Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Humanities in India?

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:05:29Z

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 first among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Background

It has only been a couple of years since I began hearing the term Digital Humanities (henceforth, DH) being uttered quite prominently, though mostly in academic circles. For the uninitiated, it almost sounds like an oxymoron. After all, for most practical purposes the digital and humanities have always been seen almost as contradictory terms, existing in distinct silos. A couple of workshops and conferences, one national-level consultation, three new centres, and two academic courses later the term still needs a definition in India, if not also in other parts of the world. But what was by then, and even now, is interesting is the emergence of pockets of work in India either claiming to be DH or even remotely related to it, and the interest in the term, either as one full of a seemingly diverse, innovative, and generative potential for interdisciplinary work in academia and practice, or as something that is just a reinvention of old questions that have been the focus of humanistic enquiry for several decades now.

The enquiry for this mapping began with the term itself, as a 'found' name for which I needed to excavate some meaning, context and location in India at the present moment. A consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education organised in Bangalore in July 2013 [1] and a proposed short course in ‘Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics’ [2] at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, were some of the early prominent instances of the use of the term. I later learnt from one of the people interviewed for this study that DH was already discussed in academic workshops as early as 2010 [3]. The general interest in the term has steadily picked up in the last couple of years however, albeit in specific pockets of the country, and it would be safe to say that it has been approached in markedly different ways by several institutions.

The source of the term itself is the history and body of literature around humanities computing in the UK and US, which essentially explores the use of computational methods in humanities research and practice. Roberto A. Busa (2010) describes it as “… precisely the automation of every possible analysis of human expression (therefore, it is exquisitely a "humanistic" activity), in the widest sense of the word, from music to the theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts”. However, locating such a history in India seems not only to be a difficult project, but largely a futile one. It seemed irrelevant to import a concept or discourse that in itself was (and still is to some extent) relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context, and then try to locate it here. Instead, what I chose to do was to take a few steps back - firstly to outline a couple of questions/conflicts that seemed to be troubling about this concept to begin with:

Are ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’ really two contradictory terms that are being bridged together? Is this a reiteration of the ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1990) debate?
What are the changes in the object(s) of enquiry in humanities disciplines due to the advent of the internet and digital technologies?
What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects? How are these affecting the traditional methods of the humanities?
Is DH a fringe academic phenomena, and can it be related to academic disciplines only? With several groups of practitioners engaging with questions and methods akin to DH outside universities, how do we define its institutional boundaries?
What are the new skills and tools emerging with, and in turn defining, DH practices in India?

Context

An immediate context for the growth of DH has been the steady debate around a ‘crisis’ of the disciplines, the humanities in particular, and how DH in a strange paradox, seemed to be both the phenomenon posing this question and offering an answer to it. Particularly in the Anglo-American context, while there has been a sustained decline in funding for the arts, especially post the global recession in the late 1990s, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and other disciplines in natural sciences still seem to be on a steady footing. The ‘crisis’ here exists here at several levels - budgetary cuts across universities for liberal arts and humanities programmes, a steep fall in gainful employment for graduates (whose numbers are much more than the jobs available in the market, the adjunct system that has become popular in the US, which has resulted in reduced full-time employment and poor compensation for faculty, and in general a lack of opportunities and resources for research in the arts and humanities. The problem however, of which these are only the symptoms, lies much deeper, at the heart of what is seen as the lack of interest due to the diminishing practical value of the humanities, which further makes them seem most dispensable in a moment of economic crisis. Martha Nussbaum calls this a ‘silent crisis’, spurred by the growth of a profit-driven model of education, which has led to an increased focus on science and technology programmes, and emphasized the fostering of certain specific skills in these domains much to the detriment of arts and humanities programmes at every level of formal education, thus also doing away with “cultivated capacities of critical thinking and reflection, which are crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake.”

Gary Gutting on the other hand sees this definition of crisis in terms of numbers itself as misleading, but proposes that this decline also as a result of a cultural and economic system that is inhospitable to the humanities in general, and the ‘cultural middle class’ in particular. He writes:

Our economic system works well for those who find meaning in economic competition and the material rewards it brings. To a lesser but still significant extent, our system provides meaningful work in service professions (like health and social work) for those fulfilled by helping people in great need. But for those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer. Or rather, it has a great deal to offer but only for a privileged elite (the cultural parallel to our economic upper class) who have had the ability and luck to reach the highest levels of humanistic achievement. If you have (in Pierre Bourdieu’s useful term) the “cultural capital” to gain a tenured professorship at a university, play regularly in a major symphony orchestra or write mega bestsellers, you can earn an excellent living doing what you love. Short of that, you must pursue your passion on the side. (Gutting 2013)

Paul Jay and Gerald Graff locate the problem within the notion of the humanities as being inherently averse to a market-driven, utilitarian form of education, which emphasises only credentials, thus rendering the field esoteric and lacking when it comes to solving problems in the ‘real world’. Instead they favour the approach of humanities students developing diverse skill sets, in addition to traditional skills of their disciplines, and being open to engage with opportunities in the larger marketplace outside of academy as well. As the essay states:

We believe it is time to stop the ritualized lamentation over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of making them relevant in the 21st century. Such lamentation only reveals the inability of many humanists to break free of a 19th-century vision of education that sees the humanities as an escape from the world of business and science. As Cathy Davidson has forcefully argued in her new book, Now You See It, this outmoded way of thinking about the humanities as a realm of high-minded cultivation and pleasure in which students contemplate the meaning of life is a relic of the industrial revolution with its crude dualism of lofty spiritual art vs. mechanized smoking factories, a way of thinking that will serve students poorly in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. (Jay and Duff 2002)

While many of the traditional humanities scholars may still look at this as the result of a certain techno capitalistic impulse - wherein a new research regime based on knowledge creation to fulfil corporate interests emerges – it is prudent to examine how and why fields like the digital humanities have now emerged around the time of such a crisis, as they seemingly fit well within this nebulous space, and what are their implications for the humanities, education and research at large.

In the India, the context is a rather chequered one – with most conversations around the internet and digital technologies located within the domain of the development of Information and Communication technologies for Development (ICT4D), in sectors ranging from education to governance. The introduction to the digital has been in multifarious ways for countries in the global south, largely through rhetoric about its potential to address and even resolve social and economic problems, so much so that, as several of the people interviewed in this study also mentioned, now anything digital automatically translates to ‘good’ and ‘beneficial’. Addressing the digital divide has been a mandate of all stakeholders, whether the state and policy-makers, private organisations, NGOs or academia. With around 300 million internet users and counting, India has the second largest internet user base in the world. However, the conditions and quality of access to the internet and other digital technologies, and who is using these and for what purposes continue to remain a bone of contention. The ambitious Digital India initiative of the current government is the latest in a slew of measures undertaken to address some of these concerns in the last several years, and it proposes to do so by tackling three key areas – digital infrastructure, governance and services on demand, and empowerment of citizens through increased digital literacy [4]. As such it seeks to resolve some of the challenges of last mile connectivity that have forever been an issue with many ICT4D initiatives, particularly with countries in the Global South. The advent of a techno-democracy or a model of governance that successfully integrates technology within a framework of rights and social development seems to be larger vision of these proposed initiatives.

The ICT-fication of education has been a major objective and challenge within this larger vision, specifically with respect to the problem of access, and more importantly quality of access which stands out as pertinent, again a problem attributed to the lack of last mile connectivity. In 2009, the MHRD launched the ambitious National Mission in Education and Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT) programme [5], which along with the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill [6] and the recommendations of the Yashpal Committee report [7], was expected to address some long-standing concerns in making higher education more accessible and hospitable to students, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2011) argues that the last-mile problem is a more of a conceptual or cultural problem than merely a technological one. This is illustrated in the manner of implementation of several projects under the NMEICT, particularly in the imagination, as Rajadhyaksha says, of technology as neutral and therefore capable of addressing issues of democratisation within higher education.

Following the NMEICT, several initiatives such as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) [8] programme, and the use of low-cost devices such as the Aakash tablets [9] were also field tested to get a better understanding of how digital technologies could be integrated seamlessly into classroom instruction. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) [10] and Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) [11], and more recently the National Knowledge Network (NKN) [12] are some of the more established efforts in distance education and open courseware. Digitisation initiatives were also launched on a large scale in the last decade, some notable ones being National Mission for Manuscripts [13], Digital Library of India [14], and National Library of India [15], among many others. There is also a growing number of closed/commercial archives, some examples being the South Asia Archive [16] and Asia Art Archive [17]. Digitisation, while being taken up in the interest of preservation and record, also brought with it a number of challenges, particularly with respect to the manner in which the projects were implemented. Whether with regard to preservation of the original material, problems with copyright or defining metadata standards, digitisation has never been an easy process. The Google Books library project is an example of this, where many books were damaged and had to be discarded in the process of digitisation, and the project itself came under criticism for several copyright violations, errors produced due to conversion of scanned texts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and incorrect or unavailable metadata.

The move towards digitisation also provided the much needed impetus for archival practice to make a transition to the digital space, this has been an inevitable but rather fraught endeavour to begin with, as some of the observations made in the later chapters will illustrate. The emergence of independent, private online archives, often seen as a fallout of the hegemony of state-funded archives is an important development of this time. An influx of funding from government and private donors, has led to a lot of work in media and communication technologies getting concentrated in so-called ‘alternative’ spaces outside the university. The growth of these in between spaces has been an interesting phenomenon, particularly with respect to the possibilities offered for different kinds of research and other creative practices that are often unable to find a space within the confines of a university or other large, established knowledge institutions.

In the last decade or so, DH seems to have become one of the most highly funded areas in humanities research and practice. While this has seemingly helped to either save and/or reinvent some the humanities programmes, a lot of traditional humanists also view the field and the term with scepticism – as a threat to more traditional forms of humanities pedagogy and practice. Whether such a context exists in India and is still a matter of question, and hinges largely on how we understand the digital itself - as an object, concept or space. For that seems to be where the questions about the field, its emergence and its epistemological concerns lie.

