other (which we mistakenly believe still to exist). But who will be able to decipher or take apart these stories (data + algorithms) which we daily write and re-write? And does it still make sense to investigate the instruments of production and preservation of memories and knowledge when we no longer have any control over them?</p>
<p>Geoffrey Rockwell and I recently tried to analyze a commercial surveillance package, Palantir, from the point of view of DH (Rockwell and Fiormonte, 2017). Palantir scans and combines data from “documents, websites, social media and databases, turning that information into people, places, events, things, displaying those connections on your computer screen, and allowing you to probe and analyze the links between them” (Anyadike, 2016). But these kinds of software can be also seen as story-telling tools, because they allow someone to build stories about us and through us. So there seems to be a “literary” and rhetorical side to surveillance software, which the digital humanist seems particularly well-equipped to analyze. After all, the story of Big Data is also our story. There seems to be an “original sin” present in Big Data, i.e. the information retrieval paradigm that treats stories as data and data as a resource to be mined. And this approach is clearly reflected in Busa’s original idea of computational hermeneutics: digitize your texts, get your data, then build an interpretation upon them.</p>
<p>A posteriori we can ask ourselves what happened on that distant morning in 1949 in the heads of Thomas J. Watson Sr. and Father Busa. Was the founder and owner of IBM conscious of what the vision of Father Busa would lead to? And could the Jesuit father have ever expected that his intuition would change not only our means of reading and interpreting history, but also how we construct it? No one can ever know. But history reaffirms once again the great responsibility of science – in this case the responsibility of the “ignorant” humanities. If anyone believes that the humanities do not have a future, it is good to read again how 70 years ago a meeting between Thomas Aquinas and computers formed the basis of a revolution in digital communication. But from now on, the role and responsibility of the humanist will not only be to preserve and interpret the signs of the past, but to engage critically with, and where necessary unmask, the technological, political and social discourses that are shaping our knowledge, memories, and consciousness.</p>
<p><em>This article was translated by Desmond Schmidt.</em></p>
<h3>Note</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Selected responses to the question “How do you define DH?” from Day of DH 2012. Accessed from <a href="http://archive.artsrn.ualberta.ca/Day-of-DH-2012/dh/index.html">http://archive.artsrn.ualberta.ca/Day-of-DH-2012/dh/index.html</a>.</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p>Anyadike, Obi (2016). Spies Sans Frontières? How CIA-linked Palantir is gaining ground in the aid industry (and why some humanitarians are worried). IRIN, March 7, 2016. Accessed from <a href="https://www.irinnews.org/investigations/2016/03/07/spies-sans-fronti%C3%A8res">https://www.irinnews.org/investigations/2016/03/07/spies-sans-fronti%C3%A8res</a>.</p>
<p>Collins, Terry (2016). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos joins Pentagon innovation board. CNet, July 28, 2016. Accessed from <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/jeff-bezos-amazon-blue-origin-pentagon-ash-carter-eric-schmidt-google/">https://www.cnet.com/news/jeff-bezos-amazon-blue-origin-pentagon-ash-carter-eric-schmidt-google/</a>.</p>
<p>Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.</p>
<p>Gellman, Barton – Soltani, Ashkan (2013). NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say. The Washington Post, October 30, 2013. Accessed from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html</a>.</p>
<p>Jones, Steven E. (2016). Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing. The Priest and the Punched Cards. London, Routledge.</p>
<p>Orlandi, Tito (2010). Informatica testuale. Teoria e prassi. Roma-Bari, Laterza.</p>
<p>Perri, Antonio (2009). Al di là della tecnologia, la scrittura. Il caso Unicode. Annali dell’Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Vol. II, pp. 725-748.</p>
<p>Pressman, Jessica (2014). Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford, Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>Rockwell, Geoffrey and Fiormonte, Domenico (2017). Palantir: Reading the Surveillance Thing. Critical Software Stories as a Way of the Digital Humanities. Paper presented at the AIUCD 2017 Conference, University of La Sapienza, Rome, January 26-28, 2017.</p>
<p>Steiner, George (1998). After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford, Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>Stiegler, Bernard (2006). Anamnesis and Hypomnesis. The Memories of Desire. In Armand, L. and Bradley, A. ed., Technicity. Prague, Litteraria Pragensia, pp. 15-41. Online version. Accessed from <a href="http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis">http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis</a>.</p>
<h3>Author</h3>
<p>Domenico Fiormonte (PhD University of Edinburgh) is currently a lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre. In 1996 he created one of the first online resources on textual variation (www.digitalvariants.org). He has edited and co-edited a number of collections of digital humanities texts, and has published books and articles on digital philology, new media writing, text encoding, and cultural criticism of DH. His latest publication is <em><a href="https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-digital-humanist/">The Digital Humanist. A critical inquiry</a></em> (Punctum 2015) with Teresa Numerico and Francesca Tomasi. His current research interests are moving towards the creation of new tools and methodologies for promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in the humanities (<a href="http://www.newhumanities.org">http://www.newhumanities.org</a>).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/the-digital-humanities-from-father-busa-to-edward-snowden'>https://cis-india.org/raw/the-digital-humanities-from-father-busa-to-edward-snowden</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkRAW BlogDigital Humanities2017-10-04T11:02:10ZBlog EntryThe Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop
<b>What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary
pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by <a class="external-link" href="http://heira.in/">HEIRA</a>: The need for innovative
curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered
by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom
teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty
members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more
inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and
through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In
this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student
engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the
digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain
innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning
environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.</p>
<p><strong>Peer 2 Peer:</strong> One of the observations that was made
unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn
faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a
personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established
human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that
have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the
digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become
the call of the day.</p>
<p>Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom,
rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth
conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a
space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to
start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in
the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a <em>facilitator</em> who builds conditions of
knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship
with the idea of curriculum and teaching.</p>
<p><strong>Reciprocal evaluation</strong>: It was pointed out that the grade
oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative
and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the
curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom
learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not
offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes
difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the
differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways
by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation
patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would
recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.</p>
<p>Inspired by the Badges contest at <a class="external-link" href="http://hastac.org/tag/badges">HASTAC</a>,
it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades.
Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and
behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to
understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles
that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to
offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps
them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of
learning.</p>
<p><strong>Role based learning: </strong>Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar
condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and
novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make
them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same
time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness
the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as
not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with
different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education
classroom.</p>
<p>We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not
only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the
classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is
lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has
differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different
because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with
each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce
knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.</p>
<p>These initial discussions look at the possibility of
innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and
differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations
opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more
inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be
improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces
where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are
disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not
just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it
encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made
stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesFeaturedNew PedagogiesResearchers at WorkDigital Pluralism2015-05-08T12:36:29ZBlog EntryThe Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia
<b>The digital turn in education comes across a wide range of initiatives and processes. The Wikipedia which is the largest user generated content website stands as a figurehead of such a digital turn, writes Nishant Shah.</b>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>The digital turn in education has been described across a wide range of initiatives and processes. These include the introduction of digital tools and gadgets as a part of the learning environment, building digital archives and repositories of learning and curriculum building, facilitating remote access to education through information and communications technologies infrastructure, improving quality of access to education and learning resources, building diverse and customised syllabi to accommodate for alternative and contesting perspectives, building peer knowledge communities of information and knowledge production, and including non-canonical material and experiences into formal institutions of education. Different locations, contexts, geo-political circumstances, socio-economic factors, and cultural differences influence the spread, rise and integration of digital technologies in mainstream education. Much academic, policy and implementation attention has been given to these processes and several models of new learning environments and infrastructure have been postulated over the last two decades. The democratising promise of internet technologies has been largely if not exclusively about education, learning, literacy and production of knowledge from different parts of the world.</p>
Wikipedia, one of the first and possibly the largest user generated content websites, that aims to put together the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’ in an open encyclopaedia, stands as the figurehead of such a digital turn. It questions and subverts the traditional analogue forms of knowledge production and relationships. The much discussed experiment conducted by Nature (Giles, 2005 and Orlowski, 2006) that established Wikipedia as an almost equal (if not more) reliable source of information to the fountainhead of print-based knowledge <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica</em>, has become the touchstone by which digital collaborative knowledge structures seek their validity within mainstream classroom pedagogy and learning.
Wikipedia itself has emerged as an object of deep scrutiny and contestation, with warring factions going strong about its strengths and weaknesses. The supporters look at how this collaborative peer-to-peer structure has changed knowledge relationships that defined consumers, producers and mediators of knowledge. They see in the rise of Wikipedia, and other such wiki-based structures and user generated content sites that remix, reuse and share knowledge within the digital realm, the potentials and possibilities of changing the futures of knowledge ecologies and economies. The detractors of Wikipedia make a strong case for specialised and expert curatorial practices of knowledge, without which the information explosion of the digital world would collapse all distinctions between speculative writing and rigorous accountable research.
