Centre for Internet and Society

Developing Open Knowledge Digital Resources in Indian Languages

teju — 2015-04-22T18:09:08Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K), in collaboration with the Centre for Indian Languages (CILHE) at TISS Mumbai, conducted a two-day workshop at English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) at Hyderabad on January 28-29, 2015. Titled ‘Developing Open Knowledge Digital Resources in Indian Languages’, the workshop was the third in this series during 2014-15.

The first workshop, focusing on Bangla, was held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in August 2014, and the second, focusing on Marathi, at Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, in September 2014. The EFLU workshop participants were drawn from Telugu and Malayalam backgrounds.

The objectives of the workshop was to familiarize student volunteers and their faculty with (a) tools of collaborative knowledge production on the internet, and (b) methods for generating new online content in Indian languages. The workshop had 19 student participants, from EFLU and TISS Hyderabad, along with 4 faculty members from these two institutions.

After opening remarks by Prof. K.Satyanarayana and Dr. Uma Bhrugubanda of the Department of Cultural Studies, the local hosts at EFLU, Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana of CILHE-TISS and Advisor to CIS-A2K spoke about the importance of creating new digital resources in local languages for both teaching and research in higher education. She stressed that students should not remain passive consumers of knowledge but instead participate in creating new knowledge resources. Vishnu Vardhan of CIS-A2K then elaborated on the theme of ‘Building Open Knowledge Resources in Indian Languages via Mass Collaboration on the Internet’. After this, the participants were introduced to some basic principles of editing on Wikipedia, and worked on establishing their presence as Wikipedia editors by creating their Profile pages, etc.

In order to familiarise students with the key Telugu and Malayalam terminology in their areas of study (cultural studies, linguistics, education), an exercise was conducted in which each participant tried to describe a few of the concepts without using the term itself. A successful description would draw attention to the intellectual work done by the concept, and establish its usefulness in the relevant language context. Animated discussion took place around concepts like public sphere, labour/work, human rights, feminism, caste, culture, etc. In a second exercise, the denotative meaning and connotative meaning of selected key terms were discussed, with a view to understanding how they could be used in Indian language writings. Following this exercise, participants also attempted to map the cluster of concepts associated with their chosen concept so they could comprehend the larger cognitive context of each term. They were then introduced to how hyper-linking and giving suitable references are a significant part of Wikipedia editing strategy. Participants ended the day by shortlisting topics for entries they wanted to create on Wikipedia.

Day Two began with an exercise that aimed to explore translation challenges on Wikipedia. Since one way of increasing Indian-language content was to translate or transcreate existing Wikipedia articles, students needed to be aware of the problems this task could pose, and the possible solutions that could be adopted. Workshop participants were asked to choose English Wikipedia entries on one person, one book, and one concept each, and report on the difficulties they encountered while attempting to translate the English content, at the level of terminology, conceptual framework or subject matter. The ensuing discussion was useful not only in consolidating strategies for translation but also in drawing attention to the problems of creating Indian-language content in areas of knowledge which have become familiar to us through the modern university curriculum.

In the last phase of the workshop, participants focused on creating their entries in Telugu and Malayalam. A few succeeded in creating three entries each, while the others managed to do at least two. The faculty of EFLU and TISS Hyderabad who were present at the workshop have agreed to meet with their students once a month to do production sprints for new content, thus ensuring that those who were merely digital users have indeed become digital authors.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/developing-open-knowledge-digital-resources-in-indian-languages

Beyond the Language Tussle

teju — 2014-12-10T14:08:02Z

It might be more productive to see the ongoing Sanskrit versus German controversy as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which languages children get to learn.

The Op-ed was published in the Hindu on December 6, 2014.

The ongoing Sanskrit vs. German controversy is being seen by some as the sign of a sinister conspiracy to change educational options, and by others as a much-needed corrective to bring back “Indian culture” into the schools. It might be more productive to see it instead as a welcome opportunity to discuss the real and persistent problems of our education system, not all of which have to do with which languages children get to learn. The attempt to implement the teaching of Sanskrit in schools seems to be supported by a remarkably uninformed view about what sort of language policy we require today. And this is not to say that previous governments had any greater insight into how to handle either the medium of instruction problem or the issue of how many languages to teach and at what level.

Education budget cut

Far more disturbing than the Sanskrit-German debate was the news last week that the new Central government has decided to cut Rs.11,000 crore from the Education budget (The Hindu, “Social sector funds slashed,” Nov. 27). The favouring of physical infrastructure over “the social sector” (health, education, social security, nutrition, etc.) disregards the intangible factors that go into strengthening knowledge bases and the setting up of infrastructure in the first place. One of the implicit casualties of the massive cut in the Education budget is a proposed 12th Plan programme to revitalise Indian language resources in higher education. The rationale for this programme was that generation of knowledge in Indian languages would not only create new intellectual resources but transform the teaching-learning process in positive ways. The access-equity-quality triangle emphasised by policymakers could effectively be strengthened through a focus on Indian languages. Since the default medium of instruction at the tertiary level was actually a local language rather than the “mandatory” English, the deliberate blindness of successive governments to this fact was depriving students across disciplines of good quality resources. This linguistic divide affects the majority of tertiary students in the country. Thus, investing in Indian language materials at the basic and advanced levels is a sustainable (not to mention cost-effective) way by which Indian higher education could be strengthened.