This report, therefore, takes a slightly broader look, somewhat like a scoping exercise to see what some present concerns are and what could be the possibilities of DH in India. The areas of focus are few – the notion of crisis, and disciplines, the archive and so forth which form the crux of the debate in India. It also looks at changes that have come about, and are imminent with the ‘digital turn’, from the perspective of selected disciplines, and practices of knowledge-making. More importantly, it tries to extrapolate, from the common issues and conflicts traced across several conversations, larger questions of a conflict of authority that disciplines in the humanities have come to undergo, and whether the digital has amplified of tried to resolve the same. The conflict is tied to questions of ownership/authorship and authenticity that emerge with new collaborative modes of knowledge production, and the politics of circulation. It is reflected in the shift from more traditional spaces of knowledge-making to newer methods, objects, figures and processes in the online world, which seem to at one level replace older ones. This perceived threat of irrelevance or obsolescence is one of the manifestations of this conflict of authority. The Wikipedia is one example of this conflict, wherein the authenticity and authority of its content and recognition as scholarship has been intensely debated owing to, among other things, the fact that it cannot be attributed to any single author. In the ways in which the digital now mediates such activities, what has become the space and understanding of the digital in our lives, in the ways we consume and produce information and knowledge, and increasingly become uneven stakeholders in a dynamic knowledge economy, are some of the questions explored therein.

Methodology

With few 'digital humanists' (a term many DH scholars in India have consciously chosen to stay away from) and DH centres around, and the discourse being far from stable in India, the best way to explore this supposedly new phenomenon then seemed to be to understand some of the immediate problems and questions with the notion of the ‘digital’ itself. This approach was not just the result of constraints of the immediate context, but also turned out to be a productive methodological gesture, as it widened the scope of this mapping exercise to include several proto/perhaps-DH initiatives that have come up around the same time, or been in existence for a while and have been trying to work around similar questions. The mapping did not begin with an assumption of a field called DH as being extant in India, and therefore as an examination of its challenges and possibilities, but rather to understand how DH-like practices have evolved and converged at the moment under what appears to be like a place-holder term, and the implications of this for research and learning. Being located in India, it also provided a good vantage point to reflect on some of the literature and discourse around the term being produced in the Anglo-American context. The consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education held in July 2013 was helpful in bringing together a number of people and key questions of what was then understood as something of a field. It is largely from the discussions at this consultation that this report approaches the term and what it may offer for humanities and related interdisciplinary research in India; somewhere it also hopes to serve as a point of departure. A major concern then was the lack of a proper definition of the field, and its instability, which continued to be a recurrent topic in my discussions with people as part of this exercise. However, the merits of embarking upon an exercise to ‘define DH in India’ were highly contentious, so the mapping took a more descriptive route, and did a discursive analysis of work in DH and allied fields and what people were saying about it in India. What I found were a range of views, some informed by practice and scholarship, others based on conjecture and some purely non-committal. As one of the people interviewed for this mapping pointed out, there is something provisional about which, if I may add, also inhibits us from saying anything definitive about it, just yet.

Given that the lack of a definition of the field remained one of the main issues, I went into conducting the mapping with a working definition/assumption that DH ‘is an interdisciplinary area of research, practice and pedagogy that looks at the interaction of digital tools, methods and spaces with core concerns of humanistic enquiry’. This definition was developed based on a review of existing literature in the Anglo-American context on DH, and deliberately made expansive enough to include within its fold, the different kinds of practices that had already chosen to adopt the term, and others which seemed to be inclined towards similar theoretical and practical concerns. Another useful definition, from the Digital Humanities Quarterly useful was the following:

Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. (Digital Humanities Quarterly 2010)

Deliberating on the interaction between humanities and technology, Susan Schreibman, in one the earliest books on DH describes the 'field' as follows:

The digital humanities, then, and their interdisciplinary core found in the field of humanities computing, have a long and dynamic history best illustrated by examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with computation. (Schreibman et al 2004)

One of the popular and most quoted definitions, however, is an early one that appeared in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Institute for the Future of the Book 2009). This describes DH as an array of convergent practices, and is also reproduced in the book Digital Humanities (Burdick et al 2012):

Digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication. Digital Humanities is less a unified field than an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. (Ibid., 122)

The notion that DH is a “less a unified field than an array of convergent practices” seems to be the most useful way to describe the observations and more so the conditions that led to this mapping exercise, which also seeks to outline some kind of a trajectory of practices that converge at this contemporary moment to engender new meanings of and around the digital, rather than produce a conceptual history of the term in the Indian context or even imagine an extant field of some sort. This notion of a convergence, as stated in the last definition, although not apparent or expressed by anyone in India, seems to be the best possible way to describe the manner in which certain practices and a discourse has grown around the intersection of humanities and digital technologies in India. This rather organic growth of DH projects, practices and coursework in the absence of a meta-theory that would drive its epistemological concerns is an important conceptual question for the field itself, and a challenge for the study. Thus while the broader conversation around DH spans everything from instructional technology, new media and art practices, integrated science education to cultural analytics, the core concerns often remain the same, that of the intersection of previously separate domains of knowledge that are now coming together, and the crucial role played by the internet and digital technologies in bringing them together.

Further, three immediate experiences in engaging with digital technologies and questions of knowledge production in India shaped the intellectual concerns of this study. The first of these is the series of monographs produced as part of the ‘Histories of Internets in India’ project at the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in CIS, during 2008-2011. A key point foregrounded in these monographs was the critical need to approach the internet, as a plural technology, available in and actualised through different forms, practices, and experiences. The second one was the collaborative project on the quality of access to higher education in undergraduate educational institutions at the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.The project was conducted in nine undergraduate institutions across three states in India, and included interaction with students and teachers through workshops and campus projects.The experience of working with students – who ranged from those who could barely use a computer to students proficient with the latest software, multimedia tools and internet applications – led to many insightful learnings about the teaching-learning environment, and prevalence of digital technologies and the internet in these spaces. The third one, of course, is the consultation on DH held in Bangalore, which provided an immediate set of questions and a network of people to begin the mapping with.

In this study, the fieldwork consisted of in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key people involved in the DH-like initiatives in India, and allied areas such as media, archives, art, and higher education. The sample size being small, the conversations were by no means exhaustive, but they were insightful in terms of the present nature of practice and the questions that they further pointed towards. The interviews were largely open-ended conversations focussing on, where possible, questions about DH: its emergence, theory, practice and pedagogy, but emphasising the notion of the ‘digital’ and is diverse perception and formulations. With respondents who were not from an academic space or not involved with DH directly, the questions were more related to the nature of changes that the digital has brought about in their practice, specifically the shifts in content and method. The crisis of disciplines and the move away from more traditional concerns of humanistic enquiry were also discussed. Issues of access, exclusivity and the move towards collaborative spaces of knowledge production and the democratic potential of the internet and digital technologies also came up quite prominently as points of discussion.

The fieldwork tried to cover not just a range of people from different disciplines and areas of practice, but also institutions: Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Purbasha Auddy, (School of Cultural Texts and Records and Dept. of English), Dr. Moinak Biswas and Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee (Media lab and Dept. of Film Studies); Dr. Abhijit Roy (School of Communication and Culture) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata; Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (Dept. of English) and Dr. Milinda Banerjee (Dept. of History) at Presidency University, Kolkata; Abhijit Bhattacharya (Media Archives) at Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; Dr. Ravi Sundaram (the Sarai Programme) at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Dr. Indira Chowdhury and Dr. Padmini Ray-Murray (Centre for Public History) at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore; Dr. C. S Lakshmi at the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women, Mumbai; Shaina Anand, Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lutgert and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who have all worked with CAMP, Mumbai and are part of the team behind Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma; Vikram Vincent at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and S.V. Srinivas, Azim Premji University, who was previously associated with the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. The individuals and institutions mentioned here have been engaged with these concerns within their respective fields of research and practice. Three institutions - Jadavpur University, Presidency University and the Centre for Public History – have actively adopted the term DH for some of the work they have been doing, whereas the remaining have been working with digital technologies as part of research, pedagogy, and practice. The report presents some part of these conversations and in doing so provides a snapshot of the operational context of the term ‘DH’ in India as well. The attempt was to understand the nature of existing and possible institutional investment in the term, as well as digital technologies (beyond tools, platforms and processes) and their stake in taking these questions further.

Notes

[1] This one-day event was organized by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, and other institutions. See: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education.

[2] See: https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/

[3] See: http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf.

[4] See: http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/.

[5] See: http://www.nmeict.ac.in/.

[6] See http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf.

[7] See: http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf

[8] See: http://nptel.ac.in/

[9] See: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578.

[10] See: http://www.ignou.ac.in/.

[11] See: http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/.

[12] See: http://nkn.in/.

[13] See: http://www.namami.org/.

[14] See: http://www.dli.ernet.in/.

[15] See: http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/.

[16] See: http://www.southasiaarchive.com/.

[17] See: http://www.aaa.org.hk/.

References

Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunefeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities.

Digital Humanities Quarterly, "About DHQ," 2010, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html

Gutting, Gary. "The Real Humanities Crisis," The New York Times, November 30, 2013, accessed July 14, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/.

Institute for the Future of the Book, "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0," 2009, http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/

Jay, Paul, and Gerald Duff, "The Fear of Being Useful," Inside Higher Ed. January 5. 2012. Accessed September 22, 2015. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities.

Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, "The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction," A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.

Snow, C.P. "The Two Cultures," Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s. 1990. Pp. 169-173.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india

Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T04:48:27Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Concluding Thoughts

This exercise in mapping ‘digital humanities’ in India has brought to the fore several learnings and challenges, especially in trying to locate the domain of enquiry even as our understanding of what constitutes new objects, methods and forms of research and pedagogy constantly undergo change and redefinition. As some of the people interviewed in the course of this study remarked, DH, with its interdisciplinary approach and porous boundaries is like a moving target that becomes increasingly difficult to define as it is constantly evolving into something new, which then adds another dimension to what is already understood about the field. This is not to say that there is a consensus on what is DH, globally or in India, but just to emphasise that the object or domain of enquiry is not fixed, or demarcated clearly.

Even as I wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the ‘field’ – if there is such a thing – is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world. What it does for us immediately is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the ‘digital’, and what may be new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large, post the advent of the digital. This study therefore is not interested in the question of whether there is a field called DH in India, but rather in what questions are raised by and for DH and DH-like projects by a range of practices and scholarship in the humanities post the digital.

