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New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the sixth among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <strong>New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</strong></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself, in India. As the previous sections may have illustrated, most of the prominent initiatives around DH in India have largely been within the university context, or have at least focused around the university as the centre of the processes of knowledge production, and emphasise a move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, and at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation. In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and topics, which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide or even accommodate. These include tools for working with digitisation processes, digital archives, and the use of computational methods in the study of cultural artifacts. Thus processes such as topic modelling, data visualisation, cultural analytics, sentiment analysis and several more become increasingly prominent in discussions about DH. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a particular kind of teaching-learning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.</p>
<p>Wikipedia and internet-based sources of information are entering classrooms with the proliferation of gadgets and tools, and with this there is a tendency towards adopting a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration. DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010) – not only in terms of people, but also spaces, methods and objects of learning - to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this in the global discourse on DH is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ <strong>[1]</strong>: people with training in the humanities who now inhabit what earlier seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. But it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that are now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters within the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. While the DH discourse in India has developed mostly within the university space, given its multidisciplinary interests and methods, it is often seen as bearing potential in terms of working outside the academic norm. Through an examination of changes in teaching-learning methods, creative and critical practices that come about with the adoption of the digital, it may be useful to explore whether it indeed opens up such alternate modes of humanities practice and how it informs the way we do DH in India; as practitioners, researchers, students, teachers or the lay person. The growth of the internet and digital tools and technologies has led to many changes in teaching-learning practices, and engendered new methods and forms of humanities practice, all of which may now be found within the university or academic space. It is therefore imperative to examine these new modes of research and practice, to arrive a better understanding of the changes in and possibilities available for humanities work after the digital. The notion of the ‘alternate’ is also an important concern here, and the emergence of these new modes of humanities practice help unpack and understand this term better.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Technology in the Classroom</h2>
<p>This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster new and alternate knowledge-making practices. India is also still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition, and the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the university circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research, where one may see DH–related work being done. What remains an important part of the discourse in the context of the university is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom.</p>
<p>The use of technology in education has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom <strong>[2]</strong>. However, the digital divide still persists, as a result of which many initiatives come with problems of their own, the most important being the lack of connection among practice, content and pedagogy <strong>[3]</strong>. Vikram Vincent, a doctoral scholar in the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, attributes this to a problem of understanding technology itself and what it can do for learning. He looks at technology as an extension of the human body and not something alien to it. Over the course of his research, he has found that the prevalent attitude to the use of technology in the classroom, particularly in early ICTs in education projects, has been more techno-centric rather than learner-centric, which is not the most effective approach <strong>[4]</strong>. Technology has always been around in some form or the other, from drawing on walls to the blackboard to now the smart board; it has always been in the classroom. How you choose to use it determines the outcomes, and one needs to ensure that the learning environment evolves with the new technology that is introduced, because it does not happen automatically but over a period of time.</p>
<p>The Wikipedia India Education programme pilot project, implemented in Pune in 2011 is an example of the number of challenges that the introduction of a new technology in the classroom brought forth, in terms of skills, content and pedagogy <strong>[5]</strong>. The need to focus on the educational component of the technology, the improvement of skills of the learner in writing, research and communication, rather than on the tool itself has been an important learning from the programme, even as it continues in a different university today. As Vincent adds further, the problem arises with looking at technology as a disruptive element or merely a tool to aid learning, which prevents institutions from envisioning a more holistic model of learning that takes some amount of time and effort. This also requires the appropriate stimulus and other conditions such as training of teachers, access to resources and training in certain required skills, addressing barriers of language and so forth, which is a feature of some programmes, such as the IT @ school in Kerala which have seen a measure of success <strong>[6]</strong>. Vincent further mentions examples of programmes he has been part of, some of them under the MHRD-NMEICT initiative which focussed on the teaching-learning process rather than the technology itself, key to which is building teacher capacity to use new and already available resources better <strong>[7]</strong>. These would be crucial steps to take before envisioning a model of teaching-learning that is premised largely on digital technologies and the internet.</p>