<h2>Concerns</h2>
<p>In the seemingly unbridgeable differences of these two contesting positions, there is however, a set of common presumptions which remained unquestioned and unchallenged. The example of Wikipedia accordingly serves to throw in sharp relief these more general questions regarding digitally produced knowledge and digitally enabled learning practices.</p>
<h3><strong>Design of Trust</strong></h3>
<h3></h3>
<p>The first among them is the concern around Authority and Authorship (Liang, 2010). Increasingly, as Wikipedia becomes a de facto global reference site available in different languages, there is a growing dependence on the authority of information available on Wikipedia. Given that the number of users of Wikipedia is exponentially higher than the number of editors on Wikipedia, there are many users who never confront the structures of participation, processes of editing, and questioning the source of information (Harouni, 2009, Broughton, 2002) found on the site. This is not a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. Given the explosion of user generated sites which often gloss over the problems of authority and authorship, misdirected or misguided information, there is a need for digital criticality which can help people sift through different kinds of information and develop the capacity for effective critical judgment regarding both truth or falsity and rhetorical persuasiveness or manipulation. Especially within the context of scholarly and academic research and learning, classroom teaching and pedagogy, there is a need to define new parameters by which information introduced in the classroom or learning environment needs to stand deeper scrutiny regarding reliability (over authority).</p>
<h3>Flattened Politics</h3>
<p>The second concern has to do with the depoliticized perception of participation, collaboration and knowledge production on Wikipedia (Graham, 2010). Not only are geographical counters, experiential knowledges and non-standard forms of citation (Prabhala, 2010) ignored on Wikipedia, but they are also rendered redundant under the guise of objectivity. The essentially viral nature of information online and conditions of easy replicability that allow for copy and paste cultures often means that the information gets de-contextualised and de-politicized from its original intentions and circuits of production/distribution.</p>
<p>In many ways, Wikipedia’s adherence to an encyclopaedic model, promotes the idea that there is universal, objective knowledge which can be produced and understood without engaging with the politics of context, language, translation, evidence, etc. This adoption of an older model of aggregating knowledge becomes problematic in the light of new perspectives and theories of reading and writing, which establish knowledge as a contested terrain rather than the benign site that can be mediated through protocols, bots and procedures (Miller, 2007 and Rosenzweig, 2006). In classrooms, students and teachers are both faced with problems when they encounter the simultaneously authoritative and collaborative, definite and tentative nature of information on Wikipedia. The flattened structure of information further complicates our engagement with the larger contexts it refers to and often hinders the learner’s ability to go beyond the self contained universe of Wikipedia, unable to engage with that which has been omitted or left-out and only concentrating on that what has been written and represented.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<h3>Technology as Tool</h3>
<p>The third concern marks a larger anxiety with the Web 2.0 technologies
and their integration with formal structures of education and learning.
It has to do with new configurations of power, recalibrated hierarchies
of learning and teaching, and distributed communities of learning which
might not often be cohesive and concurrent. With the unqualified
emphasis on digital gadgets – OLPC, Smart Boards, iPads – and ubiquitous
connectivity, there is often a danger to reducing these structures to
sheer functionality. There have been experiments where pedagogues have
merely introduced user generated sites as reference material and ways of
accessing information without actually looking at how they posit
questions to existing education systems. The larger trend of distrusting
non-academic spaces continues.</p>
</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/DC.jpg/image_preview" title="Digital Technology" height="270" width="363" alt="Digital Technology" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>A lecture on the problems of Wikipedia
is immediately followed by a ban on or “policing” of the use of
Wikipedia as a reliable resource, trying to create a false and divisive
distinction between offline and online learning tools (Davidson, 2007).
With the increased focus on ‘Digital Natives’ within education policy
and everyday classroom pedagogy, there is a call for changing the
existing classroom and replacing it with a digital classroom – a classroom that challenges the teacher-student relationships, the
authority of the prescribed curricula, and the form of learning and
teaching within college and university structures. The Digital Classroom
is often mistaken to be a virtualisation of the contemporary classroom,
where virtual presences and cloud-based resources of learning structure
the syllabi and the methods of learning. However, the larger anxieties
are about rendering the physical classroom digital by establishing new
relationships and structures at the levels of curricula design,
teaching, learning and evaluation. The need is to look beyond the social
media as a tool, and start unpacking the transparency of the digital
interface and the perceived non-hierarchical nature of information
filtering (Geiger, 2010) on Wikipedia and other such user generated
content portals.</p>
<h3>Quality of Access</h3>
<p>The fourth concern draws from digital internet rhetoric of Do It Yourself. There is a heavy promotion of howthe only thing that stops a student (or anybody who is a learner) from being an intelligent and engaged student is lack of resources. This rhetoric finds bolstering in other political movements like FLOSS and A2K (Willinsky, 2006). There is a presumption that the teacher is merely a proxy for the paucity of resources and that once the students have unlimited access to the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’, they will be able to Learn everything on their own. The DIY University models, the proposition of phasing out teachers and investing in digital infrastructure instead, the idea that the digital native student has instinctive abilities to navigate through knowledge systems (like a fish does to water), all obfuscate not only the traditional learning processes but also reduce all learning to Access.</p>
<p>There is no debate about the quality of access. Even when factual errors are spotted, it is celebrated as an opportunity to improve so that information on Wikipedia is by definition flawed and always potentially in the process of being improved. There is little theorisation of both the role of a teacher in a classroom and the relationship with information access and learning. The presumption that the only gating factor to better education is lack of resources glosses over questions of social and economic disadvantage, political contexts, age, language, race, gender, sexuality, social support, etc., that come into play when designing inclusive education systems. Instead, there is a promotion of fact-based skill-oriented learning that fits the larger neo-liberal agenda of producing workforces who necessarily should not have to be critical in their everyday labours (Achterman, 2005). Universities and colleges are finding increasing pressure to produce students who work within such flat knowledge horizons towards market expansion and promotion of information capitalism rather than a critical learner who is able to deploy lessons learned from education in order to question and change the reality of the conditions within which s/he lives.</p>
<h2>Rationale<br /></h2>
<p>Given these dramatic measures and accelerated changes happening in academia and within the university systems across the worlds, it is necessary to dwell on what a digital college classroom and learning environment looks like in the time of Wikipedia. A synthesis of perspectives from different stakeholders in varied disciplines, engaging with knowledge production, consumption, distribution and access is necessary to understand what the futures and contours of the university system and classroom pedagogy are. The ambition is to look at Wikipedia as a symptom of our times rather than a site of analyses.</p>
<h2>Call for Proposals</h2>
<p>This is a call for proposals towards a special Reader, from people who are interested in producing historical and contemporary accounts of relationships between education, technology, learning, and pedagogy in order to map existing crises and questions of our present times. We take the classroom as the unit where different processes and flows of the education system meet. In this context, we invite researchers, academic practitioners, students, artists, new media theorists, education policy actors and historians of knowledge to look at the <em>Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia</em> as an opportunity to question global trends in education and ways by which Wikipedia (and other such structures) can be fruitfully integrated in formal education towards better learning. Proposals can be for producing theoretical accounts, critical analyses, case-studies from one’s practice, review of information and knowledge, narratives of art and activist interventions, regional and local snap-shots, and other innovative forms by which the diverse and complex questions can be elaborated.</p>
<h2>Key Questions</h2>
<p>Proposals can be inspired by but not limited to some of the questions listed below that we identify as beginning points for engaging with the area:</p>
<ol><li>What does a digital classroom look like? If we had to think beyond just integration of digital tools into the classroom, what are the new models and structures of classrooms (physical, pedagogical, or otherwise) that we are looking at?</li><li>What are the new relationships that we are mapping in the time of Wikipedia – student-teacher, teacher-curriculum, student-classroom, student-student, technology-education, pedagogy-learning? How do we account for the shifts and map the transitions?</li><li>How do we understand the changing nature and function of the university and education with the rise of the internet? What are the policy and practice visions of the University of the Future?</li><li>What does the integration of Wikipedia and similar structures in everyday classroom practice lead to? What does it change and for whom?</li><li>What is the role of the teacher in the age of ubiquitous information access? How do we restructure our ideas of pedagogy, learning and evaluation?</li><li>What are the historical tensions between technology and education that are being replayed with the rise of the digital?</li><li>What does the rise of Wikipedia mean for our traditional understandings of data repositories? What are the politics and implications of Wikimedia’s other projects on Alternative Citation, Wikipictures, GLAM, etc. on the larger knowledge ecology and industry?</li></ol>
<hr />
<p><strong>References</strong>:</p>
<ol><li>Achterman, D. (2005). “Surviving Wikipedia: Improving student search habits through information literacy and teacher collaboration”, <em>Knowledge Quest</em>, 33(5), 38−40.</li><li>Davidson, C. (2007). “We can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies”,<em> Education Digest</em>, 73(1), 15−18.</li><li>Geiger, S. (2011). “The Lives of Bots”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Giles, J. (2005). “Internet encyclopedias go head to head”, <em>Nature</em>, 438(7070), 900−901.</li><li>Graham, M. (2011). “Wiki Space: Palimpsests and the Politics of Exclusion”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Harouni, H. (2009). “High School Research and Critical Literacy: Social Studies with and Despite Wikipedia”, <em>Harvard Educational Review</em>, 79 (3), 473-494.</li><li>Liang, L. (2011). “A brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Miller, N. (2007). “Wikipedia revisited” <em>ETC: A Review of General Semantics</em>, 64(2), 147−150.</li><li>Orlowski, A. (2006, March 26). Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study, <em>The Register</em>. Retrieved December 17, 2011, from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/</a></li><li>Prabhala, A. (2011). <em>People Are Knowledge</em>. Documentary retrieved from December 17, 2011 from <a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/26469276">http://vimeo.com/26469276</a>.</li><li>Rosenzweig, R. (2006). “Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past” <em>Journal of American History</em>, 93(1), 117–146.</li><li>Willinsky, J. (2006). <em>The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship</em>. MIT Press :Massachusetts.