We began with the understanding that DH is a new space of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and practice with several possibilities for thinking about the nature of the intersection of the humanities and technology. The term was a little more than a found term of sorts, in the context of this study, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The history of the term in the context of “humanities computing” in the Anglo-American context has helped in locating and defining the field globally within the ambit of certain kinds of practices and scholarship in the contemporary moment. In India, this has been relatively complex endeavour, given that DH, or engagements with humanities-after-digital and/or with digital-through-humanities come out of a different chequered history of humanities and technology. As most of the literature around DH even globally has pointed out, the problem with arriving at a definition is ontological, more than epistemological. The conditions of its emergence and existence are yet to be completely understood, although if one is to take into account the larger history of science and technology studies or the more recent cyber culture and digital culture studies, these ‘epistemic shifts’ have been in the making for some time now. In India particularly, where a clear picture of the ‘field’ as such is still to emerge in the form of a theorisation of its key concerns, it is only through a practice-mapping that one may locate what are at best certain discursive shifts in the way we understand content, structures and methods in the humanities, within the context of the digital. These changes may be visible across only a few domains – particularly in the multi-layered technological landscape in India, and lack a wider consensus in terms of whether they really constitute a larger epistemic shift or new direction of thought. The first couple of chapters in this report tried to lay out ways of understanding the current state of ‘digitality’ that India is in, and the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise or understand it better. The layered technological and media landscape that we inhabit today, where both the analogue and digital co-exist serving various purposes, and access and usage are still contentious points of debate, provides an interesting and dynamic context to understand what are new practices of humanities research and scholarship today.

The fundamental premise of the nature of the digital and its relation to the human subject still lacks adequate exploration which would be required to define the contours of the field. The inherited separation of humanities and technology further makes this a complex space to negotiate, when the term may now actually indicate the need to decode the rather tenuous relationship between the two supposedly separate domains. If one may locate the question even earlier, the separation of the natural and social sciences lies above this segregation of disciplines, and needs further exploration. There is a need therefore to understand the growth of a ‘technologised’ history of humanities to examine whether this almost forced coming together of two historically separated domains may in itself be something novel, or create new and qualitatively different kinds of practices for humanities. Even so, the disciplinary contexts of the usage of the term DH in India open up certain questions of ontology and method more broadly for humanities research and practice in the digital space. These include changes in the nature of cultural artifacts brought about by digitisation, in a landscape where the analogue and digital co-exist but also are in a state of transition from the first to the second. One example is the digitisation of objects like film posters, lobby cards and other paraphernalia around a film text, which although analogue objects, can now be layered onto a digital film object in online archivel like Indiancine.ma, thus also changing the object or opening it up for more questions. The digital object or image, is a new object of study that also demands a different kind of analysis. The change in the nature of the archival object and the challenges to archival practice are some of the related questions stemming from this context. As mentioned by Dr. Indira Chowdhury in the chapter on archival practice, oral history archives and the practice of creating and maintaining them is fraught with many challenges because of a change in the archival object itself. A digital audio file has its own protocols of storage, retrieval and use, given the problems of format and technological obsolescence. Further the classification of such files, its copies in different formats, and their preservation also demands changes in archival practice. This points to some of the larger challenges that have emerged for archival practice in India today, which include – storage and preservation of materials, cross-referencing and meta-data standards, conditions and structures of access, roles and forms of curation, re-usage of archival materials in research and pedagogy, and the constraints to digitization of archival materials, particularly in terms of rare materials and those in Indian languages. The challenge of working with materials in Indian languages (see section on Data as Text) are several, and will form one of the significant areas of work in DH.

The question of methodology comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. The proliferation of new disciplines and conflict over methodology is not new, the Gulbenkian Commission report published in 1996 titled ‘Open the Social Sciences’ documents some of these and other concerns with the growth and segregation of disciplines, and the debates it generated both internally, seen in the rise of cultural studies, and in the natural sciences as complexity studies as well (Wallerstein et al 1996). At present DH seems to be a combination and creative appropriation of methodologies drawn from different disciplines and creative practices. The change in the methodology of the humanities and social sciences itself as no longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH as well. This has raised several methodological questions, as outlined by some of the people interviewed in the study. The foremost is the challenge in rethinking the notion of the text as a digitally mediated object, and the blurring of boundaries between film, audio and print and archival materials as they are transformed into digital objects. The existing methods of reading these texts then are inadequate. An example is the Bichitra variorum at Jadavpur University, or online archives like Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, where you need new tools to navigate the vast corpus of material on these platforms, and to work with them. The notion of text and textual analysis also demands some rethinking in the light of new terms such as ‘distant reading’ that have come up in the DH discourse. Bichitra and Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma would facilitate some form of such ‘distant reading’ as they involve a method of reading the print or film text using a large number of texts, something possible only with a computer, but also with other kinds of ancillary material, like marginalia, errata, posters, pamphlets and lobby cards of a film. This brings up not just new ways of contextualizing the digital object, but also asking questions of it in terms of its material aspects. Working with collaborative online archives, while creating a new analytical and creative space for work using different kinds of film and film-related material, also pose questions of authorship and privacy. The lack of better transcription tools and other methods to work with sound in the digital space, has posed significant methodological challenges in oral history work as well, as outlined in earlier sections of this report.

The use of computational methods for humanities research is one of the important shifts that forms part of the growth of DH in India, although there is very little work being done in this area in academic spaces except for a few institutions. The Tagore variorum and the online film archives Indiacine.ma and Pad.ma are two examples in this study that have done some work with computational tools and a large corpus of material. The collation guide in Bichitra, and the use of different tools and filters in the film archives like Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been able to add another dimension to the analysis of humanities texts, but whether they help ask any qualitatively new questions still remains open to debate. The other spaces studied as part of this report, such as work on digitisation and archives at the School of Cultural Texts, Centre for Public History, or SPARROW, or media art work at CAMP, have been more engaged with exploring what the digital turn has meant for certain humanities research. Some of the more recent courses offered in DH, such as the master’s programme at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, and the certificate course at University of Pune, do engage with some form of building or ‘material making’, by offering workshops and some practical sessions, as well as topics like data mining, and textual computing. As such the skills and infrastructure needed to work with large data sets and new technologised processes of interpretation and visualisation still remain outside the ambit of the mainstream humanities. Through an exploration of allied fields such as media, archival practice, design and education technology, the study tries to locate how certain practices in these areas inform what we understand of DH today.

The archive, media and now to a certain extent art and design have become the sites for most of the discussions around DH in India, primarily because of the nature of institutions and people who have engaged with the question so far. Archival practice has seen a vast change with the onset of digitisation, and the growth of more public and collaborative archival spaces will also bring forth new questions and concepts around the nature of the archive and its imagination as a dynamic space of knowledge production. The Centre for Public History at the Srishti School focuses on some of these questions, by trying to build more collaborative, online and public archival spaces, and involving in the process a rather diverse group of practitioners and researchers. The objective is also to make not only archives, but history, and oral histories as a discipline more accessible, and dynamic. he notion of the archive as a metaphor, and the possibility of looking at the archive as a database are some new questions which would inform the growth of DH in India. The growth of an open, distributive and collaborative archive, such as Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma also asks questions about the changes in film as an archival object, in its transition to the digital space. The availability of the film text for study, and the layering of different kinds of ancillary material around the film, such as posters, advertisements, literature and errata, opens up possibilities of reading the film text differently. At a more abstract level, the nature of the text as an unstable object itself, now increasingly being mediated and negotiated in different ways through digital spaces, tools and methods would be one way of locating an object of enquiry in DH and tracing its connection to the humanities, which are essentially still seen as ‘text-based disciplines’.

What has been a definite shift is the emphasis on process which has become an important point of enquiry, and one of the many axes around which DH is constructed. The rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, including traditional methods of teaching-learning, and the emergence of new tools and methods such as visualisation, data mapping, distant reading and design-thinking at a larger level would be some of the interesting prospects of enquiry in the field. Though there is little conversation in the above areas in DH in India (even among the institutions and people mentioned in this study), and some work in other fields like the natural sciences, media and communication, its seems to not be part of the larger discourse developing around DH yet. The collation tool developed for the Tagore variorum, or the editing and annotation tools used in Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are some examples of the tools and methods presently used in what could be DH or DH-like work in India. The method of DH is however, necessarily collaborative and distributed at the same time, as evidenced by its practice in these various areas and disciplines. A lot of the work done on both these platforms has been through collaboration among people across diverse domains of expertise, in the arts and humanities and technological fields. As the description of the variorum suggests, it needed the expertise of people from Computer Science, Library and Information Sciences, English and Bengali departments to set up such a platform. The method of using or working with Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma is necessarily collaborative and distributed, because everything from the primary film material to the annotations and editing is in some way user-generated, as the archive itself is open to different groups of people ranging from the film enthusiast to the film studies scholar.

The complex and somewhere problematic history of science and technology in India and the growth of the IT sector also forms part of this context, and will inform the manner in which DH grows as a concept, area of enquiry or even as a discipline. DH is yet another manifestation of changes that we have seen in the existing objects, processes, spaces and figures of learning, particularly the open, collaborative and participatory nature of knowledge production and dissemination that has come about with the advent of internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what were earlier considered unifying notions for the university, and the humanities as disciplines founded on the ideas of reason and culture. The idea proposed by Bill Readings that the university is no longer concerned with the production of a radical or liberal subject is also an important one, as it points to a further question of the nature of the subject produced, and who the process of knowledge production is to be aimed at (Readings 1997). If one may extend this argument to DH, the subject of this new discourse around the digital is also now rather unclear.

One could explore the notion of the 'digital humanist,' or in a more abstract manner the digital subject as one example of this lack of clarity, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars, DH and otherwise. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta says, it is difficult to identify such a category of scholars, although a person who is able to situate his work in the digital space with the same kind of ease and confidence that people of a different generation could do in manuscripts and books would perhaps fit this description, and he is sure that such a person may be found. For example someone who knows Shakespeare well and can write a programme, and he is sure a day will come when this is a possibility. It is a familiarity in which the inherent distance between these two pursuits becomes lesser – DH is at that moment - a composite of these two approaches rather than the difference. While many scholars concur with this explanation, others find the term misleading – humanities scholars do not call themselves ‘humanists’. Also, by virtue of being a digital subject, anybody engaged with some form of digital practice is already a digital humanist of some sort. The problem also is in the rather unclear nature of the practice, all of which is not unanimously identified as DH, as a result of which not many scholars would want to identify with the term. This poses another question about the skills required of a humanities scholar in the near future, will she have to learn how to code etc. Additionally there is also a concern, as pointed out by some scholars, about the loss of criticality as a result of a relying on algorithms to work with a corpus of texts, among other things.

However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. This is also indicative of the larger changes in the landscape of work in the humanities, whether creative, academic or pedagogic. With the advent of the internet and new digital technologies, the nature of cultural artifacts has also been altered significantly, thus demanding a new mode of enquiry and analysis, which often goes beyond interpretation and representation. How these digital objects are constituted, are they ever complete or finished, such as the text in the variorum or the film in the archive which continue to take on layer upon layer of annotation to generate a plethora of meanings, are related questions. They pose a challenge to the existing methods of the humanities, and along with the distributed, collaborative, and networked structures of practice and research that the internet has engendered, they have opened up several possibilities for the humanities. DH, with its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and different kinds of knowledge drawn from a diverse set of practices definitely opens up space for a new mode of questioning; whether all of these different modes of questioning can coalesce as a new discipline or interdisciplinary field in itself will remain to be seen.