<p>While educational technology is a separate field in itself which looks at better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology <strong>[8]</strong>, it does form part of the context, or landscape in India within which DH would perhaps develop as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach.</p>
<p>Another predominant discourse that informs DH is that of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) which is often used as a rather broad, catch-all term, and has been variously defined and used by different groups and stakeholders across domains (Saith et al, 2008). ICT4D is premised largely around the question of access, and seeks to bridge the digital divide in terms of knowledge, resources, people and infrastructure, among other things. This has also been an intensely debated term, given its social and political implications, particularly in the manner in which it informs a larger discourse on development, technology and globalisation in the global South.(Sundaram, 2005) It is important to understand whether DH has been posited as making an intervention into these prevailing systems of knowledge – so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change. What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it – will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Towards a Digital Pedagogy</h2>
<p>Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University is positive about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies. According to him, while a media or film studies department would be close to the concerns of DH, and use some form of digital technology such as video clips or blogs as part of coursework, it is particularly important to see what change it has brought about in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages. While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research that he sees a vast change now. Many researchers, many of his students also, have found this a useful part of the research process, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms and tools like Academia or Scalar <strong>[9]</strong>. It not only makes the process more transparent, but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities for teaching-learning practices.</p>
<p>It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies, but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few, with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata, and more recently Srishti School of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore. The change is recent, as several researchers have pointed out. There have always been concerns about privacy and regulation of content, whether on a university archive or its network. The enthusiasm towards ‘anything digital is good’ is relatively new, and comes from a larger (and sometimes rather utopian) development discourse focussed around modernity and technology. Curricularisation comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets - we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital, and both modes exist simultaneously - but the rate of change is faster with the digital than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities, thus also seen as threat to the disciplines themselves, but to see if it has its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.</p>
<p>The development of courses on DH in three universities in India, and the manner in which the field has been ‘curricularised’ so to say, would be an indication of its specific academic concerns in the Indian context, and the disciplinary challenges and questions that it may throw up for the teaching-learning process. Expectedly, the three courses mobilise a set of resources and expertise that the schools have built over the course of many years. In doing so they also foray into areas that existing humanities courses at the university may not have explored enough, within their own disciplinary framework. For example the course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at Jadavpur University <strong>[10]</strong> comprises of components on software studies and digital music preservation, building on work done at the large archives at the School of Cultural Texts and Records. Similarly, the course at Presidency University <strong>[11]</strong> has components on storytelling in digital media through video games, while the course at Srishti <strong>[12]</strong> has a focus on design practice and critical making amongst other interests. The courses therefore follow a decidedly interdisciplinary framework, which no doubt interesting, also makes curriculum development and course assessment a challenge. While the ‘digital’ aspect of ‘DH’ forms a significant part of these explorations, the manner in which it is being studied is an important point of focus – whether as a condition, space, concept or object, rather than just a set of tools and methods that facilitate the enquiry of the humanities. Digitisation significantly alters the cultural artifact, and there is a need to understand and theorise this digital object better. As Padmini Ray Murray points out, the digital is one way to mediate the material object, particularly those that are not textual, since that kind of experiential access can only be provided by the digital, especially in the case of archival objects. A critical understanding of the digital needs to therefore be a key aspect of such an enquiry in DH.</p>
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<h2>Alternate Spaces of Humanities Practice</h2>