<hr /><strong>Collaborators</strong>: Dr. David Theo Goldberg, <em>University of California
Humanities Research Institute</em> and Claudia Sullivan, <em>Digital Media and
Learning Initiative, HASTAC</em>.<br /><strong>Photo source</strong>: <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=digital+classrooms&l=1">Flickr</a> (Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution and share alike distribution).<br /></li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia</a>
</p>
No publishernishantWikipediaResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia2015-10-05T14:53:30ZBlog EntryThe Curious Incidents on Matrimonial Websites in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india
<b>This essay by Abhimanyu Roy is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author explores how the curious interplays between the arranged marriage market in India the rise of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com. The gravity of the impact that such web-based services have on the lives of users is substantially greater than most other everyday web-enabled transactions, such as an Uber ride or a Foodpanda order. From outright fraud to online harassment, newspaper back pages are filled with nightmare stories that begin on a matrimonial website. So much so that the Indian government has set up a panel to regulate matrimonial sites. The essay analyses the role of matrimonial websites in modern day India, and the challenges this awkward amalgamation of the internet and love gives rise to.</b>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><em>A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.</em><br />— Mignon McLaughlin <strong>[1]</strong></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>People say ours is an arranged marriage. In a way, our meeting was arranged by our parents but eventually it was the two of us who decided on the marriage. We met and went out together for a few times. We dated for a while and then agreed to marry...</em><br />— Madhuri Dixit <strong>[2]</strong></blockquote>
<p>Mignon McLaughlin was a pioneer American journalist. Madhuri Dixit is one of the most popular Indian film actresses in recent memory. They are both women who have led very public lives and they have also had long and happy marriages. Yet, their quotes offer an insight into the very different ways in which they began their marital lives. Unlike the West, love is not inextricably linked to marriage in India. A number of factors such as class, race, caste and financial considerations come into the picture in matrimony – it is not far-fetched to think Ms. Dixit’s parents would not have introduced her to her future groom if he did not fulfill certain criteria.</p>
<p>This makes internet-enabled disruption extremely complex. Any system that aims to disrupt needs to take into consideration systemic elements. E.g. Uber needs to consider fuel prices, regulations, economic fluctuations and real-time demand while setting their prices. However, when unpredictable emotions, sociology and psychological states of not just the individuals involved in the union but also others such as their families come into the picture, things become incredibly complicated. This gives rise to a number of unwanted situations from fraud to blackmail. At the same time, websites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com continue to gain more users – an indication that a lot of people have found their life partners on these platforms. To gain an understanding of this situation, let us first ask a question – who is the modern Indian?</p>
<h3>Identity Crash</h3>
<p>In their contribution to the 2002 book <em>Building Virtual Communities</em>, Dorian Wiszniewski and Richard Coyne first put forth the concept of the mask in the context of online interactions. The authors stated that idiosyncrasies of internet interactions – lack of physical presence, relative anonymity etc. – allowed individuals to reveal more about self-identity than conventional social interactions <strong>[3]</strong>. In particular, the authors point out that the choices that online contributors make regarding their profiles, style of writing and topics that they follow represent an ideal version of themselves as opposed to their offline social identity which depends more on the perceptions of others about the individual.</p>
<p>Perhaps no-where is this more evident than the modern online media landscape in India. A look at some of the most popular content on the Indian sub-sections of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and YouTube presents a revealing picture of modern young India that runs counter to the conventional notion of family-centricity and social conservatism. Channels such as Being Indian on YouTube that has videos asking Bengaluru citizens about penis sizes and Mumbaikars on office romances, content produced by popular Buzzfeed authors such as Rega Jha and Sahil Rizwan and hard-hitting editorials from outlets such as Quartz and Huffington Post regarding love, marriage, sexuality and abuse reflect an undercurrent of social liberalism that is unseen in conventional social circles.</p>
<p>But for all that online liberalism, a 2013 survey commissioned by the Taj Group of Hotels and carried out by market research agency IPSOS revealed that 75% of Indians in the age group of 18 to 35 preferred arranged marriages <strong>[4]</strong>. What explains this apparent cognitive dissonance? A possible answer comes from a study commissioned by the UK government in 2013. The study called ‘What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?’ posits that it is easier to deconstruct online identities compared to offline ones – upload pictures, share content, post status updates. The offline identity, on the other hand, has a sense of permanence associated with it and more difficult to rebuild. In clash between a malleable identity and a permanent one, the permanent one wins out <strong>[5]</strong>.</p>
<p>This gives rise to an interesting conundrum – is it possible for one to take a decision for their offline identity based on information provided by someone who is representing their online self?</p>
<h3>Shaadi</h3>
<p>Anupam Mittal was working in a business intelligence firm in America during the dot com boom. Every year he used to visit his family back in India. On one of these visits in 1997, he had a chance meeting with a match-maker. After wriggling his way out of the encounter (there were many uncomfortable personal questions for his liking), he came up with an idea for a portal where prospective brides and grooms would be able to upload their profiles and cut out the middleman in India’s marriage ecosystem. This idea led to sagaai.com, which would eventually become shaadi.com <strong>[6]</strong>.</p>
<p>By 2008, Shaadi.com was one of India’s five most popular websites. It had over 300 million page views each month and 6000 profiles were added every day <strong>[7]</strong>. Since then, the online matrimony market has become more segmented and numerous clones have cropped up – most notably, Jeevansaathi.com and BharatMatrimony.com. While this has somewhat taken the sheen off from Shaadi’s dominance, the portal still remains the market leader in India.</p>
<p>In the numerous interviews that Mittal has given since the launch of Shaadi, he always attributes the success of the portal to one attribute – it makes the process of marriage easier <strong>[8]</strong>. This statement, however simple it may seem on the surface, actually encompasses a number of factors – a wider pool of prospective spouses, circumventing match-makers, objective representation, and testimonials of satisfied clients. However, collating a large number of prospective brides and grooms and facilitating the union is not a new phenomenon. It has been around for years in India – centuries in fact.</p>
<p>For a very long time, parents who wanted their children to be wedded in India would contact a marriage broker. This individual (or in some cases, agency) would keep on record the details of a large number of prospective life partners. Thereafter, much like a recruitment agency, they would match the details to the request of their clients and arrange a meeting. As news media began to grow in prominence in the nation, matrimony-seekers started to find a way around marriage brokers. This led to the emergence of matrimonial ads in newspapers <strong>[9]</strong>. The main advantage that matrimonial ads had was that they allowed people access to a huge number of prospective spouses – a much larger pool than those of marriage brokers <strong>[10]</strong>.</p>
<p>To understand why matrimonial websites supplanted both brokers and newspaper advertisements one has to look at the deficiencies in both systems. Brokers while primarily only facilitating introductions actually impact every facet of the wedding <strong>[11]</strong>. They would make the wedding arrangements, find the purohit (priest), fix the guest list, determine astrological suitability and (in the past) even negotiate the dowry. In each of these transactions, the broker has a profit motive, which is what makes brokers a very troubling medium – they have an incentive to do what is best for them and not for their clients. At its best, this might involve getting more expensive flowers for the ceremony. At its worst, they may knowingly push a bride into a marriage they know is unsuitable but would yield them greater profits.</p>
<p>Of course, if one wanted to not get into this system, they could always put out a matrimony ad in the newspaper. Except, the greatest advantage of matrimonial ads is also their greatest weakness. While it’s true that putting out an ad in a newspaper opened up a large number of choices for a man or woman, it also opened them up to the general public <strong>[12]</strong>. Instead of having a broker narrow down their options to a few people, the advertisers would now have to sift through a plethora of propositions – many of which they would never even consider. Shaadi was a game-changer in both these aspects. Customizability allowed users to pick and choose who was able to view their profiles on the website – thus eliminating solicitors who did not meet their criteria for a spouse <strong>[13]</strong>. At the same time, Shaadi’s revenue model limited its operations to only facilitating a meeting between the two parties. This kept in check the profit incentive that was inherent to brokers <strong>[14]</strong>. By identifying weak points in both models and catalyzing a beneficial change for the user, Shaadi.com (and other matrimonial websites) were able to gain a foothold in India’s marriage industry.</p>
<p>With over 2 million unions that were initiated online since the inception of Shaadi.com, it would seem as though online matrimony is a success <strong>[15]</strong>. However, there is a dark side to this phenomenon – a 2012 report by the Economic Times found that almost half the divorces in metros were by couples who met through a matrimony website. Unsurprisingly, the main reason for this was misrepresentation of details on online profiles <strong>[16]</strong>.</p>
<p>While the increasing acceptance of online matrimony points to its popularity and the success of decision-making based on the representation of the self-identity of individuals, the high number of divorces suggests that there are clear gaps in the system that can lead to some very uncomfortable situations. An examination of the decision-making process for internet-based tractions is required to understand why online matrimony-seekers make the decisions that they do and the consequences of those choices when it comes to marriage.</p>
<h3>Choices</h3>
<p>Economic theory bases decision-making on the principle of utility maximization <strong>[17]</strong>. Fundamentally, given a set of choices we would pick the option that gives us the greatest benefit for the lowest cost. Individuals weigh benefits on a set of criteria that are subjective in nature and differ from person to person – Akash may like 2 chocolates and 1 ice cream for Rs. 10 but Megha might prefer 2 ice creams and 1 chocolate for Rs. 10 instead.</p>
<p>The basic assumption in this model is that the choices are well-defined, i.e. there is no hidden information that might change the decision-maker’s opinion. Any hidden information changes the context within which the decision is taken – Megha certainly would not prefer to have ice creams if it was very cold that day. This has serious implications for a medium where decision-making is governed by trust on the parties furnishing the decision-maker with the facts upon which to make their choice.</p>
<p>Although there are many factors upon which an online suitor would base their decision to pursue a potential spouse, evidence from the operation of matrimonial websites has found that there are actually six criterions that matter the most – education, religion, age, height, work area and caste.[18] Evidence about misrepresentation among these six factors in Indian matrimony is sparse. However, research into western dating websites suggests that most of the fudging tends to occur for height, age and weight <strong>[19]</strong>. It should come as no surprise that these are the hardest factors to verify – a bride’s family may ask to see proof of the groom’s employment and education but would think twice before asking to measure his height or test his age.</p>
<p>Ensuring honesty on a matrimonial website is a difficult proposition. The profile creators are governed by the same economic theory of decision-making that was laid out earlier. If a prospective suitor thinks he would get a better spouse by increasing their height by a couple of inches or decreasing their age by a few years, why wouldn’t they lie? On the operators’ end, verifying the truth behind any of the claims is also problematic – how do you gauge the veracity of someone’s age by a picture? The problem on the operators’ end goes much deeper though and this is where the situation starts to get murky.</p>