More importantly, it also indicates the changes taking place in the university system in India, which is trying to address multiple anxieties at a larger political and the every-day administrative levels, reflected in problems with quality, equity and access to education (Misra and Singh 2015; Academics for Creative Reforms 2015). The digital turn has been one of the sources of concern, as it has pushed for the need to rethink the role of technology, particularly internet, in teaching and learning practices, both within and outside the classroom. The internet, and the different challenges posed by it in terms of methods, objects and contexts of learning, has contributed greatly to the emergence of some of the digital practices discussed in this study, which also take some of the questions they pose about knowledge production, pedagogy or scholarship, outside the ambit of the classroom or university space. The emergence of DH can be seen as a coming together of these anxieties in some manner, and perhaps indicative of a distinct ontological basis for such a discipline or area of study in India. This is not to conflate the discourse with the narrative of a ‘crisis’ in the university (something that exists in the Anglo-American context of DH) but rather to highlight the changes that it is undergoing, where the internet and digital technologies continue to play a crucial role. In the absence of a history or established traditions for the growth of disciplines like media studies, software/internet studies or digital cultural studies in India, apart from the work done by research programmes like the Sarai programme at CSDS, it is imperative to ask if the emergence of DH is then a push to trace such a history, to understand better its ontological and political stake, and more importantly to explore what the ‘digital’ means not just for the humanities, but for a larger processes of knowledge production today.

References

Academics for Creative Reforms ‘What Is To Be Done About Indian Universities? In Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 24, 13 Jun, 2015.

Misra, Rajesh and Supriya Singh ‘Continuum of Ignorance in Indian Universities’ in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 48, 28 Nov, 2015

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

Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. California: Stanford University Press, 1996, http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts

Digital Humanities and New Contexts of Digital Archival Practice in India

sneha-pp — 2019-12-18T10:32:07Z

Puthiya Purayil Sneha attended and presented at a conference on 'The Arts, Knowledge, and Critique in the Digital Age in India: Addressing Challenges in the Digital Humanities' organised by Sahapedia and Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad on November 28-29, 2019.

Conference: Website (external)

Digital humanities and new contexts of digital archival practice in India

This is the abstract of Sneha's presentation on digital humanities in India and transitions in digitization and cultural archival practices in the postcolonial context. The presentation was part of a session titled 'Community and Knowledge.'

The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors in India. In space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) in particular, there have been several initiatives undertaken by state institutions, along with individual and collaborative efforts to digitize and make cultural heritage and educational content available online. The growth of new areas of research and creative practice like digital humanities has also brought to the fore the need for digital corpora, including new technologies and methods of research as ways to engage with cultural content through the development of digital pedagogies and creative practice.

Many of these questions are located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. While digitization and archival practice form a significant aspect of the discourse on digital humanities, there still exist a number of anxieties around its practice. Especially in the case of community-led efforts, such as archiving oral histories or GLAM initiatives with collaborative knowledge platforms like Wikimedia, challenges of the digital divide are persistent, reflecting also a larger politics around the growth and sustenance of cultural heritage projects and the humanities and arts more broadly. Drawing upon excerpts from work on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in cultural archives, this presentation seeks to understand the practices and politics of digitization and archival work today, and how it continues to inform the growth of fields like digital humanities in India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-and-new-contexts-of-digital-archival-practice-in-india

Digital Humanities Alliance of India - Inagural Conference 2018 - Keynote by Puthiya Purayil Sneha

sneha-pp — 2018-06-26T12:02:09Z

The inaugural conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) was held at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore on June 1-2, 2018. The event was co-organised by the IIM and the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, with support from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Puthiya Purayil Sneha was a keynote speaker at the event. Her talk was titled ‘New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital’. Drawing upon excerpts from a study on mapping digital humanities initiatives in India, and ongoing conversations on digital cultural archiving practices, the keynote address discussed some pertinent concerns in the field, particularly with respect to the growth of digital corpora and its intersections with teaching learning practices in arts and humanities, including the need to locate these efforts within the context of the emerging digital landscape in India, and its implications for humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy.

Tweets from the Conference: #DHAI2018

The above photograph of Sneha presenting at the Conference is courtesy of Melissa DeLury.

Abstract of the Keynote

The discourse around the field of digital humanities in India has emerged at an interesting and crucial juncture, where the ‘digital’ has been the focal point of several changes in governance, policy, industry, education and creative practice among other areas over the last couple of decades. Even as the field has garnered much interest globally, it has also invited criticism, especially due to its largely Anglo-American framing, which traces a history in humanities computing and textual studies, located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. Now with increasing efforts to address issues of representation and diversity in emerging digital initiatives, it is imperative to trace where efforts within India have been speaking to these concerns within the global discourse as well. In India, as with several parts of the world, a large part of the work and scholarship around digital humanities, as we have seen so far has centered around two key processes/concepts - that of digitization, or the creation of a corpora of cultural content, enabled by the availability of the internet and digital technologies, and the need for new methods and tools to work with or study them. These conversations have largely organized around two thematic areas of work within digital humanities and related digital practices - namely the creation of digital corpora in the form of archives and repositories, and the advancement of digital technologies and methods of research, or more specifically through the development of digital pedagogies. Drawing upon excerpts from a study on mapping digital humanities initiatives in India, and ongoing conversations on digital cultural archiving practices, this talk discussed some pertinent concerns in the field, particularly with respect to the growth of digital corpora and its intersections with teaching learning practices in arts and humanities, including the need to locate these efforts within the context of the emerging digital landscape in India, and its implications for humanities practice, scholarship and pedagogy.

Conference Agenda

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/dhai-inagural-conference-2018-puthiya-purayil-sneha-keynote

Digital Activism in Asia Reader: Announcement

sneha-pp — 2015-10-24T14:22:39Z

The CIS-RAW programme organized an editorial workshop on March 6-7, 2015, as part of its project on a Digital Activism in Asia Reader. The project is a collaborative effort of the Centre for Internet and Society and the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany, which aims to bring together local knowledge, debates and conversations around Digital Activism in Asia.

The proposed reader on Digital Activism in Asia will combine stories in multiple forms, including academic essays, case-studies to grey literature from public discourse that reveals and points to the debates around digital activism that have emerged in this particular context. Most of the audience will consist of academics, practitioners and policy actors internationally.

One of the main goals of this reader will be to challenge the prevalent notion in the discourse of Digital Activism of universality and uniformity across contexts and cultures. The focus is on new actors (like digital natives), processes, movements, and networks that such digital activism has engendered.

The editorial workshop was conducted towards completion of the Reader, to better contextualize the material through peer annotations and supporting information. Over the course of two days, a total of six participants worked on two articles each, which had been circulated beforehand, to annotate those using different kinds of material and close reading the texts.

The workshop was structured in the form of presentations and discussion sessions in the morning, followed by a writing sprint in the afternoon. Apart from a larger discussion around digital activism itself, its modes, approaches and forms, the materials were also categorized along four axes – activists using digital tools, activism around the digital, digital shaping activism and activism shaping the digital – which helped structure the discussions and the process of writing. The suggested annotations took different forms – from introductory paragraphs to references for further reading. Participants were also expected to bring in and build on their own practices, experiences and contexts in discussing the articles.

The Digital Activism in Asia Reader is expected to be published by the Hybrid Publishing Lab in mid-2015.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader-announcement

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

sneha-pp — 2019-11-01T17:53:40Z

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

Event page: URL

Agenda: Download (PDF)

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

Data Lives of Humanities Text

sneha-pp — 2020-12-23T13:07:43Z

The ‘computational turn’ in the humanities has brought with it several questions and challenges for traditional ways of engaging with the ‘text’ as an object of enquiry. The prevalence of data-driven scholarship in the humanities offers several challenges to traditional forms of work and practice, with regard to theory, tools, and methods. In the context of the digital, ‘text’ acquires new forms and meanings, especially with practices such as distant reading. Drawing upon excerpts from an earlier study on digital humanities in India, this essay discusses how data in the humanities is not a new phenomenon; concerns about the ‘datafication’ of humanities, now seen prominently in digital humanities and related fields is actually reflective of a longer conflict about the inherited separation between humanities and technology. It looks at how ‘data’ in the humanities has become a new object of enquiry as a result of several changes in the media landscape in the past few decades. These include large-scale digitalization and availability of corpora of materials (digitized and born-digital) in an array of formats and across varied platforms, thus leading to also a steady prevalence of the use of computational methods in working with and studying cultural artifacts today. This essay also explores how reading ‘text as data’ helps understand the role of data in the making of humanities texts and redefines traditional ideas of textuality, reading, and the reader.

This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (2020) edited by Sandeep Mertia, with a Foreword by Ravi Sundaram as part of the Series on Theory on Demand by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Read the open access book here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/data-lives-of-humanities-text

Creativity, Politics, and Internet Censorship

sneha-pp — 2016-06-17T07:07:40Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CIS Featured in 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' Report

sneha-pp — 2015-10-16T07:43:18Z

This report, authored by Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne, sheds light on the expertise required to support a robust and sustainable digital scholarship (DS) program. It focuses first on defining and describing the key domain knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets at some of the world’s most prominent digital scholarship programs. It then identifies the main strategies used to build this expertise, both formally and informally. The work is set in a global context, examining leading digital scholarship organizations in China, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The report team visited and spoke to us last year, as part of the study. Here are the Executive Summary and link to the final report.

Access the 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' report here.

Executive Summary

As new production, researchers scholarship analysis, pursue using digital or digital publishing scholarship or computational and dissemination (the creation, techniques), of they are often challenged to develop new skill sets. What skills, competencies, knowledge, and mindsets should digital scholars possess? How are such attributes—which we group under the term expertise—best cultivated? Does the shape of expertise vary around the world? Such questions are being asked by institutions establishing or reshaping digital scholarship organizations (DSOs), instructors developing educational and training programs in digital scholarship, experienced and aspiring digital scholars defining what expertise they need to acquire, and researchers exploring the global nature of digital scholarship.