<p>While these are the developments within academia or the university space, there are a number of spaces outside this circle that have also been asking similar questions, and producing new kinds of scholarship and research around these ideas. The Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma archives have not only served as rich repository of material on film and video, used by scholars and film enthusiasts alike, but also as a pedagogic tool in spaces like the Media Lab at Jadavpur University. Through an innovative fellowship programme, Pad.ma has supported research and film making using the archive as a platform. An interesting example here would be a documentary film on power plants in Chhattisgarh made by Sunil Kumar. Available as a film treatment/script on Pad.ma, Kumar’s work is based on research in mainly two districts of Chhattisgarh, where he met and spoke with people, collected documents and shot several hours of video, which he then published in the form of 80 footage series on Pad.ma <strong>[13]</strong>. There are several other examples on Pad.ma, such as the video-art project on the Radia tapes, and the work on "perfume arts" in Bangalore <strong>[14]</strong>. The Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) through its workshops on oral and visual history has tried to engage with the more pedagogic aspects of the archive <strong>[15]</strong>. While the possibilities are many, the uptake of such platforms in universities has been slow, due to issues that range from lack of internet connectivity to a discomfort or unfamiliarity with the internet and other kinds of technology. This eventually relegates initiatives like these to the space of an alternate, extracurricular or outlier, even though they seem to be asking the same questions as the mainstream institutions and doing similar work.</p>
<p>What this also refers to is the space for new modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders or even brings to the fore in already existing practices. With these however, also come the questions about the legitimacy of these forms and methods of knowledge production, as seen in the rather polarised positions around DH in its global discourse. The Wikipedia is one example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang (2011) describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the 15th -18th centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the Internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says:</p>
<blockquote>The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an inherent quality but a transitive one 6 located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge, but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?</blockquote>
<p>He further goes on to elaborate that the question of the authority of knowledge should ideally be located within a larger ‘knowledge apparatus’, comprising of certain technologies and practices, (in this case that of reading, writing, editing, compilation, classification and creative appropriations) which help inflate the definitions of authority and knowledge even more.</p>
<p>The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’–often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge. While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of prominent practices and occupations are but alternatives - from alternative medicine to education - to the already established or mainstream system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now. The attempts to subsume these alternate practices under a unifying term such as DH, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long, within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question.</p>
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<h2>Humanities and Technology: A Twinned History</h2>
<p>Another factor in this reduced visibility of the alternate and now re-emergence is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. Therefore by extension then, the term DH itself may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. David Berry (2012) in his essay on the computational turn speaks of possibilities that computationality, and specifically new software and code offer in terms of unifying multiple kinds of knowledge in the university. He says that:</p>
<blockquote>In trying to understand the digital humanities our first step might be to problematize computationality, so that we are able to think critically about how knowledge in the 21st century is transformed into information through computational techniques, particularly within software. It is interesting that at a time when the idea of the university is itself under serious rethinking and renegotiation, digital technologies are transforming our ability to use and understand information outside of these traditional knowledge structures. This is connected to wider challenges to the traditional narratives that served as unifying ideas for the university and, with their decline, has led to difficulty in justifying and legitimating the postmodern university vis-à-vis government funding. (5)</blockquote>
<p>Berry therefore indicates that this turn towards computationality is the result of an emerging need to demonstrate the relevance of the university structure to processes of knowledge production, therefore reiterating the ‘crisis’ argument. The notion of the postmodern university has been examined in detail by Bill Readings, who Berry quotes in his paper. Readings (1997) is sceptical of the term postmodern, preferring instead the idea of a post historical university, which is divested from the notion of the nation-state and further culture as a unifying idea, and is moving towards a notion of excellence that he sees as techno-bureaucratic, a result of several factors including globalisation and the fact that processes of knowledge production and institutionalisation are no longer centred around a liberal subject. If the demonstrated project of the university has changed, the emergence of such new discourse, and specifically concepts and terms such as the ‘alt – academy’ has relevance to how one may now imagine new spaces, objects, processes and figures of knowledge itself.</p>