<p>While physical characteristics are the easiest ones to be deceptive about one can also lie about their educational and employment credentials. The mandate of matrimonial websites is to connect brides and grooms. The onus of verifying the truth behind the claims made by either party lies on the opposite group and not on the operators of the medium <strong>[20]</strong>. Besides, verifying whether someone went to a particular university or not or is employed in the same capacity as their claims requires resources that matrimonial websites do not possess. This gives rise to the most troubling aspect of such websites – fraud.</p>
<h3>Deception</h3>
<p>In 2014, a Mumbai-based woman met a man named Michael Williams who claimed to be based in the United Kingdom on BharatMatrimony.com. After some weeks of courtship, Williams had swept her off her feet. In late July of that year, he informed her that he would be visiting India but upon his arrival, he informed her that he had been detained by the customs department for carrying excessive foreign currency and would require an ‘anti-terrorist certificate’ in order to be allowed in the country. He asked her for some money – the customs department required Indian currency – and she obliged. However, after receiving her assistance she did not hear from him again. Williams had duped her out of 2.93 lakhs.</p>
<p>Upon contacting BharatMatrimony.com, the portal informed her that they had suspended Williams’ profile and the responsibility of verifying his claims lay with her. After a protracted legal case, the Mumbai High Court ruled that the portal was not liable for fraud <strong>[21]</strong>.</p>
<p>This is not a unique case. Several cases of fraud, sexual abuse and harassment have occurred on matrimony websites <strong>[22]</strong>. Users have tried several mechanisms to verify the details that they are provided with on these sites. From asking probing questions to discern any possible duplicity to even hiring detectives to find the truth about their possible spouses and (more recently) checking social media profiles, men and women on matrimonial sites go to extreme lengths to determine the veracity of the information that they have been provided with <strong>[23]</strong>. However, not everyone is as vigilant and quite a few times terrible experiences ranging from theft to sexual assault have begun through a meeting on a matrimonial website <strong>[24]</strong> <strong>[25]</strong> <strong>[26]</strong>.</p>
<p>The lack of clear regulation and policy coupled with India’s lax laws governing online transactions make it difficult to draw a line where the responsibility of the websites end and that of the users begin. Fortunately, this situation is changing.</p>
<h3>Oversight</h3>
<p>Governments in most countries have an unusually significant role to play in an institution that is supposed to be between two people. From inheritance laws to prohibition of certain types of unions – most prominently and controversially the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States – governments straddle a complicated middle ground between having too much influence in marital affairs to having too little.</p>
<p>Even so, the Indian government’s involvement in marriage in especially extensive. From anti-dowry legislation to prohibition of child marriage, the government has always had a vital role to play.</p>
<p>In November 2015, the Indian government decided to set up a panel that would make recommendations for the regulation of matrimonial websites in order to check abuse <strong>[27]</strong>. The initiative is an undertaking of the Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry. The panel consists of members from the WCD ministry, Home ministry and Department of Electronics and Information Technology along with representatives from matrimonial websites such as Shaadi.com and Jeevansathi.com. Ministry officials pointed out that the growing number of cases of fraud and abuse occurring on such websites was the prevailing reason for the formation of the panel.</p>
<p>In June 2016, the panel made its recommendations. It was now mandatory for websites to keep track of the IP addresses of its users. Documentation from users would now also be solicited to verify their identity and curb instances of fraud. Matrimonial websites are also required to now explicitly spell out that they are for matrimony and not for dating <strong>[28]</strong>.</p>
<p>While the government has cited that these regulations are to protect users of these websites, the operators of these websites have so far declined to comment on the guidelines (at the time of writing of this essay, the full list of guidelines has not yet been made public and have not formally been presented to the operators of matrimonial websites) <strong>[29]</strong>. However, any protestations from operators notwithstanding, regulation will be an integral part of the future of matrimonial websites in India. This brings us to an important question – what indeed is the future of these websites? Will they withstand the crime that occurs on them or will they become an irreplaceable part of life in India?</p>
<h3>Future</h3>
<p>The online matrimony industry in India is estimated to be worth $225 million by 2017 <strong>[30]</strong>. In 2013 over 50 million new subscribers registered across these websites <strong>[31]</strong>. Despite, the stories of fraud and abuse that start on these portals and end in courts, matrimonial websites are growing and are here to stay.</p>
<p>Operators of these websites are undertaking various market development exercises to bring in new customers. The most visible of these is the segmentation of the market – BharatMatrimony and Shaadi, have launched a number of targeted community driven portals such as PunjabiMatrimony.com, EliteMatrimony.com, Bengalishaadi.com among others <strong>[32]</strong>.</p>
<p>In an interview of February 2015, Gourav Rakshit Chief Operating Officer of Shaadi.com laid out operational changes that the market leader is contemplating implementing. To prevent deceptive information provided by users, stricter guidelines regarding the upload of photographs on the website are being implemented as well as the implementation of a screening procedure for profiles and the development of a stronger relationship with the cyber-crime branch of law enforcement agencies <strong>[33]</strong>.</p>
<p>The final cog in the future of matrimony websites is technology. Mobile and real-time engagement strategies are being actively considered by these websites in their quest to drive up their user base and find new streams of revenue <strong>[34]</strong>.</p>
<p>But this not where the journey of matrimony websites ends. As with every great voyage, its conclusion is the beginning of another great expedition. Just as Shaadi.com and others had rode the early wave of disruption in the Indian wedding industry, so too are a number of new and upcoming internet-based services. Companies such as 7Vachan, Big Indian Wedding and ShaadiMagic offer a host of options for banquet halls, priests, makeup artists, photographers etc. These startups simplify the long process that is planning an Indian wedding. Would-be brides and grooms or their families can easily connect with vendors, make their final choices and organize every aspect of the wedding in a pristine manner instead of the general chaos that ensues while planning a wedding. As these companies prove, the disruption of the wedding industry that was started by matrimonial websites will continue in the foreseeable future <strong>[35]</strong>.</p>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
<p>In the March 2005 issue of New York magazine, a New York-based author of Indian-origin chronicles her and her family’s trysts with arranged marriage <strong>[36]</strong>. The article titled ‘Is Arranged Marriage any worse than Craigslist?’ is an examination of the experiences of the Indian diaspora with an institution that is deeply ingrained in their identity. In it, the author recalls an experience from her childhood wherein she had fallen out of the window of their home as a baby and had broken her arm. According to her father, the primary concern of her mother was that they should never mention this incident to anyone as it would greatly increase the dowry her family would have to pay her husband. Aside from being an event that shows the contradictions that Indian expats face in a western countries, it also shows how deeply the institution of marriage is rooted in Indians’ identity.</p>
<p>According to UNICEF, 90% of marriages in India are arranged <strong>[37]</strong>. Parents center their children’s lives on the event right from the outset. To industrialize an environment that has such deep emotional connections within it is fraught with dangers and the online matrimony business has had to deal with fraud and abuse. But along the way, they have permanently disrupted the way Indians get married. The growing popularity of these websites are a testament not just to their efficacy but also to the spirit of a new India. Government intervention and the oversight of website operators is bringing about greater improvements in fraud detection and abuse prevention on these websites. As the market continues to evolve, bring in more users and cater to new audiences, online matrimony will continue to thrive in India for a very long time to come.</p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Mignon McLaughlin. In Wikipedia. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignon_McLaughlin.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Madhuri Dixit Quotes. In BollyNook. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.bollynook.com/en/madhuri-dixit-quotes.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Renninger, K. A., & Shumar, W. (2002). Building virtual communities: Learning and change in cyberspace. Cambridge University Press.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> IANS. (March 20, 2013). Indians swear by Arranged Marriage. In India Today. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/indians-swear-by-arranged-marriages/1/252496.html.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Miller, D. (2012). What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Anonymous. (May 11, 2012). Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal: A Bachelor Finds Success as an Online Matchmaker. In Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/shaadi-coms-anupam-mittal-a-bachelor-finds-success-as-an-online-matchmaker/.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Challapalli, S. (October 2, 2008). Online matrimonial services open new tech fronts. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/online-matrimonial-services-open-new-tech-fronts/article1638067.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Pratap, R. (April 18, 2014). Right Click. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/work/right-click/article5925468.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Anonymous. (March 2015). History of Matrimonial Sites. In HatkeShaadi. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from www.hatkeshaadi.com/blog/2015/03/history-of-matrimonial-sites/.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> Anonymous. (May 17, 2016). Are you contemplating Marriage? If Yes, Then Find A Soul-Mate via Amar Ujala. In myAdvtCorner.com. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://blog.myadvtcorner.com/matrimonial-newspaper-advertisement/are-you-contemplating-marriage-if-yes-then-find-a-soul-mate-via-amar-ujala/.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> Anonymous. (April 14, 2014). Matrimonial India sites are better than marriage brokers. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/440432.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Ahmed, A. (March 19, 2012). Online Matrimonial Sites versus Conventional Matrimonial Methods. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/356114.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Understand SimplyMarry Better. In SimplyMarry.com. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.simplymarry.com/matrimonial/faq.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> Anonymous. (April 14, 2014). Matrimonial India sites are better than marriage brokers. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/440432.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> Albright, J. M., & Simmens, E. (2014). Flirting, Cheating, Dating, and Mating. The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, 284.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> Julka, H. and Vishwanath, A. (June 26, 2013). Matrimony portals making serious efforts to counter rising tide of divorces, ensure lasting unions. In Economic Times. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-26/news/40206906_1_portals-online-bharatmatrimony-com.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> Margalit, L. (July 4, 2014). The Rational Model and Online Decision Making. In Psychology Today. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/behind-online-behavior/201407/the-rational-model-and-online-decision-making.</p>
<p><strong>[18]</strong> Anonymous. (May 11, 2012). Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal: A Bachelor Finds Success as an Online Matchmaker. In Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/shaadi-coms-anupam-mittal-a-bachelor-finds-success-as-an-online-matchmaker/.</p>
<p><strong>[19]</strong> Hodge, G. (December 10, 2012). The Ugly Truth of Online Dating: Top 10 Lies Told by Internet Daters. In Huffington Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/online-dating-lies_b_1930053.</p>
<p><strong>[20]</strong> Dhawan, H. (February 2, 2016). ID proof may become mandatory for registering on Shaadi websites. In Times of India. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/ID-proof-may-become-mandatory-for-registering-on-Shaadi-websites/articleshow/50814355.cms.</p>
<p><strong>[21]</strong> Khan, A. (March 29, 2015). HC quashes FIR filed by ‘duped’ woman against matrimonial site. In The Indian Express. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/hc-quashes-fir-filed-by-duped-woman-against-matrimonial-site/.</p>
<p><strong>[22]</strong> Nair, S. (November 19, 2015). Government panel to check fraud on matrimonial websites. In The Indian Express. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/govt-panel-to-check-fraud-on-matrimonial-websites/.</p>