Through our pilot study, we sought to answer these questions with the broader aims of identifying the workforce-related factors important to the success of digital scholarship, helping training and educational programs define key goals, and contributing to the conversation about the global dimensions of digital scholarship. We focused on “best in class” DSOs, highlighting the human dimensions behind their success in areas such as research output, winning grants, international reputation, and innovative teaching or training programs. We conducted interviews with a range of people involved with leading DSOs, including directors, research staff, faculty, librarians, graduate students, and university administrators. We conducted site visits with all but one of the 16 institutions participating in our study, which enabled us to get a richer sense of the facilities, organizational context, and local culture. While most of our interviews focused on digital humanities, we also included several digital social science organizations to identify areas of commonality and contrast. We explored a variety of organizational structures, including research centers and institutes, an academic department, labs, a network, a nonprofit organization, and a company; these organizations were sponsored by academic schools, libraries, and information technology departments. To understand the global dimensions of digital scholarship, we examined organizations from Mexico, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Since digital scholarship projects often require specific technical skills (such as expertise in text analysis or geographic information systems [GIS]), it was difficult to generalize about what particular skill sets organizations should offer; in many ways that depends on the goals and focus of the organization. In addition, different skill sets were expected depending on one’s position and degree of experience. However, our interviews revealed in particular the importance of collaborative competencies, reflecting the ways in which digital scholarship typically takes place in teams dependent on diverse expertise. Since digital scholarship often involves developing new methods, tools, and theoretical approaches, successful digital scholars usually exhibit creativity, curiosity, and an enthusiasm for learning, which we term learning mindsets. Some level of general domain knowledge is useful so that team members can understand the research questions they are pursuing, while researchers draw upon methodological competencies (such as data science and GIS) and technical skills (such as database design and programming) to carry out their research. Finally, managerial skills—particularly project management—are needed to ensure that projects are completed.

While self-education and learning by doing are the predominant ways that digital scholars have traditionally acquired expertise, they also appreciate being part of a community of practice, so that they can turn to colleagues for help solving a problem and learning something new. Many organizations host workshops and visiting speakers and enable faculty and staff to attend conferences, although it can be challenging for staff to secure travel funding. A couple of organizations provide dedicated research time to staff, so that they can experiment, stay abreast of the state of the art, and contribute their own research. Along with formal support for professional development, we noted the importance of a “learning culture” in fostering continuous learning. Organizations most successful at building expertise among faculty, students, and staff tended to share characteristics such as an open and collaborative interdisciplinary culture in which each team member contributes expertise and is respected for it; global engagement, which includes participating in multi-institutional research projects; an entrepreneurial culture in which experimentation is valued; and a focus on teaching and learning as well as research. We noted variation in the kind of facilities these organizations occupied; collaborative space seemed to be more important than top-notch hardware.

Since we were able to visit only a small number of organizations in each country or region included in the study, we don’t feel comfortable making broad generalizations about the state of digital scholarship around the world. However, we did note some common factors that influenced the shape of digital scholarship expertise. These factors included a tradition of digital scholarship, as more established organizations could both build on existing structures and could be limited by them; funding; the degree of involvement of the institution’s library; and variations in academic career structures, such as paths to promotion and the recognition of alternative academic careers.

Digital scholarship organizations face a number of challenges, particularly in securing adequate funding for their work. We want to draw particular attention to the challenge of recruitment and retention. Typically, DSOs cannot compete with the private sector in offering high salaries or extensive opportunities for advancement; rather, they provide more flexible environments and an academic or intellectual atmosphere in which staff are encouraged to experiment and learn. Unfortunately, some staff at many organizations are hired on temporary contracts because of limited funding, so they often leave for more stable positions. We also noted a tension between research and service at some organizations, wherein these organizations viewed producing new knowledge as central to their mission but may also be expected to provide services to local researchers or to maintain existing projects. At a few organizations, we observed status differences between faculty and staff, particularly in the ability to be principal investigators on grants or to receive travel funding. Researchers whose first language is not English must often choose between reaching a smaller audience with work published in their native language and devoting significant time to translating their work into English.

We provide an extensive list of recommendations aimed at digital scholars, leaders of DSOs, universities and host organizations, funders, and the broader digital scholarship community. To highlight some of the most salient: We recommend that digital scholars take responsibility for their own learning, nurture their own curiosity, and actively pursue learning opportunities, including by participating in communities of practice and team projects. We advise the leaders of DSOs to encourage both structured and unstructured opportunities for learning by including dedicated staff research time in job descriptions, enabling staff to train and mentor, and hosting workshops, outside speakers, and other events. Host institutions such as universities should create more stable staff positions with paths to promotion and facilitate more stable funding for DSOs, while funders should support global digital scholarship exchanges. As for the digital scholarship community, we recommend heightening awareness of digital scholarship around the world through conference programs, funding initiatives, publications, and communities of practice, and promoting greater linguistic diversity. We hope that this report helps raise awareness of the range of expertise required for digital scholarship, the importance of a learning culture and active communities of practice in nurturing it, the challenges digital scholarship staff often face in finding stable careers, and the diversity of models for digital scholarship around the world.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report

Call for Papers: #CultureForAll Conference

sneha-pp — 2020-12-23T13:34:23Z

We are collaborating with Sahapedia, Azim Premji University, and University of Cape Town to invite papers on cultural mapping for the #CultureForAll conference scheduled to be held in March 2021. Cultural mapping is a set of activities and processes for exploring, discovering, documenting, examining, analysing, interpreting, presenting, and sharing information related to people, communities, societies, places, and the material products and practices associated with those people and places. All interested academicians, researchers, PhD students, and practitioners are invited to submit papers. The conference is supported by Tata Technologies and MapMyIndia.

Cross-posted from Sahapedia.

Background

Sahapedia in collaboration with the Azim Premji University, The Centre for Internet and Society and the University of Cape Town is inviting papers in cultural mapping for the Culture For All conference scheduled to be held in March 2021.

Cultural mapping is a set of activities and processes for exploring, discovering, documenting, examining, analysing, interpreting, presenting, and sharing information related to people, communities, societies, places, and the material products and practices associated with those people and places. It was recognised by UNESCO more than a decade ago as a crucial tool in sustaining the tangible, intangible, and natural heritage of the world.

However, the exercise is either used inadequately or rarely highlighted in the Indian context thereby limiting accessibility to peer-reviewed work in this area. As part of the #CultureForAll festival and conference, an open call for research papers and action projects in cultural mapping is being made to consolidate knowledge created till date in India and regions with similar cultural history like Asia and Africa. Cultural mapping and documentation are intricate processes that attempt to solve complex questions of who, what, how, and for whom to map. We hope these papers will carve out a space to interrogate, discuss, and reflect upon the same.

Another central objective of reviewing work in this area is to develop a mapping toolkit/guide that can help make cultural documentation accessible to anyone interested. Without being prescriptive or lending itself to a homogenous practise, the toolkit/guide would be a way to bring together varied approaches, contexts, and innovations in the field. In a sector like culture where financial and non-financial resources are insubstantial, we believe this toolkit/guide will give organisations and individuals a clear roadmap for future mapping projects.

Themes

All interested academicians, researchers, PhD students, and practitioners are invited to submit their papers under any one of the following themes. All papers will be evaluated by a review committee and select papers in each theme will be awarded INR 10,000 and presented in the #CultureForAll conference. Papers will also get an opportunity to be published in respected peer-reviewed journals and Sahapedia's web platform.

Cultural Mapping—Theory & Practise: There is no fixed way to map cultural resources and the approach can be multi-fold. Efforts can also vary in terms of community involvement and collaborative processes. Papers submitted under this topic should explore and elucidate the theoretical and methodological frameworks used in mapping, with an emphasis on issues and challenges faced, the extent of community engagement, and the impact of such projects in policymaking and society, if any.

Technology for cultural mapping: Technology and digitisation have shifted approaches to culture and heritage and the recent pandemic has made it indispensable to the society at large. Papers are invited on issues related to techniques and technologies for preservation, management and dissemination of cultural heritage with a focus on innovation and social equity specifically for the Indian context.

Evaluating impact of cultural mapping applications: Cultural mapping provides rich cultural data by creating resource inventories that helps address varied issues like sustainability, intergenerational conflict, alienation of youth, and the role of women in society. It can create opportunities for communities to affirm identity and pursue land rights. Cultural mapping can be an informative classroom activity for children, and a valuable methodology for academic research. As a policymaking tool, it can be used to enhance and conserve heritage sites while promoting new tourism development approaches. Papers submitted under this topic should illustrate how cultural mapping has been used in areas like education, tourism, placemaking, conservation, and skilling, the issues and challenges faced, how impacts are measured, and the metrics associated with such measurement.

Important dates

Call for papers: November 16, 2020

Last date for submission: January 31, 2021

Announcement of final selection: February 26, 2021

Presentation of select papers: March 1 to March 15, 2021

If you have any questions, please contact us at conference[at]sahapedia[dot]org

Eligibility & Selection

All interested academicians, researchers, PhD students, and practitioners are invited to participate in the call for papers. Papers should be submitted in English and will be reviewed for their originality, relevance, and clarity. Works that have been published earlier or are found to be plagiarised will not be accepted. The submission should include a paper of not more than 3,500 words along with a presentation for the same. Please email submissions to conference[at]sahapedia[dot]org with the subject "Paper Submission: [Theme] [Applicant’s Full Name]". Please find formatting instructions for the paper here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/call-for-papers-culture-for-all-conference

Call for Essays: Offline

sneha-pp — 2018-08-20T06:58:05Z

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

Offline

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

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

Call for Essays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Essays — #List

sneha-pp — 2019-10-11T17:07:26Z

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

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artefact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions.

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

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

Call for Essays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sneha-pp — 2019-08-07T12:29:25Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may be a person who:

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

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

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

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

Submissions:

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

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

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

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

Timeline:

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

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

பங்களிப்பதற்காக அழைப்பு இணைய மொழி ஆதிக்கச் சூழலை மாற்றியதில் உங்கள்அனுபவம்!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

நீங்கள்,

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

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

உங்களிடம் நாங்கள் கேட்க விரும்பும் சில கேள்விகள்:

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

ஆய்வேடு சமர்ப்பித்தல்:

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

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

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

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

காலகட்டம்:

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

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

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

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:06:46Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

The 'digital turn' has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. DH has emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technologies and the human being or subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. It has been variously called a phenomenon, field, discipline and a set of convergent practices – all of which are located at and/or try to understand the interaction between digital technologies and humanities practice and scholarship. DH in the Anglo-American context has seen several changes – from an early phase of vast archival initiatives and digitisation projects, to now exploring the role of big data and cultural analytics in literary criticism. Some of the early scholarship in the field illustrate the problems with defining and locating it within specific disciplinary formations, as the research objects, methods and locations of DH work cut across everything from the archive to the laboratory and social networking platforms. Largely interpreted as a way to explore the intersection of information technology and humanities, DH is grown to become an interdisciplinary field of research and practice today. However, DH is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.