<p>The significance of the university system to knowledge production has been a recurring point of much debate and discussion in India. Although not explicitly stated as a crisis in humanities by the people interviewed, there are problems of content, pedagogy, infrastructure, and vision that continue to plague higher education at large <strong>[16]</strong>, and very often technological fixes are seen as a solution to these, in some part due to the imagination of a techno-democracy as described in the introduction to this report. As Berry points out then, computationality is a promise, or possibility to do things differently, which is then also inherently assumed to be a way of doing things better. The computational possibilities of DH still need to be explored, but how much of these contribute qualitatively to addressing or even furthering certain disciplinary concerns, still remains an open question. As Jan and Sebastian point out from their experience of working on Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma, the computational aspects of the archives are still to be developed, as there are still restrictions in terms of speed and feasibility (see chapter on infrastructure <strong>[17]</strong>); the kind of new questions it produces for cinema studies at large will remain a contention. Further, as Padmini Ray Murray observes, drawing on archival material, or data to develop new computational hypotheses would be a direction to work towards, as not much work has been done in this respect in India (See chapter on archives <strong>[18]</strong>). The challenges with computationality then demand, as Berry argues, a more critical exploration of the term itself, and in fact can be extended to a critical analysis of the state of digitality more broadly.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Final Notes</h2>
<p>The problems with the crisis in the humanities and the contribution of technology to these changes could be located to this change in what has traditionally been seen as the space of culture and reason, which has now moved on to something else, a notion of excellence in Readings’ example, thereby changing the questions at the centre as well. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field. At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of humanities practice have been brought to the foreground, but have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come. Some of the questions or points or focus that open up are as follows:</p>
<ol><li>The role of extra-institutional/non-academic or alternate spaces in humanities practice, and in producing and creating new kinds of knowledge.</li>
<li>The increased visibility of new objects and methods within informal and marginal spaces of knowledge production. This demands different, and often innovative methods of enquiry, and whether they alter disciplinary modes of humanities practice and research.</li>
<li>The notion of a moving away from established modes of humanities practice, research and scholarship (therefore the question of a ‘crisis’) which would open up a larger debate around the authority of knowledge.</li>
<li>The ontological and epistemological stake of DH, in short the kinds of new questions it enables us to ask.</li></ol>
<p>As important and visible as the idea of the alternate is in DH, it also presents the mainstream itself as fractured space that imbibes several contradictions of the practices in question, which cannot be confined to these watertight silos of formal/informal, academic or creative. Nevertheless, the mainstream spaces remain crucial for widening and deepening creative digital practice and research in arts and humanities disciplines, and will be the spaces to watch to understand the development of a substantive DH discourse in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> For more on this see: Nowviskie, Bethany, (Ed.) Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011, <a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars">http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars</a>, last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> The largest and most ambitious has been the Ministry of Human Resources and Development’s National Mission in Education through ICT programme (NMEICT), started in 2009. See: http://mhrd.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-0 Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> To stay with the example of the NMEICT, an evaluation of the programme pointed out several challenges to technology-enabled learning, namely in the areas of connectivity, content, and pedagogy. See <a href="http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf">http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more see this position paper by the NCERT on education technology in India: <a href="http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf">http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See an evaluation report on the programme by Tory Read: <a href="http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/">http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59">http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> For more on these projects see: <a href="http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87">http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: Spector, J. Michael. <em>Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives</em>. New York: Routledge, 2015; and Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) <em>Opening up Education</em>. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf">https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf</a>. Also see: <a href="http://ciet.nic.in/">http://ciet.nic.in/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.academia.edu/">https://www.academia.edu/</a> and <a href="http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/">http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html">http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities">http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script">http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/texts">http://pad.ma/texts</a> Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sparrowonline.org/">http://www.sparrowonline.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> See the report of 'The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education: by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development: <a href="http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf">http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf</a>; and Roy, Kum Kum, "Decoding 'New Education Policy,'" <em>Economic and Political Weekly</em>, Vol. 50, Issue No. 19, May 09, 2015, <a href="http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html">http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html</a>, last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[18]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn." <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2012 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440. Last Accessed April 12, 2016.</p>