“The long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.”

We should note here that the emphasis is not on how many languages the student learns but on whether s/he is developing cognitive capabilities. This too has been a serious blind spot in modern Indian education over the decades, right up to the recent May 2014 Supreme Court judgment on the non-enforceability of mother-tongue instruction. The Court invoked the right to freedom of speech and expression in this instance to say that children and parents could choose the language in which the child wanted to be educated. With all respect to the learned judges, one wonders if they sought expert opinion in the matter or merely relied on their common sense. If they had done the former, they might have found out that worldwide research has proved that the most effective teaching and learning happens through the use of the mother tongue. If exposing a child to English at a very young age is dictated by opportunism and a skewed sense of what makes social mobility possible, this choice flies in the face of language and education research as well as the most enlightened pedagogic practices available. If mother tongue or Indian language education is not practical today, it’s because of the enormous lack of good educational resources in those languages, another need that state initiatives have failed to address adequately.

Parallel with China

Since, these days, China is the favourite country of comparison for us, we should pay attention to the fact that students in China start learning English in the fourth standard and for the most part study all their subjects in Mandarin. In my experience, the English fluency of the average Chinese undergraduate ranges from functional knowledge of English to complete proficiency, with an emphasis on reading and writing rather than speaking. Even those with functional knowledge are far more capable of dealing with the world of higher education today than most students I encounter in India. The single most important variable here would have to be that of mother tongue instruction combined with later exposure to a language that gives students access to resources not so readily available in Chinese. It’s a different matter that Internet use is so heavily policed in China. However, every person I know inside and outside the university has figured out how exactly to access the resources they want, which is much more than can be said of Indian students who don’t experience government-imposed firewalls. So, again, is the ability to navigate the digital domain related to language skills or critical skills?

Lack of clarity

The inability to create a systematic curricular exposure to language and critical skills is perhaps what prompts periodic outbursts like the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) directive to replace German in Kendriya Vidyalaya schools with Sanskrit. Combined with this lack of application is what can only be seen as the extraordinarily resilient prejudices about what constitutes “Indian culture.” We routinely tend to forget that this is a modern concept, mobilised by colonialist as well as nationalist perspectives on our society. Lack of clarity about what education is for leads to muddled thinking about what should be done in the space of education. We should not confusedly believe that the primary task of education is to pass on ways of living — we do that in almost every domain of social engagement. The task of education is to foster and strengthen cognitive capacities that can equip students to produce original knowledge on their own terms, for which we are likely to need bilingual and trilingual education. Debating whether we should learn Sanskrit instead of German is a distraction from the real tasks that lie ahead. We need to reorient the language debate to focus not on learning the language (any language) but learning how to think.

Language use analysis

The CBSE circular of June 30, 2014, instructing its affiliated schools to observe ‘Sanskrit Week’, introduced the topic by stating that “Sanskrit and Indian culture are intertwined as most of the indigenous knowledge is available in this language.” It’s shocking to see that people in the business of education are unaware about the fundamental histories of language use in our country, and that mere assertion can pass for accurate information. Apart from the facile collapsing of “culture” onto “knowledge,” the circular’s statement about Sanskrit as the language of indigenous knowledge appears as a sweeping generalisation when you look at it from the point of view of medical, artisanal or performing arts knowledge forms. Even if we stay with just one example, that of indigenous medicine, and even if we stay with the venerable Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a quick overview of the books listed would show that the languages of indigenous knowledge include Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Tamil in addition to Sanskrit. The library currently lists 137 Tamil books on Siddha, for example, with 157 Sanskrit books on Ayurveda. Some of this knowledge is also available in Malayalam, like the important works on vishavaidyam.

Coming to contemporary language use in India, it would be important to note that just as modern Kannada, Marathi or Telugu for example have drawn on Sanskrit to build their vocabulary, they have equally strongly drawn on other languages. Here are some sample Kannada words that reveal the original language coiled inside the present day usage: adalat, vakila, javabu, ambari, gulabi, sipayi, taakathhu, firyadu, bunadi, najooku (Persian/Urdu). This kind of sampling could be replicated for any contemporary Indian language, and an exhaustive mapping exercise might reveal fascinating borrowings and transformations that gesture well beyond language use.

Most of our languages cannot sustain teaching and research in the context of the modern university and its disciplines. We need to create critical vocabularies across several conceptual domains. Students need to learn the ability to distinguish between levels of meaning, to contextualise/translate, and to create new concepts that capture the life of our societies and our institutions. And in doing this, they have to learn to draw on multiple linguistic resources.