<p><strong>[23]</strong> Hema. (September 15, 2012). Tips for assessing genuineness of a matrimonial profile. In Matrimonial Blog. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://matrimonialblog.com/general/2012/tips-for-assessing-genuineness-of-a-matrimonial-profile-stop-fraud/.</p>
<p><strong>[24]</strong> Praveen, P. (July 11, 2015). The web of deceit. In Deccan Chronicle. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://www.deccanchronicle.com/150710/lifestyle-relationship/article/web-deceit.</p>
<p><strong>[25]</strong> Aman, S. (November 24, 2014). Fraud and Cheats Rule Matrimonial Sites. In The New Indian Express. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2014/11/24/Fraud-and-Cheats-Rule-Matrimonial-Sites/article2537595.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[26]</strong> Ameer, T. (August 12, 2015). Matrimonial portals set to face the music over dubious profiles. In Millenium Post. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://millenniumpost.in/NewsContent.aspx?NID=145048.</p>
<p><strong>[27]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[28]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[29]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[30]</strong> PTI. (December 17, 2013). Online matrimony business likely to touch Rs. 1,500 cr by 2017. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/online-matrimony-business-likely-to-touch-rs-1500-cr-by-2017/article5470871.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[31]</strong> Ganapathy, N. (June 15, 2016). More fraud cases as India embraces marriage sites. In Straits Times. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/more-fraud-cases-as-india-embraces-marriage-sites.</p>
<p><strong>[32]</strong> afaqs! News Bureau. (September 9, 2009). Bharatmatrimony.com unveils 250 community based matrimonial sites. In afaqs!. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.afaqs.com/news/story/24904_Bharatmatrimonycom-unveils-250-community-based-matrimonial-sites.</p>
<p><strong>[33]</strong> Nair, S. (February 16, 2015). Mobile will disrupt matrimonial space in India, says Gourav Rakshit of Shaadi.com. In First Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.firstpost.com/business/corporate-business/mobile-will-disrupt-matrimonial-space-in-india-says-gourav-rakshit-of-shaadi-com-2097637.html.</p>
<p><strong>[34]</strong> Nair, S. (February 16, 2015). Mobile will disrupt matrimonial space in India, says Gourav Rakshit of Shaadi.com. In First Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.firstpost.com/business/corporate-business/mobile-will-disrupt-matrimonial-space-in-india-says-gourav-rakshit-of-shaadi-com-2097637.html.</p>
<p><strong>[35]</strong> Soni, S. (September 19, 2015). The great Indian wedding is now an online affair . In Entrepreneur India. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250863.</p>
<p><strong>[36]</strong> Jain, A. (March 2005). Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?. In New York Magazine. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/11621/index1.html.</p>
<p><strong>[37]</strong> Lai, J. (June 1, 2012). Arranged Marriage: CNN Examines The Age-Old Practice In India. In Huffington Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/arranged-marriage_n_1560049.</p>
<h3>Author's Profile</h3>
<p>Abhimanyu Roy is a researcher who specializes in the social applications of emerging technologies for the urban poor. His work has been featured at conferences at MIT and the World Bank and in publications by Harvard University.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherAbhimanyu RoyResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesRAW Blog2016-08-30T10:52:50ZBlog EntryThe Bots That Got Some Votes Home
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home
<b>Nilofar Ansher gives us some startling updates on the "Digital Natives Video Contest" voting results declared in May 2012, in this blog post.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It was a hint of suspicion raised by one of our colleagues at the Centre for Internet & Society that spurred our Web Analytics team to check into the voting activity of the contest that was all about the ‘<a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives" class="external-link">Everyday Digital Native</a>’. And while we acknowledged and celebrated the ‘digital’ in the native (users of technology), we forgot the human part that the digital has to engage with. Following weeks of deliberations, we now have conclusive evidence that points to irregularities in voting numbers of the Top 10 contestants. We are now staring at the elephant in the room: those innocuous little automated scripts we sweetly nicknamed, ‘bots’.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Internet bots, also known as web robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey. In addition to their uses outlined above, bots may also be implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is required (e.g., gaming bots and auction-site robots) or less commonly in situations where the emulation of human activity is required, for example chat bots (Source: Wikipedia).</p>
<h3>What irregularities?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">You would see how a script or bot would have played a role in ‘automating’ the votes for a video. The Top 10 videos received a combined voting number of 20,000+. The discrepancy occurs at the juncture where the votes polled on the front end (the webpage where the contestant video was visible to the public) did not match with the number of hits the page received on the backend (this is the analytics part). For instance, the top polled video has some few thousand votes more than the number of people who actually visited our CIS website in the same duration. This prompted a review of the logs and the possible “hand” of a nonhuman agent acting on its human creator’s command to drive up the votes.</p>
<h3>How was this done? The Technicalities</h3>
<p>The following graph shows the extremely high level of voting requests just before the closing date (March 31, 2012). This would not be extraordinary except for the fact that two or three entries had an exceptionally higher vote count relative to their page views as per the analytics statistics.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/quickhist_march_april.png" alt="null" class="image-inline" title="Voting requests by date" /></p>
<h3>Analysis of the voting against the http requests for the voting link against page views</h3>
<div>
<table class="vertical listing">
<tbody>
<tr style="text-align: center;">
<th>
<p>Entry</p>
</th>
<th>Actual Votes Recorded (1)<br /></th>
<th>Direct http requests to votes (2)<br /></th>
<th>http requests for normal page view access (3)<br /></th>
<th>Recommended adjusted vote count (4)<br /></th>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-media-dance" class="internal-link">Digital Dance</a></p>
</td>
<td>268</td>
<td>448</td>
<td>198</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">198</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/big-stories-small-towns" class="internal-link">Big Stories, Small Town</a></p>
</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>112</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-natives-contest/entries/connecting-souls-bridging-dreams" class="internal-link">Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams</a></p>
</td>
<td>1113</td>
<td>2018</td>
<td>1685</td>
<td>1113</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/finalist-summary/deployed" class="internal-link">Deployed</a></p>
</td>
<td>191</td>
<td>479</td>
<td>195</td>
<td>191</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p class="internal-link"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/from-the-wild-into-the-digital-world" class="internal-link">From The Wild Into The Digital World</a></p>
</td>
<td>10317</td>
<td>11880</td>
<td>810</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">810</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/i-am-a-ghetto-digital-native" class="internal-link">I Am A Ghetto Digital Native</a></p>
</td>
<td>321</td>
<td>365</td>
<td>844</td>
<td>321</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/life-in-the-city-slums" class="internal-link">Life in the City Slums</a></p>
</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>18</td>
<td>94</td>
<td>13</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/who-is-a-digital-native" class="internal-link">Digital Natives</a></p>
</td>
<td>111</td>
<td>328</td>
<td>102</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">102</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/with-no-distinction" class="internal-link">With No Distinction</a></p>
</td>
<td>369</td>
<td>557</td>
<td>1232</td>
<td>369</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-coverage-in-a-digital-world" class="internal-link">Digital Coverage in a Digital World</a></p>
</td>
<td>9622</td>
<td>13650</td>
<td>181</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">181</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3></h3>
<span class="internal-link"> </span>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are the public votes displayed on the contestant’s page through the thumbs up icon</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are http requests to the voting link against each video when the user clicked on the thumbs up icon.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are http requests which are collectively related to the video page (page view). A normal human user would browse through a page first, which downloads some other urls, such as the HTML for the page, JavaScript, images, and so on. A normal vote request would be included collectively. A direct http request to the voting link on the other hand does not do this, and only makes a specific request to vote without downloading the other parts that make up the page.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">A normal human vote count should be the same or less than the number of page views. Only three videos highlighted show abnormal behaviour and it is recommended these be adjusted to the page view counts.</li></ol>
<h3>Are you saying contestants cheated?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the use of programming scripts to accrue votes is no new tactic and we should, in fact, have a more robust mechanism to monitor such activity during a contest, we cannot prove the culpability of the human agents. The contestants might be innocent actors with overzealous friends or colleagues who ran the voting scripts. As of now, since there is no way to ascertain their part in this irregularity, it’s best we give them the benefit of the doubt. What comes through loud and clear is that once you do away with the scripted votes, four contestants still manage to have enough votes to maintain their positions in the final five. In the fifth position, we now have a contestant from the top ten finalists, who has secured the requisite votes (after vote adjustment) to propel him into the final five.</p>
<h3>Recommendation</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">‘Digital Dance’ (Cijo Abraham), ‘From the Wild into the Digital World’ (John Musila) and ‘Digital Coverage in a Digital World’ (T.J. Burks) had additional vote url counts than page views. It is recommended that the total votes for these videos be adjusted to the page view counts, and not the actual vote counts as displayed on their individual web pages (thumbs up icon) during the voting period.</p>
<p>The rankings of the adjusted voting would now read as:</p>
<ol>
<li>Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams – Marie Jude Bendiola (1113)</li>
<li>From The Wild Into The Digital World - John Musila (810)</li>
<li>With No Distinction - T.J. K. M. (369)</li>
<li>I Am A Ghetto Digital Native – MJ (321)</li>
<li>Digital Dance – Cijo Abraham (198)</li></ol>
<h3>Transparency at CIS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">‘The Digital Natives with a Cause?’ research inquiry is shaped around concerns of transparency, equity and community accountability. In our research methods as well as in outputs of the different activities, we have always maintained a complete transparency of decision making processes as well as in depending upon the incredible people we work with to help us learn, grow and reflect openly on the concerns that we have been engaged with. We strive to follow this method and in publishing these statistics, we want to ensure that there is complete transparency about the votes that were accrued and how the final winners were selected. We also take this opportunity as a learning experience to re-think the question of the non-human actors in our networks and further about the nature of participation and reputation online. We hope that the publishing of these results will help answer any inquiries on how the process unfolded.</p>
<h3>View Logs and Source Code</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/logs-during-voting-period" class="external-link">All logs from the web server for this period</a> (24.7MB) Identical IPs are from caching server.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/main.R">R script to evaluate data for table</a></li></ul>
<h3>What next?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Since we spotted the error in time, we haven’t disbursed the prize money of EUR 500 to each of the Top 5 contestants. They will now receive the prize along with a chance to participate in the Digital Native workshop-cum-Webinar, slated to be held in July 2012. The top 10 videos will be showcased in this event.</p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home</a>
</p>
No publisherNilofar AnsherFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-04-24T11:56:10ZBlog EntryThe Attention Economy - A Brief Introduction
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/attention-economy
<b>This post examines attention economy as a brief prelude to a paper and monograph to be published on it. It examines the current theses on attention economy and a few approaches to reading attention economy in gaming besides foregrounding the attention economy and its functions and influence in MMORPGs.</b>
<h3>What is attention economy?</h3>