<p>Davidson, Cathy N and David Theo. Goldberg. <em>The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age</em>. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.</p>
<p>Iiyoshi, Toru and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) <em>Opening up Education</em>. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.</p>
<p>Liang, Lawrence. "A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century." In <em>Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader</em>. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (Eds). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.</p>
<p>Readings, Bill. <em>The University in Ruins</em>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Saith, A, M. Vijayabaskar and V. Gayathri. <em>ICTs and Indian Social Change</em>. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008.</p>
<p>Spector, J. Michael. <em>Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives</em>. New York: Routledge, 2015.</p>
<p>Sundaram, Ravi. "Developmentalism Redux." In <em>Incommunicado Reader</em>. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (Eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T04:45:25ZBlog EntryThe Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma
<b>Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.</b>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-pad-ma-10-lessons-learned-from-running-open-access-online-video-archives-in-india-and-beyond/leadImage" alt="The Zen of Pad.ma - Lecture by Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, Feb 03, 6 pm" />
<p> </p>
<h2>The Zen of Pad.ma</h2>
<p>Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Biographies</h2>
<p><strong>Sebastian Lütgert</strong>, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.</p>
<p><strong>Jan Gerber</strong>, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppPracticeDigital HumanitiesDigital MediaOpen AccessResearchers at WorkEventArchives2016-01-28T08:25:18ZEventLiving in the Archival Moment
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fifth among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <strong>Living in the Archival Moment</strong></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, Walter Benjamin (1968: 59-67) dwells upon the many nuances of the art of collecting (books in this particular case), on everything from the sometimes impulsive acquisition to the processes of careful selection and classification which go into creating a library. "Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects" (67) he says, and this becomes important given the many ways in which we can acquire books today, as well as the problems of copyright, authorship and authority over meaning and knowledge that become a bone of contention in the digital age. The collector defines the nature of the object here, because he lives in and through them. While describing the personal process that is collecting, Benjamin is also aware that it may not be a process that will last as it is - a foreboding of the age when the impulse to collect, hoard and categorise has only grown tremendously due to increased access to books owing to the internet, but also where the figure of the collector seems to have been slowly effaced, thus presenting a ‘chaos of memories’ (60) in unarranged collections spread over several hard disks instead of book shelves. The figure of the collector, and the idea of ‘ownership’ emerge as an important trope in understanding the notion of order, or rather disorder of the art of collecting in the digital space.</p>
<p>This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in DH - the archive - particularly as it occupies a predominant space in the imagination of the field in India, and processes of knowledge production and the history of disciplines in general. The influx of digital technologies into the archival space in the last decade has been an impetus for the large scale digitisation of material, but it has also thrown up several challenges for traditional archival practice, including the preservation of analogue material, the problems of categorising and interpreting large volumes of data, and the gradual disappearance or re-definition of the traditional figure of the collector – a concern echoed across several spaces extending from private online archival efforts to large collaborative knowledge repositories like the Wikipedia. With the questions that DH seems to have posed to traditional notions of authorship or subject expertise, the 'digital humanist', when we imagine such a person, can be seen as a reinvention of this figure of the collector - a curator of materials and traces, here of course, digital traces.</p>