The Problem of Definition

The question of what is DH has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of DH – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the 'digital' itself as integral to humanistic enquiry [1]. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions for the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s of digital humanities. Dave Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that "what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities." (Parry 2012)

Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in this report. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested threads or modes of thought, which will also inform larger concerns of the DH work at CIS:

The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the Nature of the book, "any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another" (Johns 1998:3). The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this 'technologised history' of the humanities. Can DH therefore be an attempt to uncover such a history and bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here?
The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with DH practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core DH concerns, they are not all 'digital humanists' or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not DH – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most DH research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in DH– where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno-social subject [2] as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.
Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and DH. This comes with the perception of DH being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities disciplines to reinvent themselves to remain relevant in the present context, and one way to do this is by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. DH has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not or even need not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching DH as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of DH in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying DH works with and tries to address this particular formulation of the field.

Locating these concerns in India, where the field of DH is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on DH still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says "Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others." (Latour 2002)

DH then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates DH from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of DH. There are several questions therefore for DH - in terms of what it means and what it could do for our understanding of the humanities and technology. However the questions of DH still need to be made explicit. This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of the above thoughts a little further. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and DH. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.

The Problem of the Discipline

Much has been said and written about DH as an emergent field or domain of enquiry; the plethora of departments being set up all across the world, well mostly the developed world is testimony to the claimed innovative and generative potential of the field. However as outlined in the introduction the problem of definition still persists and poses much difficulty in any attempts to engage with the field. While the predominant narrative seems to be in terms of defining what DH or to take it a step back, what the ‘digital’ allows you to do, with respect to enabling or facilitating certain kinds of research and pedagogy, a pertinent question still is that of what it allows you to ‘be’. DH has been alternatively called a method, practice and field of enquiry, but scholars and practitioners in many instances have stopped short of fully embracing it as a discipline. This is an interesting development given the rapid pace of its institutionalisation - from being located in existing Humanities or Computational Sciences and Media Studies departments it has now claimed functional institutional spaces of its own, with not just interdisciplinary research and teaching but also other creative and innovative knowledge-making practices. The field is slowly gaining credence in India as well, with several institutions pursuing research around core questions within the fold of DH.

So is the disciplinary lens inadequate to understand this phenomenon, or is it too early for a field still considered in some ways rather incipient. The growth of the academic discipline itself is something of a fraught endeavour; as debates around the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thought have established. To put it in a very simple manner, the story of academic disciplines is that of training in reason [3]. Andrew Cutrofello says "In academia, a discipline is defined by its methodological rigor and the clear boundaries of its field of inquiry. Methods or fields are criticized as being 'fuzzy' when they are suspected of lacking a discipline. In a more straightforwardly Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary power of academic disciplines can be located in their methods for producing docile bodies of different sorts" (Cutrofello 1994). The problem with defining DH may lie in it not conforming to precisely this notion of the academic discipline, and changing ideas of the function of critique when mediated by the digital, which is of primary concern for the humanities. DH has in many spaces also emerged as a manifestation of increasing interdisciplinarity and the blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplinary concerns.

However a prevalent mode of understanding DH has been in terms of the disciplinary concerns it raises for the humanities themselves; this works with the assumption that it is in fact a newer, improved version or extension of the humanities. The present mapping exercise too began with the disciplinary lens, but instead of enquiring about what DH is, it tried to explore what the ‘digital’ has brought to, changed or appropriated in terms of existing disciplinary concerns within the humanities and more broadly spaces and process of knowledge-making and dissemination. This thought stems from the premise that if we have to posit the digital itself as a state of being or existence, then we need to understand this new techno-social paradigm much better. Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University in Kolkata sees this as useful way of going about the problem of trying to arrive at a definition of the field – one is to understand the history of the term, from its inherited definition in the Anglo-American context, and distinguish it from what he calls the current state of ‘digitality’ – where all cultural objects are being now being conceived of as ‘digital’ objects. In the Indian context, the question of digitality also becomes important from the perspective of technological obsolescence - where there is a great resistance to discontinuing or phasing out the use of certain kinds of technology; either for lack of access to better ones or simply because one finds other uses for it. Prof. Dasgupta interestingly terms this a ‘culture of reuse’, one example of this being the typewriter which for all practical purposes has been displaced by the computer, but still finds favour with several people in their everyday lives. The question of livelihood is still connected to some of these technologies, so much so that they are very much a part of channels of cultural production and circulation, and even when they cease to become useful they have value as cultural artefacts. We therefore inhabit at the same time, different worlds, that of the analogue and digital, or as he calls it 'a multi-layered technological sphere'. The notion of the 'digital' is also multi-layered, with some objects being 'weakly digital', and others being so in a more pronounced manner. The variedness of this space, and the complexities or ‘degrees of use’ of certain technologies or technological objects is what further determines the nature of this space and makes it all the more difficult to define. DH itself has seen several phases in the West, but has seen no such movement or gradual evolution in India, where these phases exist simultaneously.

This is also true of most technology in underdeveloped world. This further complicates the questions of access to technology or the 'digital divide' which have been and still are some of the primary approaches concerning the pervasiveness of technology, particularly in the Global South. The need of the hour therefore is to be able to distinguish between this current state of digitality that we are in, and what is meant by the ‘Digital Humanities’. It may after all be a set of methodologies rather than a subject or discipline in itself– the question is how it would help us understand the ‘digital’ itself much better, and more critically, and the new kinds of enquiries it may then facilitate about this space we now inhabit. This, Prof. Dasgupta feels would go a long way in arriving at some definition of the field.

One of the important points of departure, from the traditional humanities and later humanities computing as mentioned earlier, has been the blurring of boundaries between content, method and object/s of enquiry. The ‘process’ has become important, as illustrated by the iterative nature of most DH projects and the discourse itself which emphasises the 'making' and 'doing' aspects of the research as much as the content itself. Tool-building as a critical activity rather than as mere facilitation is an important part of the knowledge-making process in the field (Ramsay 2010). In conjunction with this, Dr. Moinak Biswas, at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, thinks that the biggest changes have been in terms of the collaborative nature of knowledge production, based on voluntarily sharing or creating new content through digital platforms and archives, and crucially the possibility of now imagining creative and analytical work as not separate practices, but located within a single space and time. He cites an example from film, where now with digital platforms and processes ‘image’ making and critical practice can both be combined on one platform, like the online archive Indiancine.ma [4] or the Vectors journal [5] for example, to produce new layers of meaning around existing texts. The aspect of critique is important here, given that the consistent criticism about the field has been the ambiguity of its social undertaking; its critical or political standpoint or challenge to existing theoretical paradigms. Most of the interest around the term has been in very instrumental terms, as a facilitator or enabler of certain kinds of digital practice. While the move away from computational analysis as a technique to facilitate humanities research is apparent, the disciplinary concerns here still seem to be latched onto those of the traditional humanities. Questions about the epistemological concerns of DH itself therefore remain unanswered.

While reiterating some of these core questions within DH, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee at the Department of English, Presidency University and Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, at the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, speak of the problem of locating the field in India, where work is presently only being done in a few small pockets. The lack of a precise definition, or location within an established disciplinary context are some reasons why a lot of work that could come within the ambit of DH is not being acknowledged as such; conversely it also leads to the problem of projects on digitisation or studies of digital cultures/cyber cultures being easily conflated with DH . Related to this is the absence of self-claimed ‘digital humanists’, which makes it all the more difficult to identify the boundaries of their research and practice. More importantly, the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise around questions of the digital is also an obstacle to understanding what the field entails and the many possibilities it may offer in the Indian context. This they feel is a problem not just of DH, but in general for modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities that have adopted Western theoretical constructs. One could also locate in some sense the present crisis in disciplines within this problem. Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru explicate this issue when they talk about the absence of 'experience as an important category of the act of theorising' because of the privileging of ideas in Western constructs of experience (Guru and Sarukkai 2012). This is also reflective of the bifurcation between theory and praxis in traditional social sciences or humanities epistemological frameworks which borrow heavily from the West. DH while still to arrive at a core disciplinary concern seems to point towards the problem of this very demarcation by addressing the aspect of practice as a very focal point of its discourse.

Dr. Indira Chowdhury, oral historian and director of the Centre for Public History, who is also a faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore sees this as a favourable way of understanding how the field as such has emerged and what its various possibilities could be in terms of different disciplinary perspectives. She is uncertain that of its emergence as a response to a ‘crisis’ in the humanities as such. She recalls an instance of one of her students who went on to work on hypertext in Canada, several years ago, which for her seemed to be the first instance of something close to DH. The IT revolution in the early 2000s was a significant change, and there were several things that it enabled people to do, in terms of concordance, cross-referencing and getting around texts in certain ways. However, whether key questions in the humanities really changed, whether they were taken any further, is something yet to be explored because it is still such a new field, and one can only be speculative about it, she feels. It perhaps pushes for a new level of interdisciplinarity, and a different kind of collaborative space that the digital enables. What is significant and exciting for her as a historian, however, is that if history has to survive as a discipline, in schools but in terms of public spaces and discourse, it should actively engage with the digital. This not only presents significant challenges, in terms how to represent the past in the digital space, (in short problems with method) but also opens up new possibilities, for example with oral history and the advent of digital sound. The definition of the field will also evolve, as people define it from different spaces of practice and research, which Dr. Chowdhury feels is crucial to keeping it open and accessible by all.

Even from diverse disciplinary perspectives, at present the understanding of DH is that it facilitates new modes of humanistic enquiry, or enables one to ask questions that could not be asked earlier. As Prof. Dasgupta reiterates, it is no longer possible to imagine humanities scholarship outside of the ‘digital’ as such, as that is the world we inhabit. However, while some of the key conceptual questions for the humanities may remain the same, it is the mode of questioning that has undergone a change – we need to re-learn questioning or question-making within this new digital sphere, which is in some sense also a critical and disciplinary challenge. While this does not resolve the problem of definition, it does provide a useful route into thinking of what would be questions of DH, particularly in the Indian context.

Notes

[1] For a more detailed overview of the different phases of DH, see Patrik Svensson in 'Landscape of Digital Humanities,' Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 4 Number 1, 2010, http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html.

[2] For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558.

[3] This is rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see Conflict of the Faculties (1798) by Immanuel Kant and Discipline and Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault.