<p>Attention economy was made prominent through the writings of Thomas Davenport<strong>1</strong>and Micheal Goldhaber<strong>2</strong>, who examine 'attention' as a scarce commodity in an information rich environment and divulge into examining exchanges and investments of attention and their results. Not particularly a new concept, attention economy focuses on the examination of attention as a scarce commodity in the information-rich societies influenced by the Internet and new digital technologies. The concept was first noted and written about by the political scientist Herbert Simon (1971), who notes “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients… [and thus arises] the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the over-abundance of information sources that might consume it.” In the abundance of information and access to information, the consumption or the ‘prosumption’ of information relies on the investment of attention, which becomes a scarce commodity – expended in the act of consumption. For the expended resource is no longer information or its scarcity in terms of availability – which has been the classical concerns in the industrialized market economy – but the amount of attention that is expended on the consumption of information. Economics is governed by what is scarce and the abundance of information is not a measurable function, rather what is expended in its consumption, namely human attention. From a cognitive science perspective, attention can be read as the investment of focused cognitive faculties in a particular ‘prioritized’ activity. In this way attention becomes an essential factor in capital production activities, in that the investment of attention generates capital through the direction of work (labour) and time in any particular activity. Derek Lomas (2008) and Peter Hughes<strong>3</strong> treat media objects as artificial organisms that need attention for sustenance and energy for reproduction, somewhat in the nature of a Darwinian struggle where the most ‘able’ and ‘fit’ organism survives. All media organisms need one crucial element to survival, sustenance and reproduction – ‘attention’. In viral spreads and reproduction of a media organism the possibility of its procreation and viral distribution is realized through the investment of attention – the amount which enables survival and reproduction. By extension, virtual products are essentially media (artificial) organisms, and by extrapolation virtual goods and (possibly) even identities are organisms that thrive on the attention it receives for survival and reproduction.</p>
<h3>The Economy and the Currency</h3>
<p>Goldhaber (1997) notes that attention economy does not indeed have a market and operates unlike post-industrial markets. Although there is considerable material influence in terms of the investments of labour, time, and real money, often there is no direct means to measure it. Concepts of property, dichotomies of production, work, leisure and play require reformulation in light of this economy thriving on attention and its monetization. Davenport and Beck (2001) reinforces a measure of Goldhaber's arguments by stating that telecommunications bandwidth is not a problem but human bandwidth is. Goldhaber proceeds to say that a transfer of information must always be accompanied by a transfer of attention – measurable by the amount of time that is invested in the process. Even though both Goldhaber and Davenport seem to agree that examining time investment is a poor measure of the attention that is expended.</p>
<p>Attention economics in earlier discourses and theses are connected with examining the failures and shortcomings of ‘the design’ of informational systems that locate, falsely, informational scarcity as the root of the problem leading to a deficit in attention, whereas the problem lies in the flow of attention itself and not information. The theories on ‘attention’ deal with a multitude of perspectives – from examining the psychological aspects, on the one hand, to economics, politics and sociology (including a measure of anthropology) of online networks on the other. A recent research on attention economy has largely been towards attention:</p>
<p>a) as a scarce resource that was incentivized [providing an incentive to invest]<strong>4</strong> in some manner and thus the attention currency – which is one reading of the attention currency; and</p>
<p>b) as non-material capital, termed most appropriately as attentional capital and as measurable as wealth is to income, assuming that income can be measured and wealth and holdings are diverse and often immeasurable. Other studies focus on incorporating attention into design such that it captures user’s attention and rewards the time spent on the consumption of that information – so that the prioritization is the gambit of the providers of information and the subsequent hierarchies (such as Google and Yahoo) rather than the users. Prioritization of avatar information is also prominent in the representations in the achievement hierarchy – a system common to how search engines prioritize information – only in gaming this system systematically categorizes information pertaining to the avatar and its achievements and growth. This is both internal to the game world in question as well as external in that external tools outside of the game gather and prioritize avatar information. Such practices have been termed as metagaming.<strong>5</strong></p>
<p>Defining metagaming becomes problematic in that it is not a concept peripheral to the absent centre of gaming rather – metagaming or activities and processes associated with metagaming become multiple centres by itself. Applying this to the secondary/goldfarming market may lead to interesting readings but here I digress. Attention and the flows of attention are connected to the ways in which information is structured into hierarchies and channelled, such that ranking systems and the achievement hierarchy moderates attention flows and shifts – players and gamers who grow in short spans of time through strategic and organizational excellence get more visibility in these hierarchies.</p>
<p>Attention economies are largely read and identified in online economies and ecosystems. Davenport and Beck (2001) switch this dichotomy around and attempt a reading of organizational systems and how the offline attention economy affects organization and concepts of productivity and production. However, for the purposes of this study – online gaming economies take a central focus and a generic reading of multiple MMORPG economies is attempted.</p>
<p>Before Castronova (2003), Castronova et al (2007), and much later Consalvo (2009) engaged with questions on Virtual Economies and Gaming Worlds (for the sake of argument – Castronova’s term, Synthetic Worlds is used interchangeably with Virtual Worlds), Goldhaber and his contemporaries engaged with questions of production of informational goods – those that would in a primitive fashion address virtual production, consumption and exchange of digital informational goods and the relevance of attention expended within these economies. A colloquial reading of attention is that it is always translated as the investment of labour and time in different measures. Furthermore, the investment of time and labour on the consumption of any particular information<strong>6</strong> is is incentivized and thus prioritized based on its position in the hierarchy. The higher its visibility, lower its incentives and vice versa. The writers on gaming cultures and economies do not directly engage with questions of attention flows and shifts but by using their concepts on the investment of time, activities of production, cultural, avatarial, and gaming capital, as well as virtual currencies – I engage with the concept of attention as a currency necessary to survival in virtual worlds particularly in MMORPGs, where there are elements of progress, exploration, conquest, warfare and constant struggle.</p>
<h3>Reciprocal Attention and Survival</h3>
<p>An investment in attention always ‘seeks’ a reciprocity in attention, such that an investment ensures a positive net gain either directly or indirectly owing to a growth in the attention repositories or collection of attention capital. This need not be manifest in the service–provider–user relationship but the user–user relationship. This enables reading the production of attention and the systematic means by which attention is channelled through a complex system of hierarchies in society as well as in the Virtual Gaming Worlds<strong>7</strong> more accessible.</p>
<p>Attention can also be approached as the necessity for survival in human society in much the same manner as human society is dependent on the flows of attention for the development of the individual or group in a society or community. It can be argued that attention inevitably forms a basic necessity that indirectly influences survival, sustenance, and reproduction. Production of attention, production of virtual goods, and the production of attentional capital<strong>8</strong> are dependent on the minimal and pre-requisite investment in attention. The focus of this paper is to pitch attention as a currency, a currency that can be examined as one only when certain thresholds of attention have been achieved and relevant to the survival in MMORPG gaming worlds— worlds that are capable of viable social and economic interaction.</p>
<p>Questions on the attention economy is inevitably connected to questions of production and consumption and more recently prod-usage and pro-sumption (hyphenated for emphasis) in digital technology mediated environments, whether graphically represented complex virtual worlds or text based MUDs.</p>
<p>Although irrelevant to this trajectory, attention economy has also been approached from a systems and organizational perspective, which is what Davenport and Beck (2001) focus on. Similar studies revolve around examining attention flows in Social Network Systems (SNS) – Lomas (2008) and maximizing user value – Huberman and Wu (2008).</p>
<ol><li>
<p class="discreet">Davenport has explored the implication so of the attention economy from an organizational perspective and the impact on human life – so to speak – particularly in Davenport and Beck 2001 – 'The Attention Economy', the primitive precursor of which was Davenport 1997 – 'Information Ecology'.</p>
</li><li>
<p class="discreet">Micheal Goldhaber has written and spoken in considerable detail on The Attention Economy – most prominent and seminal of which is 'The Attention Economy – The Natural Economy of the Net' 1997 in the Journal First Monday.</p>
</li><li>
<p class="discreet">I quote directly from Peter Hughes who posits: “Artificial organisms might live on attention--they 'sleep' when no one is looking at them and gain energy (cycles) when someone is. Since energy could be used to reproduce, the most attention-grabbing forms would be selected.” - Italics imposed for Emphasis.</p>
</li><li>
<p class="discreet">Some discourses focus on the means by which attention can be converted into currency – one of those means would be to provide incentives to invest attention in a particular action, this incentive then moves its priority higher in the informational hierarchy and in a limited focus, reading the achievement hierarchy.</p>
</li><li>
<p class="discreet">I believe the term to be conceptually unanchored and nearly meaningless in its vast array of usages and applications – but to locate some of these practices using metagaming might provide an interesting insight into the very nature of these practices and the way in which they are encapsulated and epitomized in other terms.</p>
</li><li>
<p class="discreet">Informational goods and virtual goods are read side by side and are not differentiated in this article, for the purposes of this argument – 'informational goods' as a term is a larger concept of which virtual goods may form a subset.</p>
</li><li>
<p class="discreet">Termed the Achievement Hierarchy – The Achievement Hierarchy represents the complex internal and metaverse rankings in an online game. This includes the game’s internal achievement ranking system that categorises players’ and gamers on different growth patterns and achievements as well as external tools not part of the game which assists in a detailed ranking system. Often players themselves subscribe to external ranking mechanisms, to keep track of others and their own progress. Wowprogress is one such external achievement hierarchy that ranks players in multiple realms. Travian World Analyzer, Traviandope and many other external resources support gameplay but are not in essence a part of intended gameplay. Metagaming can prove to be a usable and relevant term to define these practices. I have intentionally avoided linking them as some of these sites employ hostile scripts.</p>
</li><li>
<p class="discreet">I consistently use attentional capital as an extended concept which includes avatarial capital – avatar capital is a term proposed by Castronova (2005) and cited by Consalvo (2007).</p>
</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/attention-economy'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/attention-economy</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaGamingGaming EconomyInternet HistoriesHistories of InternetResearchers at Work2015-04-03T10:48:21ZBlog EntryThe Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India (Excerpt)
https://cis-india.org/raw/aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-education-in-india-excerpt
<b>In a recently published paper, Jahnavi Phalkey and Sumandro Chattapadhyay explore public initiatives in technological solutions for educating the poor and the disadvantaged in independent India. Here is an edited excerpt from the paper that traces the recent history of technological solutions for mass education and unpacking the narrative of ‘failure’ that is associated with the Aakash experiment.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/2016.02.14_s-campion-aakash.jpg" alt="Students using <p>Aakash tablet, Anupshahr, Uttar Pradesh. Photograph by Sonali Campion." /></p>