<p>The concept of the archive has been important to knowledge production and particularly the development of academic disciplines; whether driven by concerns of the state or the impulses of the market, there have been different ways of defining and understanding the archive, not only as a documentary record of history, but as a metaphor for collective memory and remembrance which includes technology in its very imagination. One of the most elaborate formulations of the archive has been in the work of Jacques Derrida, where apart from proposing the death and preservation drives as primary to the archival impulse, he also highlights the process of archivisation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory (1995). Michel Foucault in his concept of the archive looks at it as "a system of discursivity which establishes the possibility of what can be said," <strong>[1]</strong> thus pointing to the archive as a space not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of knowledge creation. There is today a consensus, at least in its academic understanding that archives cannot be relegated to being self-contained linear spaces of objective historical record, but that archival practice itself has political implications in terms of how collective memory and history, or as indicated by Foucault, histories are preserved and retold through a process of careful selection. Disciplines themselves may therefore be seen as archives of knowledge, and one may stretch this analogy to say that they may also appear as self-contained spaces with restrictions on entry for different ways of remembering and reading. More importantly, the question of what constitutes the archive and what objects or materials may be archived reflects a larger debate about problems with the definition of disciplines and shifting disciplinary boundaries <strong>[2]</strong>. With the shift to the digital archive, new questions about access, sharing and collaboration have emerged, as illustrated by the number of new archival spaces that have emerged, and growth of expansive archives such at the Walt Whitman, Rossetti and Blake archives in the West (Drucker 2011). However, as is apparent, the conditions of access to such archives and their interpretation have not been problematised enough, if at all, particularly with respect to how they contribute to generating new kinds of knowledge or scholarship.</p>
<p>While DH debates in the West have focussed quite significantly on archives and the possibilities that digital collections have now opened up research and creative practice involving archival material, in the Indian context it is the 'incompleteness of the archive' that still seems to be a bone of contention. Some of the scholars and practitioners interviewed as part of this study see archive creation as one of the key questions of DH as it has emerged in India, and the possibilities and challenges that this brings to the fore, (particularly in terms of access to rare materials and extending these debates to regional languages) as something that the field will need to contend with at some point. The role of digital technologies in fostering this activity of archive-building is stressed in these debates. In an earlier monograph titled Archives and Access produced as part of CIS-RAW, Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto trace a material history of archival practice in India, specifically looking at conflicts and debates surrounding state and colonial archives, and the politics of access, preservation and digitisation (2011). The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to the now within the reach of the individual, engendered by increased access to technology, and the ‘publicness’ that the visual nature of the internet fosters. However they also talk of the possibility of continuing forms of state or market control over the archive precisely through the internet and digital technologies, with the nature of individual access and use again being mediated through digitisation. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer with the archives at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata who was also part of the Archives and Access project, and has been part of some early conversations on DH in India, speaks about this change <strong>[3]</strong>. Even twenty years ago, it was difficult to define the archive, as it was considered the prerogative of the state, and this defined the nature of archival practice and management as well. From there it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved some issues of preserving content and the problems of physically accessing archives to a large extent, it may not always be the best option, as the archival or analogue material needs to be in good condition so as to make for good digitised copies, thus emphasising the need for more effective methods and better training in preservation practices. Also, as he point out, digitisation may be able to capture and preserve the content of an artifact, but not its form, which is equally important. He therefore rues the fact that even with technological advancements, there is still a lack of interest in archival practice, and often institutional mandates determine the archival agenda which may not be in the interest of generating more research and scholarship around material, as this is the only way to keep the archive alive.</p>
<p>The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, has been an important shift here, with their focus on archiving the personal and the everyday, he says, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. While on the subject of private collections and personal narratives, Dr. C S Lakshmi, writer and academic who is director of the Mumbai-based Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) <strong>[4]</strong>, has particular concerns about digitalisation making large amounts of information available for consumption online, particularly with respect to women. While digitisation is an effective tool for preservation and offers several possibilities for documentation, unmediated access is problematic and often a breach of privacy. There is so much information out there that the digital sphere makes available, sometimes this excessive communication also contributes to certain silences and obscures or makes invisible people and their stories. So very often its not a question of just making information available to people. What are you making available, how much are you making available and to whom, for what purpose - these are all important questions that contour the notion of access and need to be addressed according to Dr. Lakshmi. Curation therefore emerges as an important process. The publicness or hyper-visibility that the visual nature of the internet and digital technologies accords to the archive is seen tied to a narrative of loss here, and against the rhetoric of preservation which is still in many spaces deemed to be the primary function and imagination of the archive. What this sets up is also a conflict between the possibilities of open access and sharing of material, and concerns of privacy, and the need to find a space where both these seemingly contradictory ends meet.</p>