[4] See: http://indiancine.ma/.

[5] See: http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php.

References

Cutrofello, Andrew, Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance, State University of New York Press, 1994.

Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012.

Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Latour, Bruno, 'Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,' Trans. Couze Venn, Theory Culture Society, 247-260, 2002.

Parry, Dave, 'The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism', Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24.

Ramsay, Stephen, 'On Building,' 2010, http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities

A Comparative Study of Article Creation Campaigns on Wikipedia - Part II

sneha-pp — 2021-06-11T10:54:37Z

This is a short report on a comparative analysis of two prominent Wikimedia initiatives, Wikipedia Asian Month and Project Tiger, to understand prevailing challenges and opportunities, and strategies to address the same. The report has been authored by Nitesh Gill with inputs from Suswetha Kolluru, and editorial oversight and support by Puthiya Purayil Sneha. This is part of a series of short-term studies undertaken by the CIS-A2K team in 2019–2020.

Part I of this report outlined the research questions and methods of this study. Part II presents some of the observations and learnings.

Observations and Analysis

Wikipedia Asian Month and Project Tiger are pilot projects and both are equally popular among Indian communities. They are similar projects but also have some unique aspects. Communities connect with each-other but in different ways. For example, as noted by an organiser, Sailesh Patnaik, WAM has the following objectives: “ a) Supporting Small Wikipedia communities around the world (majorly Asian Language Wikipedias) b) Providing support to small local communities, to encourage growth and development c)Increase the cooperation among the Wikimedia communities and affiliates in Asia, d)Enriching Asian related culture, content, and enjoyment on Wikimedia projects.”

Meenakshi Nandini, a Malaylam Wikimedian notes, “The Project Tiger contest gave me some best experiences. Through this project, I got support in the form of laptop and Internet access. That is very useful for me. In my view, it is a competition between the communities rather than individuals. I saw that participants wrote more articles in the Project tiger contest than in any other events.But, WAM helped to create more relevant and high-quality content than Project tiger.”

Some common aspects for the both projects are below:

Motivation

WAM is one of the initial projects to give a boost to volunteers across the world. Most of the editors are focussed on initiatives in their own languages, and WAM offered a common platform for Asian communities to work together on a project. According to the interviews of community members, the love for their languages inspired them to participate as well as create content in regional languages, communicate to other community members etc.

As community member SangappaDyamani notes , “To enrich Kannada wiki articles, [I’m] happy to represent kn wiki in such an event, we can meet new editors, learn new tech used in other wiki etc.”

Communities or community members began to take part in WAM when they had less opportunities or less ideas to grow their local Wikipedias. After this project began, communities or individuals have been motivated for their Wikipedia’s growth, and engaging more with regional languages and knowing about Asia or Asian culture. Many Indic languages were searching for a platform and WAM gave them a common platform to engage and create content in their regional languages. All interviews indicated the same point that it was a new idea and as every Indic language was developing at the time, this idea influenced most of the languages.

As community member, Ramajit Tudu observes, “As our Santali Wikipedia [went live], we all had lots of excitement to cover all types of the article[s] but prior to that we had articles on the regional topic only. At that time some of the other community members suggested we should take part in this editathon (WAM) and we felt It was a very nice campaign, it is an exchange and sharing of information among the Wikipedians of Asia. Knowing about the person, place and subject about your own continent other than your own country and putting them in your own language is always an interesting job. In the year 2018, I was one of the coordinators and Jury for WAM - Santali language. As our community was growing in the year 2019 others were the co-ordinator and jury but still, I had contributed by participating in the editathon. Besides these, I support the editathon by creating the project page in Santali language.”

Similarly,there are quite a number of motivational factors for volunteers who have been actively participating in Project Tiger. Firstly, it gives an opportunity to create several important and relevant articles that relate to their language Wikipedia that are presently missing. Secondly, in order to keep up the momentum among participants throughout the competition, it is designed in two phases and there is friendly competition between all the Indic communities that participated to secure the top position. The third and final motivational factor is cash prizes, in the form of Amazon vouchers, for top 3 individual contributors from each community and a three day offline Wiki workshop for all the active and major contributors from top performing communities.

“When it comes to a competition (between communities), there is a different kind of zeal and there are cash prizes too for extra motivation” says User:Jagmit Brar from the Punjabi community who created more than 1000 articles under Project Tiger in both the iterations.

These motivation factors have definitely been a major reason why the contest witnessed immense engagement and reach among the Indian communities.

Communication and Collaboration

Communication is an important aspect of running these long duration editathons. So, the model is to engage local organizers and participants with early invitations. The team started contacting Asian communities a month before the start of the campaign.

According to Rupika, the Communication and Media officer of WAM “One of the most difficult things about any project is when it is a new project and they are just trying to [let the] community know about the project. But for projects that are popular and well-established like Wikipedia Asian Month and Wiki Loves Monuments, they don’t have to work that much hard. But we do make sure that our efforts with local organisers are complete. So, we ask them to create a page a month or two before that project starts.”

The discussion started from the mailing lists. Thereafter, mass messages were dropped on all the village pumps and local organisers started discussion with their community members. A new meta page was designed for every iteration. After the notifying and instructions, interested communities add their names and make sure to participate in this project. The model of engaging the communities is through social media channels, emails or on-wiki. The central-notice is a more beneficial method for informing Wikimedia about WAM and also writing blogs for the updates on progress of the project.

Also Wikipedia Asian Month’s primary objective was to collaborate with all the Asian countries as well as others to increase content related to Asia on Wikipedia. It started after a proper discussion and this collaboration was a huge experiment for organisers as well editors. The volunteers interviewed in the course of this study expressed that they are glad with the collaboration of different communities across the world on this campaign.

Collaboration is one of the main features which defines the objective of WAM. It helps the small communities to grow systematically and do something for their regional Wikipedias and learn from other international and national communities.WAM started with 40 plus communities and at present, the number of participating communities is over 70 due to its collaborative nature. Through its five iterations, many Wikipedia communities have been linked to each other and know about each other’s histories and culture etc. ‘Mourya Biswas, a Bengali wikimedian notes’, “Personally, organising WAM was a great deal of a learning experience as well with regard to how to go about organising an editathon with so many people contributing from across different parts of the world. I had hitherto very little experience on organising online editathons. A few tools were absolutely new to me. In the subsequent editathons that I have organised since then, I've learnt to use a few tools to coordinate, support and manage the editathon even more efficiently.”

Similarly communication engagement is an effective step of Project Tiger as well. Organisers announce the project on India mailing list then approach communities via village pumps so that they are aware of when the project will commence. Communities remain engaged with the project till three months. The communication channels include social media, emails and phone-calls. Jury members regularly remain in touch with organisers. Editors also communicate regularly with recipients of hardware support.

Project Tiger, as a contest, needs collaborative efforts in order to be a successful engagement with the communities, and the emphasis was on regular communication and discussions that resulted in strengthening the community further.

“We had Whatsapp groups with all the volunteers participating in the contest to strategise, resolve doubts, share ideas in order to create as many good quality articles as possible”, observes User:Parvathi Sridharan from Tamil Wiki community.

This contest/project not only saw engaging participation from existing and experienced volunteers, but also from many new ones. This contest has paved a way for new and enthusiastic people who were interested in contributing to Wikipedia. One way this happened is also through offline Wiki workshops conducted as part of outreach.

“This contest was a good chance to show how people in India are improving the access to knowledge across India and to the world. Many communities which were unnoticed came out during this PT writing contest and showed their community strength.” notes User:Gnoeee, from the Malayalam community who had contributed to English and Malayalam Wikipedia during Project Tiger 1.0

Culture

WAM encourages cultural exchange by mediating online connections between communities and helping them learn about unique aspects of their respective countries and languages. During this project, Asian communities generate articles/content on their local Wikipedias, and also have an opportunity to find their cultural interests and ways to understand other cultures.

As noted by Saliesh Patnaik, an Odia Wikipedian who is also the social media head for WAM, “This project also encourages cultural exchange within the community with the help of a month-long edit-a-thon which promotes the creation or improvement of the Wikipedia content about Asia except for their (the participant’s) own country.”

“Wikipedia Asian Month is the one of the first kinds of campaigns not just in Asia but in the entire movement to involve so many small communities in this wide level. That individually has allowed so many different communities to grow and help them to learn how to systematically and structurally work together. Project Tiger and other contests came [in the later stages] which really got communities involved. But when WAM started in 2015 it was the first contest where people participated internationally.” The editors’ enthusiasm towards WAM proves that they are interested in creating content across cultures and establishing their links with other non-Indian communities.

Just like WAM, Project Tiger also encourages cultural exchange and bridging cultural gaps. Through this project, Indic communities got a platform to connect with each other. During this contest, communities generate their own regional list regarding important articles for their local Wikipedias. Communities have the opportunity to contact other fellow Wikimedians from Indic languages. They talked to each other through existing groups to solve their issues which they faced during the contest.

During the training period for the winner and runner up community, there was a possibility to exchange their thoughts and ideas. Due to that on-ground activity, Wikimedians played their roles enthusiastically and got more motivated with other stories, experiences and cultural aspects like cuisine. This is the way cultural exchange happened via Project Tiger.

Grant Process

While projects under the Wikimedia movement are primarily run on the strength and interests of its volunteer community, there are specific aspects which require funding and support from collaborators such as the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). For major events, the Wikimedia project needs a grant, depending on time duration and objectives. Similarly, WAM, while not being a very high budget event, is supported by a rapid grant from the foundation. This rapid grant supports the work on purchasing and sending postcards, certificates, T-shirts, stickers & pins, advertisements on social media (Facebook, Twitter), infrastructure (AirTable membership, G-Suite subscription, etc.), domain, and the time of volunteers who are engaged in this work.

For Project Tiger, CIS-A2K gets a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. Selected applicants from any Indic language get hardware support which covers chromebooks/laptops and internet connectivity. Apart from it, during the contest Amazon vouchers were also given to the participants from each community who got the 1st, 2nd and 3rd rank for all the three months. These prizes are fixed for every month. There are also prizes for an overall winner community, and a runner up, which is in the form of a training session after the writing contest.

Appreciation

A token of appreciation is provided to participants, which is important to aid efforts. Under WAM, this appreciation is divided into two parts : Postcards & Certificates and Brand Ambassador. Postcards are given to those participants who created at least five articles about an Asian country. The postcards are sent by the same countries in appreciation of the contributors’ participation. This is a way to encourage new leadership and new editors. Certificates are also part of this appreciation, as a recognition of active participation and the importance of their work. As Aliva Sahoo, Odia Wikimedia, notes “When I wrote articles in 2016 I created a good number of articles. And that time I was happier because I got 4 or 5 postcards from different countries. My other community members also received postcards. That time I felt motivated to get postcards and I decided to create more articles next time and will collect more postcards. I think this kind of appreciation encourages volunteers and makes them happy.