<h6>Students at Pardada Pardadi Education Society in Anupshahr, Uttar Pradesh, use the Aakash tablet in class as part of a pilot project introducing the low-cost computer into rural schools. Photograph by Sonali Campion, April 09, 2013: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonalicampion/9449250639/">https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonalicampion/9449250639/</a>.</h6>
<p> </p>
In 2010, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India launched a set of prototype devices of an affordable tablet computer, the development and production of which were to be supported by the Ministry as part of its larger ICTs for education project. This device later came to be known as the “Aakash” tablet, and the project went through several iterations, between 2010 and 2014, of not only technological re-designs, but also institutional arrangements to design, develop, manufacture, test, and procure the devices.
<p> </p>
<h2>Technological Solutions for Mass Education</h2>
<p>Our exploration of technological solutions for mass education in India has taken us through a not-so-linear history of projects that have informed the imagination and making of the Aakash project. This include the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, or SITE (1975); University Grants Commission-led Countrywide Classroom project (1984 -); the Simputer, the first hand-held device developed in India (1998); the Hole in the Wall project developed and led by Sugata Mitra (1999); the Government of India-led EDUSAT (2004); National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (2003); and finally, a national online education portal named Sakshat (2006). The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment itself terminated rather quickly, but it led to several versions of television based instruction programmes, most notably aimed at higher secondary and university students. Instruction in the broadcast-format continues to date, even after the arrival of the internet and the fact it has become the preferred medium for the Indian state. The television has not been replaced, but certainly shadowed by a variety of internet access and computing devices.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Aakash, a “Low Cost Access-Cum-Computing Device”</h2>
<p>An early official description of the then-nameless tablet as a “low cost access-cum-computing device” is noteworthy <strong>[1]</strong>. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary computing device that does not also function as an access device (say, to the internet). Where does the need for calling it an “access-cum-computing” device come from? It comes, perhaps, from the hierarchy of priority – the device is primarily an access device, and secondarily can perform the function of a general-purpose computer. An archaeological reading of the assumptions of learning processes embodied in this device reveals an earlier layer of thinking – that of broadcasting educational programmes to television sets via satellite connection. Labelling it as “access-cum-computing” frames the object as being shaped by the residue of the Indian state’s education technological experiences of the past, including that of the SITE initiative.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>“[The] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled”</h2>
<p>Throughout the short history of the Aakash device, the verdict of “failed innovation” figures prominently – from the early failure of "Sakshat" <strong>[2]</strong>, to allegations of the Chinese origin of the Aakash device <strong>[3]</strong>, to manufacturing troubles and under-production of the device <strong>[4]</strong>, to criticisms of the tablet’s built quality and computing capacity <strong>[5]</strong>, to mistrust and failed collaborations between parties involved in its production <strong>[6]</strong>, and intra-governmental criticisms of the implementation process <strong>[7]</strong>. Moreover, there remained a continuous tension within the government itself regarding the necessity of the project, especially fuelled by (and fuelling) the image of the project as being driven by the dreams of a specific minister <strong>[8]</strong>.</p>
<p>To simply describe the Aakash project’s failure as one due to the unbearable heaviness of functions ranging from the technical to the symbolic and political is to fall short of a full explanation. Alongside that narrative of failure, it is critical to foreground the quiet success of the project in establishing the tablet computer as a near-essential and familiarised everyday object for access to educational material. There is an alarming accuracy in the MHRD claim that the Aakash project established a sub $100 tablet market in India – it did, even if it was not for the device they wanted to promote <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Device is the Desire</h2>
<p>We observe that the Aakash project, as well as the ones preceding it, have been driven primarily by a desire to scale up the provision of education. The initiatives towards building delivery infrastructures for such mass-scale provision of education has almost always been accompanied by a larger desire for developing capabilities in space exploration, communication, and computing – the key technologies of twentieth century geopolitics. Our study of the manufacturing of the Aakash tablet, and its surrounding discourses, foreground the technological imagination of the state after liberalisation in India (1991), and its unique arrangements and efforts to create domestic capability of technological innovation in a context of globalised production and communication networks. We see our role as one of recovering the work of technology in the history of education as understood through the interactions between the state, academia, and industry.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Archival Research in (Increasingly) Digital India</h2>
<p>Documenting the project has been an interesting historical exercise. We have been attentive to documents disappearing from their online locations. One remarkable possibility for archival research opened up by the internet is the (limited, and often uncertain) ability to access materials that are not presently available on a website, but were part of it in the past. This possibility allowed us to access a few crucial government documents that are not directly available on the official websites any more. We have also been attentive to the reiterations and revisions that do not merely overtake or shadow earlier documents. They sometimes erase earlier documents altogether as digital revisions. We do not have access to personal correspondence or internal institutional correspondence relating to the project. We are, however, skeptical of that happening as no protocols for the archiving of digital correspondence is yet in place with the Government of India. Doing recent history of India is becoming an ever more difficult exercise that historians must urgently attend to, if we are to make the present ready to have its own past in the future.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. “The History of Aakash Low Cost Access cum Computing Device.” Sakshat. October 05, 2011. <a href="http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf">http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Mukherjee, Arindam. “Bonsai Netbooks.” Outlook. February 16, 2009. <a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Bonsai-Netbooks/239719">http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Bonsai-Netbooks/239719</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Raina, Pamposh, and Mia Li. “India’s ‘Aakash,’ Now Made in China.” The New York Times. November 26, 2012. <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/india%E2%80%99s-super-cheap-tablet-now-made-in-china/">http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/india%E2%80%99s-super-cheap-tablet-now-made-in-china/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> Nanda, Prashant K., and Surabhi Agarwal. “Government Close to Giving Up on Aakash Project.” Mint. March 22, 2013. <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Politics/fmEi8gsOSFgOzSTFfLsw6J/Govt-almost-gives-up-on-Aakash-says-no-point-in-hardware-ob.html">http://www.livemint.com/Politics/fmEi8gsOSFgOzSTFfLsw6J/Govt-almost-gives-up-on-Aakash-says-no-point-in-hardware-ob.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Chopra, Ritika. “Kapil Sibal's Cheap Aakash Proves to be a Dud.” Mail Today. January 08, 2012. <a href="http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/kapil-sibal-cheapest-tablet-of-world-aakash-failure/1/167730.html">http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/kapil-sibal-cheapest-tablet-of-world-aakash-failure/1/167730.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Julka, Harsimran. “14 Lakh Aakash Tablets Booked in 14 Days.” The Economic Times. January 03, 2012. <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/14-lakh-aakash-tablets-booked-in-14-days/articleshow/11345695.cms">http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/14-lakh-aakash-tablets-booked-in-14-days/articleshow/11345695.cms</a>. Parthasarathi, Ashok. “Cloudy Outlook for Aakash.” The Hindu. May 21, 2012 (Updated: May 22, 2012). <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3439629.ece
">http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3439629.ece</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Government of India. Report No. 19 of 2013 - Union Government (Civil) - Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Compliance Audit Observations. Government of India. 2013. <a href="http://www.cag.gov.in/content/report-no-19-2013-compliance-audit-observations-union-governmentcivil">http://www.cag.gov.in/content/report-no-19-2013-compliance-audit-observations-union-governmentcivil</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> At an event in late 2013, Kapil Sibal admitted, “[the] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled, I tried hard...” Quoted in Press Trust of India. “Kapil Sibal: Aakash Tablet is My Unfulfilled Dream.” Financial Express. December 24, 2013. <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapil-sibal-aakash-tablet-is-my-unfulfilled-dream/1211284/0 ">http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapil-sibal-aakash-tablet-is-my-unfulfilled-dream/1211284/0 </a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> This is an edited excerpt from a paper titled ‘The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India’ recently published in History and Technology, on 5 February, 2016. The paper can be accessed here: <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142" target="_blank">http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142</a> (the first 50 downloads are free).</p>
<p>Cross-posted from <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2016/02/12/the-aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-mass-education-in-contemporary-india/" target="_blank">South Asia @ LSE Blog</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-education-in-india-excerpt'>https://cis-india.org/raw/aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-education-in-india-excerpt</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroResearchers at WorkEducation TechnologyInternet HistoriesResearch2016-02-14T10:11:09ZBlog EntryThe 'Beyond the Digital' Directory
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory
<b>For the past few months, Maesy Angelina has been sharing the insights gained from her research with Blank Noise on the activism of digital natives. The ‘Beyond the Digital’ directory offers a list of the posts on the research based on the order of its publication.</b>
<p></p>
<p>Have you ever
wondered what is really “new” about the activism of digital natives? In May
2010, the Hivos-CIS ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ Knowledge Programme started
a collaboration The Blank Noise Project in India and Maesy Angelina, a
student-researcher from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam – International
Institute of Social Studies in The Hague who is taking up the research agenda
for her final project to qualify for her Masters degree in International
Development with a specialization in Children and Youth Studies.</p>
<p>Maesy
has been blogging about the insights she gained from her field work in
Bangalore in the CIS website under the ‘Beyond the Digital’ series, which
consists of the following posts:</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"><strong>1. <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/beyond-the-digital-understanding-digital-natives-with-a-cause/weblogentry_view" class="external-link">Beyond the Digital: Understanding
Digital Natives with a Cause</a></strong></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Digital
natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina
argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth
digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the
contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial
first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey
to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research
with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge
Programme.</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><strong>2. <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/first-thing-first/weblogentry_view" class="external-link">First Thing First</a></strong></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Studies
often focus on how digital natives do their activism in identifying the
characteristics of youth digital activism and dedicate little attention to what
the activism is about. The second blog post in the Beyond the Digital series
reverses this trend and explores how Blank Noise articulates the
issue it addresses: street sexual harassment.</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talking-back-without-talking-back" class="external-link"><strong>3. Talking Back without “Talking Back”</strong></a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span class="description">The activism of digital natives is often
considered different from previous generations because of the methods and tools
they use. However, reflecting on my conversations with Blank Noise