<p>The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies contributes to a 'problem of excess', and that is where curation and building new kinds of tools come in as a critical and creative exercise. Dr. Amlan Dasgupta reiterates this opinion. He talks about the internet as fostering an 'age of altruism', where the proliferation of technological gadgets has brought about a culture of voluntarily sharing materials online. This of course challenges notions of authority and brings forth the problems of the unarranged library which Benjamin’s essay also points towards, but the archive can be used as a metaphor to understand how notions of authorship and authority are being challenged as is apparent in the DH discourse. The theory-practice divide is also something that ails this particular domain like many others; not only is there an inadequate understanding of how to access and use the archive on the part of students and researchers alike, but there is a lack of standardisation of the practice of archive management and the science itself, in terms of metadata, problems of ownership and copyright, and most importantly inadequate infrastructure, training and expertise on preservation of analogue materials. While it may not be within the ambit of DH to address all of these questions, the renewed interest in archival practice and the diversification of its modes is something is that would continue to be an integral aspect of its practice. In fact what digitisation has also led to is diversity in the modes of documentation itself, and the larger process of archiving, which has important implications for the kinds of questions one may ask within certain disciplinary formations, history being an important example. The nature of material in the archive is never quite the same, so is the manner of working with and interpreting them. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, who has been engaged with archival practice herself, and is now working on setting up oral history archives through the Centre for Public History, speaks of the changes that digital technologies have produced in studying oral history, specifically in terms of recording and interpretation of interviews. The mode of documentation, particularly the digital, adds a new layer to the manner in which the voice, sounds or even silence is recorded or interpreted. She refers to Alessandro Portelli’s work on oral history, which talks about the nuances of the sound, such as tone, volume and speed of speaking which are all bearers of meaning and can tell you so much about what the person is trying to say, but can never be fully translated into the written word.(2006, 32-42) Although there are still some basic but crucial obstacles such as with transcription, the digital space may allow for tools that help with more nuanced interpretation of recorded material, and large volumes of it; a possibility that CPH is looking into at the moment. There are several institutions in India who want to set up their archives, most of their materials include many hours of interviews, with many people at a time and transcription is a problem, because it takes time, and there is still no software to aid or completely automate this process effectively. One of the approaches of DH may be to address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material using digital tools.</p>
<p>The digital archive is one space where many of these questions about the process of archive-creation and the separation between preservation and production that is often made in the existing discourse come into conflict, thus inflating the definition of the term much more. New technologies of publishing, the proliferation of electronic databases and growth of networks that in turn encourage production and the increasing amount of born-digital materials then present new questions for the concept of the archive and scholarship.</p>
<p>The role of technology has been significant in the development of the concept of the archive; in fact the archive, in its very nature would be a technological object, or a space where one can trace a history of the disciplines in relation to technology. The introduction of the digital has added yet another dimension to this question. Dr. Ravi Sundaram, Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and one of the co-initiators of the Sarai programme at the Centre for Developing Societies (CSDS) <strong>[5]</strong>, speaks of how the advent of the digital has brought about several shifts in the imagination of the archive, which he sees as two distinct phases. Sarai was one of the early models of a concept driven, networked archive, based on a culture of 'mailing lists' that built conversations around topics which in themselves constituted the archive. The shifts came with Web 2.0 with which archiving the everyday became a possibility, given the access to inexpensive gadgets and the pervasiveness of social media. While the model of the networked, curated and public archive still has valence today, a significant next step would be to see how one can extend these questions to thinking differently about the archive, by developing new protocols for entering, sharing and circulation of material, and producing new knowledge or concepts around these ideas. This would be crucial in terms of generating research and scholarship around the archive itself as a concept, and realising the full potential of network-generated information. Another pertinent question is that of information and technology infrastructure, which is a political question as well. The investment on infrastructure for the archive is determined by different kinds of interests and will play an important role in how archival efforts will ultimately develop. As Dr. Sundaram reiterates, the point to note is that new archival efforts are not only general repositories, but critical interventions in themselves. They foster new kinds of visibilities. The Pad.ma archive <strong>[6]</strong>, for example, works with existing footage and reinvents or adds new layers of meaning to it through annotations and citations. This also opens up possibilities for new kinds of questions to be asked about existing material. Private archival efforts, many initiated by individuals are also becoming more niche and specific, driven by a specific research agenda, public interest in conservation or as critical and creative interventions in a particular area. Some examples of this are the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma <strong>[7]</strong>, the Indian Memory Project <strong>[8]</strong>, and Osianama <strong>[9]</strong>. In some of these examples, the archive may be used as more of a metaphor rather than a description or classificatory term, because of the layers of meaning that they generate around an existing object or 'trace'.</p>