The second form of appreciation is the Wikipedia Asian Month Ambassador. This is an honour from WAM to a Wikipedian who creates the most number of articles on their respective Wikipedia. In every iteration of WAM, ambassadors are chosen depending on the number and quality of contributions. By adding an element of competition, and using a title that does not suggest the same, the ambassador initiative plays a very important role in the event to enable more contributions. In the end, we have Wikipedians who are willing to receive other postcards by contributing 30-50 articles (relatively high quality according to our rules), which makes this event very successful and effective” Rupika Sharma, notes.

In Project Tiger as well, as a token of appreciation to all the top performing participants, prizes were given to the top 3 editors who created the most number of articles from each community, every month in the 3 month contest. Appreciation was given in the form of a cash prize during the first iteration of the Project. After receiving a lot of feedback about this, gift vouchers are given in the second iteration instead of cash prizes.

Apart from this, merchandise such as stickers and t-shirts to other top contributors is also a practice that’s followed. The overall winner, runner up communities and few other top contributors and juries from remaining communities later attend a three day workshop as part of the Project Tiger community prize, on the topics of their preference.

Fountain tool

The Fountain tool was developed for reviewing the articles of Wikipedia Asian Month, and is used only when the contests are running. “I made the first prototype during the first Wikipedia Asian Month in 2015. We, the jury members, were flooded with articles that needed to be evaluated fairly quickly and so I thought that I can automate 90% of the jury workflow” notes fountain tool developer Le Loy. In this tool, bytes and words are fixed according to the project. For example, in the Wikipedia Asia Month a minimum of 3000 bytes are fixed as per the criteria of evaluation for WAM. This is therefore a useful tool for the contests. It is a tool which helps a lot to collect statistics of specific projects on Wikipedia. After talking to Le Loy, we can reach the conclusion that the tool is not limited to a particular language, and it can be used for any kind of event on Wikipedia.

Project Tiger also uses the Fountain tool to review articles submitted in this contest. It was easy for the participants to submit the articles and also for the jury to pick up an unreviewed article and review it based on the number of bytes, or if the article was actually submitted in the time period mentioned in the contest rules and so on. This tool has definitely made the jury process more efficient and smooth.

Diversity and Bridging gaps

Cultural diversity is an important aspect of the sustenance of the Wikimedia movement itself, and bridging different cultural gaps is an important aspect of this effort.

After checking all past statistics of WAM, we found that WAM focused on content related to Asia only but it didn't pay much attention to content by and about persons across diverse gender and sexual identities, including marginalised groups. Sailesh Patnaik & Rupika Shrama, WAM organiser notes that there have been some efforts in this area, saying “We work with more than 50 different language communities on Wikipedia, and have also collaborated with Women in Red to bridge the gender gap in our projects.” There is however a need for ongoing work in this space.

Project Tiger has its own strategy behind diversity and bridging gaps. Both events maintain their diversity as per required rules and areas. One of the major reasons why volunteers find a hindrance in dedicating time for Wikimedia and its projects is the lack of facilities like a laptop or even a proper internet connection. This is why laptops and internet stipends provided during the first phase of the contest have a monumental effect on the contest and also in contributions to not just Project Tiger, but also many other Wiki projects in general. Several volunteers contribute articles via mobile phones in spite of the difficult/complex editing environment. Without this support, there is a chance that Wikipedia can lose some of its most promising volunteers.

Project Tiger also tries to bridge a gender gap. For example, the criteria for hardware support also includes ensuring a certain percentage of women applicants are selected. The coordinators have also tried to specifically engage women participants during the contest. Before opening the applications for hardware support, PT core team set criteria for eligibility. On the other hand, one rule always highlighted that 33% women can get laptop or internet connectivity due to their past contribution. This is an effort to engage women in the Wikimedia movement.

Limitations and Barriers

Despite the success of these long running programmes, its true that there still remain some barriers and limitations, as illustrated below:

Wikipedia Asian Month

WAM has largely remained a stable programme, but it would be a good thing to see how new aspects could be introduced in the programme. The process is the same every year because after finishing the first iteration the core team didn’t take any feedback, suggestions or concerns from the individuals for the next step, which is a major barrier to growing and planning something new for the next level. As Odia Wikimedian Aliva Sahoo notes, “From 2016 to 2019, WAM was the same and there was nothing new, but I am not sure if during 2020, they changed something because I didn’t participate this year.” According to participant’s comments or WAM rules & guidelines changes in the structure could be introduced. “When the same project is happening again and again then the novelty will reduce. We should make some changes from time to time to engage the people” notes Punjabi Wikimedian, Satdeep Gill.
The project actively makes an effort in trying to work with more communities every year but also collaborate with other projects such as Women in Red, which is aimed at creating more content by and about women. WAM itself has not been able to promote women leaders and women content as well due to its design which focuses on promoting content.
Follow-up on receipt of appreciation postcards etc. should be done diligently.There have also been instances where appreciation postcards have been delayed or not sent which affects the motivations of contributors in engaging with the project further. A few contributors did not receive their appreciation from senders, which has led to some negativity. At least after two iterations of any project, contributors or Wiki projects demand for something new. For example, during the beginning of the project, participants got the Wikipedia Asian Month ambassador tags and that was an honour for them. But volunteers seem to be looking for a change and they want to look forward to the project. A Malayalm Wikimedian, Meenakshi Nandini, noted, “However the prizes are not getting to most of the participants, especially the WAM prizes. Even me also didn’t receive most of the event prizes. So we couldn’t tell the participants that you will definitely get these prizes. I won two times as a "Wikipedia Asian Ambassador". But is there any importance or benefit for that honor?”
During the WAM, the focus was only on article creation but not on the quality of articles. It is important therefore to accord more attention to the quality of the content being created, which would help in the long-term sustenance of the project and is better aligned with the larger objectives of the movement.

Project Tiger

Project Tiger happened only in two iterations, but has its limitations and challenges as well. The participants or volunteers who participated in Project Tiger had some concerns on the Google article lists. Contributors felt Google should suggest only those articles which are important for their Wikipedias as priority. The PT core team was not properly able to convince participants as to why the Google list is important and editors were also not fully aware of the same, which led to some mismatch in expectations from the project.
Due to hardware support and gift vouchers, most participants are motivated to contribute more, But on the other hand, it changes the whole process of contribution in the Wikimedia movement. Cash prizes or gift vouchers showed a less than satisfactory result, thereby leading to a rethinking of how best to motivate contributors.. But for a few editors hardware support and prizes are a lot. A few users who were editing from phones got laptops just because of the project which has helped their contributions.
The manner of addressing the gender gap in the project has also been a point of contention. The possibility is, some participants feel that women only get laptops or internet support due to their gender identity. The process of such quotas may be debatable going forward, and so a clear rationale and process may be developed to encourage participation by women and individuals across the spectrum of gender and sexual identities.
One major concern from jury members was that participants did not work on quality but quantity. Reviewers and readers are facing problems with machine translated articles submitted during Project Tiger. The PT team tried to solve the issue of quality during the second iteration, but did not work well, and jury members faced the same difficulty this time as well.
A common challenge noted by Satdeep Gill (for both projects) is that “Contributors focus mainly on increasing the article count and the maintenance work lags behind. We need to focus on this as well.”

Learnings

Both projects have had more than one iteration so far, and have managed to create interest and engagement within Indian language communities in working collaboratively and building content. They have also had a fair number of challenges and limitations as well, as illustrated by the interviews. For instance, there has been a difficulty in measuring the quality of articles, the way that quantity is tracked. So there is a need to develop metrics to capture and work on quality of content. A related point is with reference to a lack of capacity building within communities, which would enable them to collaborate and contribute better. There have also been some challenges with logistics, and ensuring that participants receive their prizes during Wikipedia Asian Month. This would need more communication and careful coordination of efforts. There is also a need to keep participants engaged over a long time, and repeating the same structure of the project every year may also lead to a lack of interest or innovation. The project actively makes an effort in trying to work with more communities every year but also collaborate with other projects such as Women in Red, which is aimed at creating more content by and about women. WAM itself has not been able to promote women leaders and women content as well due to its design which focuses on promoting content. The projects therefore need to work in a progressive manner, building on feedback from participants and adapting to the evolving needs and interests of the communities.

These difficulties are also faced by Project Tiger. Google should focus on lists according to the needs of communities, in discussion with the PT team.For example, the core team should track volunteers' contributions after getting the support because anyone can make 500 or 1000 edits for getting a laptop. The core team should find people from the communities who need this support and will contribute proactively. Project Tiger’s process transparency is appreciated, but with the same transparency the infrastructure distribution process should be different from now. Also it should encourage or discuss with communities about proactive women’s participation during the project. PT should run a Bridging Gender Gap campaign, where communities should play a role to engage women as organisers from each community and should make a strategy for the same. This project needs to work on a strategy for building and sustaining quality as well which is important for growth of Indic Wikipedias.

So, not every project is perfect, every project has some achievements and some limitations. Therefore, WAM and Project Tiger are also the same, it achieves its goals but also carries some failures. But there is a possibility to make changes to both projects.

Conclusion

Wikipedia Asian Month is an International project which started in 2015. It is a low budget project, and gives a common platform to Asian as well as Non-Asian communities to participate over the course of a month. When WAM started most of the communities were excited to do something for their languages, and this was a big initial motivation for the project. The communities want to continue with WAM because they feel like this is one of the projects which started at that time when communities wanted something to engage themselves with Wikipedias. Every year most of the communities participate in it for sure, although the people who work on the projects may differ. Project Tiger is a pilot project which is a three-month-long contest. This project provides an opportunity to communities to work together. After the success of the Indic languages contest [Project Tiger] in 2018, two more countries, (Project Saraswati and Project Al-Ma'refa), also organised a similar project under different names. Due to Project Tiger, thousands of articles were created or developed by volunteers about important, most searched for topics suggested by Google, as well as those important to respective Indic language Wikipedias. Infra-structure support pays attention to volunteers' hard work and encourages them to work to share free knowledge. These projects therefore go a long way in enriching local language content, and keeping volunteer communities interested and engaged with their respective Wikipedias.

You may also read the full report on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/a-comparative-study-of-wikimedia-article-creation-campaigns-in-india-part-ii