Ensuring the entry of Indian language resources into the mainstream of our higher education system is a long-delayed project. By bringing these resources into a national educational structure, we will be (a) expanding the analytical abilities of these languages, and (b) making the curriculum more relevant to the society we live in. The long-term objective should be to make the student bilingually proficient, so that he is able to bridge effectively the conceptual worlds of the local and the global.

(Tejaswini Niranjana is with the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/the-hindu-december-6-2014-tejaswini-niranjana-beyond-the-language-tussle

Beyond Editor Count: Assessing Quality on Wikipedia

teju — 2016-06-12T16:00:13Z

Since Wikipedia is considered as the go-to source for different kinds of knowledge by anyone starting off in a particular field of study, and since Indian languages (IL) are often the default languages of the classroom in India, strengthening the quality of the material available on IL Wikipedias is certain to have widespread tangible and intangible impact.

While there is a need to improve the editor count on IL Wikipedias, it cannot substitute for efforts aimed at enhancing the quality of Wikipedia contributions. Here is an account of an initiative geared towards enriching the IL digital domain and in particular Wikipedia through partnerships with universities.

In collaboration with CIS-A2K, the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education (CILHE) at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, has been conducting workshops with post graduate and undergraduate students in humanities and social sciences on developing digital open knowledge resources using IL Wikipedias.

These workshops, which are conducted by a resource person from CILHE and anchored by faculty members in partner institutions, are aimed at (a) integrating open knowledge resources into classroom teaching, (b) involving students in developing content relevant to their research interests, and (c) developing the skills to produce well-referenced academic writing.

Besides Wikipedia editing, the workshop process involves exercises that allow students to engage closely with major social science concepts and their meanings. The workshops also include collaborative digital annotation exercises.

This effort is the only one of its kind in the country where both students and teachers participate in creating open knowledge resources that are of use to them and the larger academic and non-academic audience.

Achievements thus far

Workshops are conducted bilingually, across several geographies, with English being the common factor. The Indian languages in question are Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Bangla and Kannada.

Here is a brief account of two such partnerships. The first is with Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Women’s Studies Centre (KSPWSC) at Pune University, Pune, and the second with the Departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) in Hyderabad.

At KSPWSC, around 20 researchers since 2015 have collaboratively annotated 100 key women’s studies texts in Marathi and have written articles on these texts on the Marathi Wikipedia. This is the first part of a larger project called Sau Dhuni Teen (100 x 3), which aims to also cover 100 notable persons and 100 key concepts in women’s studies in addition to the 100 key texts.

This has been a year-long process involving, prior to the workshop,

(a) selection of 100 key texts through a survey of existing women’s studies curricula across the state of Maharashtra in the universities of all 6 major areas of the state;

(b) close reading and analysis of the texts led by faculty.

During the workshop, students learn how to

(a) annotate digitally and for an encyclopedia; how to create concept clusters and clouds of annotation;

(b) overcome translation challenges (English into Marathi, and Marathi into English) through the cultivation of linguistic attentiveness and sensitivity to the cultural contexts involved; and through the use of online and offline dictionaries and other writings on the subjects covered in the 100 key texts. The exposure to the existing literature helps students absorb the necessary vocabulary which is already in use and familiar to readers.

At EFLU, Hyderabad, 25 students speaking a number of Indian languages -Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Hindi - have come together to create articles of relevance to social sciences and humanities teaching and learning. The entries include: the concept of the public sphere, movements for political autonomy, leading Indian scholars, and major contemporary academic and literary works.

Ensuring success and sustainability: Key Factors

Consistent faculty participation coupled with regular meet-ups to develop existing articles and create new ones ensures the success and sustainability of these workshops. Prior to the workshops, the faculty members engage intensively with students in identifying concepts or texts about which writing in Indian languages is limited or inadequate.

Finding a thematic focus has been crucial for retaining interest and participation of the students in different locations, for example - women’s studies in Pune University, rural development at TISS Tuljapur, literary and cultural studies at EFLU.

Measurable outputs for student assessment are important for those faculty seeking to make Wikipedia editing part of internal assessment. These outputs include articles written, information added, references used, and links made, which can be easily computed from the View History pages.

Understanding Quality Enhancement

Participatory knowledge production: The Indian language articles on notable academicians, theorists, phenomena, events, and places written as part of the workshop are accessed, used, and further developed by students as well as Wikipedians other than the original authors.

Changing the pedagogic culture through open access resources: The articles become a strong pedagogic resource in Indian languages which is publicly accessible, generated by users themselves, used to supplement classroom teaching, and open to editing and revision.

Context sensitivity: The success of these workshops may also be assessed in terms of the variety of concept descriptions generated, the relevance of articles to context, and the integration of local experience onto digital knowledge platforms.

In addition to Wikipedia’s criteria for a good article, which include clarity, coherence, focussed development of the article, comprehensive references, use of inter-links and hyperlinks, the Indian language resources developed through our initiative have the significant additional feature of being contextually and culturally sensitive. We believe this is a crucial criterion for Wikipedia to be able to take root in the Indian knowledge domain.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/beyond-editor-count-assessing-quality-on-wikipedia