and my experience in the ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei, the
difference goes beyond the method and can be spotted at the analytical level –
how young people today are <em>thinking</em>
about their activism. <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/taking-it-to-the-streets/" class="external-link">4. Taking It to the Streets</a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">The previous posts in the Beyond the Digital series have discussed the distinct ways in which young people today are thinking about their activism. The fourth post elaborates further on how this is translated into practice by sharing the experience of a Blank Noise street intervention: Y ARE U LOOKING AT ME?</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-digital-tipping-point" class="external-link">5. The Digital Tipping Point</a>
<p> </p>
<span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">Is
Web 2.0 really the only reason why youth digital activism is so
successful in mobilizing public engagement? A look into the
transformation of Blank Noise’s blog from a one-way communication medium
into a site of public dialogue and collaboration reveals the crucial
factors behind the success.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/diving-into-the-digita" class="external-link">6. Diving Into the Digital</a><br /></span>
<p> </p>
<p>Previous posts in the ‘Beyond the Digital’ series have discussed the non-virtual aspects and presence of Blank Noise. However, to understand the activism of digital natives also require a look into their online presence and activities. This post explores how Blank Noise’s engagement with the public in their digital realm.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-class-question" class="external-link">7. The Class Question</a></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">Blank
Noise aims to be as inclusive as possible and therefore does not
identify any specific target groups. Yet, the spaces and the methods
they occupy do attract certain kinds of volunteers and public. This
raises the class question: what are the dilemmas around class on digital
interventions? Are they any different from the dilemmas on street
interventions? <br /></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"><br /></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-many-faces-within" class="external-link">8. The Many Faces Within</a></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">Blank
Noise, as many other digital native collectives, may seem to be
complete horizontal at first glance. But, a closer look reveals the many
different possibilities for involvement and a unique way the collective
organize itself. <br /></span></p>
<p><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term" class="external-link">9. Activism: Unraveling the Term</a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">After
discussing Blank Noise’s politics and ways of organizing, the current
post explores whether activism is still a relevant concept to capture
the involvement of people within the collective. I explore the questions
from the vantage point of the youth actors, through conversations about
how they relate with the very term of activism. <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond" class="external-link">10. Reflecting from the Beyond</a></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable">After
going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine
posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained
so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in
moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital
natives. <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><br /><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><span id="parent-fieldname-description" class="kssattr-atfieldname-description kssattr-templateId-widgets/textarea kssattr-macro-textarea-field-view inlineEditable"></span>While the posts present bits and pieces of field research notes and reflections from data analysis, the full research products are:</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">- Angelina, M. (2010) '<a class="external-link" href="http://thesis.eur.nl/theses/law_culture_society/iss/cys/index/863849405/">Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Forms of Youth Activism - The Case of Blank Noise in Urban India</a>'. Unpublished thesis, graded with Distinction. The Hague: International Institute of Social Studies - Erasmus University of Rotterdam.</p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast">- Angelina, M. (2010) '<a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/position-paper/view?searchterm=position%20paper%20digital%20natives" class="external-link">Towards a New Relationship of Exchange</a>'. Position paper for the Digital Natives with a Cause Thinkathon. </p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-beyond-the-digital-directory</a>
</p>
No publishermaesyYouthDigital ActivismDigital NativesWeb PoliticsStreet sexual harassmentBlank Noise ProjectBeyond the DigitalCommunitiesart and interventionResearchers at Work2015-05-15T11:33:39ZBlog EntryTechnology, Social Justice and Higher Education
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education
<b>Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation. </b>
<p>The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer Technologies<br /></h3>
<p>The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where
through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story
telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought
environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we
facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions
of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these
critically in order to build a better learning environment for
themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.</p>
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<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/sies.jpg/image_preview" title="sies " height="266" width="400" alt="sies " class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td>
<div align="left">Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to
the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to
accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students
involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and
community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes
of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often
circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they
thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.</div>
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<div align="left"> </div>
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<p>As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific
projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses
by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage
with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories
and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction
and learning.</p>
<p><em>The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:</em></p>
<h3>The Costs of Belonging</h3>
<p>Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the
students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it
was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational
institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat
English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend
circles within the college environment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/problem.jpg/image_preview" title="problems" height="365" width="548" alt="problems" class="image-inline image-inline" /></p>
<div align="left">It was particularly insightful for us to understand
that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping
‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became
apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative
action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in
the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers,
internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for
most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even
when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there
were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity
with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and
institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a
significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways,
these students were digital natives if defined through access, because
they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they
wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in
creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.<br /><br />Based
on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting,
exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the
gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel
excluded from the power of the digital.<br /><br /></div>
<h3>The Need for Diversity<br /></h3>
<div align="left"><br />
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<tbody>
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<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/others.jpg/image_preview" alt="others" class="image-inline image-inline" title="others" /></td>
<td>It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every
student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital
web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being
synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked
by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of
modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost
all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital
technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English,
fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and
display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.<br /><br /><br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p>Such an idea might also help in
reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web
through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find
themselves tentative and intimidated online.</p>
<p>The breakthrough that the
participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper
in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language
resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of
transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning
lesson for us.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning</h3>
<div align="left">As a part of their orientation to the world of the
digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the
students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the
possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they
are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience
and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new
insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital
storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and
accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help
us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.<br /><br />Working
together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as
it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories,
emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable
tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups
learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established
hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting
was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY
education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill
gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated
special trainings with different experts in areas of language,
communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the
methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure
that is different from the regular classroom learning.<br /><br />What would
happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How
would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater
than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each
other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of
the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities,
where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities,
cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys,
ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in
not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in
re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.<br /><br /><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/workshop.jpg/image_preview" title="classroom" height="337" width="509" alt="classroom" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br />
<div align="center"><br />
<div align="left">Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative
story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating
awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the
digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show
some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies.
How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as
peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we
organise a faculty training workshop later in December. <br /><br />These
three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and
executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as
the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It
is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage
and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social
inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and
engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge
production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing
better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher
Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but
also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream
learning within higher education in India.</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFeaturedHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-03-30T14:54:21ZBlog Entry