<p>They are also reflective of a different milieu that came about with the digital turn in India. Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker who set up the artist’s studio and collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[10]</strong>, and is also part of the team behind the Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma platforms, speaks of the various factors that contributed to the setting up these two online archival spaces. As artists for them the larger concern was the ever-changing electronic media or technological landscape, as seen in some of their earlier projects such as Russel TV, which involved creating content around media ecologies and intellectual property in a sort of pro-piracy, and access to knowledge framework. The focus for them was the ecology or the landscape, and within that the sharp point was where there were irregularities and inequalities and there was a need to redistribute things in a certain way. Pad.ma grew out of a larger idea of understanding this changing milieu around the early 2000s, where the digital had already become pervasive – filmmakers were editing on a laptop or desktop computer, they had access to the internet and DIY tools, resources were cheaper and more accessible as the internet was opening up a world of possibilities. Therefore, as the team realised, if there was to be an archive of the contemporary, it had to be digital or visual, or video specifically, and located online. This was also the time when the independent filmmaker had become a prominent figure and the challenges and advantages of sharing unused and raw footage became quite possible and apparent with a platform like Pad.ma. The archive was created as something contemporary, non-state and non-canonical, with a wide range of stakeholders and contributors ranging across NGOs, activists, independent filmmakers to individuals with an interest in film and video. There were however several difficulties as well, chiefly in getting people to share material, issues of privacy, and a resistance to the use of this platform as a pedagogic and academic resource, which over the years have come down with the people becoming more open to using material on the platform as primary texts, and the development of more tools for editing and annotations. Indiancine.ma that way is more of a traditional form of film studies, but with more possibilities now for working with the film text.</p>
<p>However, while entering the digital space may have enabled more sharing and dissemination of material, how much of these efforts also make their way into larger civil society and policy debates, scholarship and pedagogy is still a crucial question. Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been used by students, in media and film in particular but the efforts remain niche and restricted to certain disciplines only. Some part of this comes from a resistance to the film or a certain kind of text as academic, and therefore scholarly or relevant to a larger cross-section of research. This also stems from a predominant imagination of the archive as a static, linear repository. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha, film and cultural studies scholar, who was part of the team that created Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, points out, the distinction between the archive as a repository space and an interpretive space is one that needs to be made clearly, and archives are clearly a form of the later. In fact the idea of the digital as a permanent medium is false, and it should not be the solution to problems of storage and preservation. Further, in a lot of expansive archives, whether digital or physical, it is seen that only up to five percent of the material is used, and more often than not it is the same five percent! This is because most people do know about the existence of certain kinds of material which is buried deep within the archive, and therefore do not access it. The emphasis of archival practice, and particularly in the time of the digital archive where space is not seen as a constraint, yet, should be to enliven the archive to ensure that material from the 'dead space of the archive' is made more searchable and accessible for use.</p>
<p>Curation then comes back again as an important aspect of the archive, even in the time of the digital. Indira Chowdhury sees this as one of the main shifts from the traditional archive, where the curator or the archivist performed the role of a custodian or gatekeeper who grants restricted access to the archive only to researchers or scholars. Now with the advent of the internet and shift to the digital, it’s more about collaboration, and adding to the archive, and this has encouraged a diversity of users, and uses of the archive. This comes with its own problems however, such as with metadata standards for instance, and particularly questions of format which become important from the perspective of technological obsolescence (as discussed in the earlier chapter). The digital archive has made practitioners think about what they are archiving, for whom and what purpose, and in what formats, but these questions also go back to the traditional archive, and in fact are dependent on how we think about and defined the archive itself, then and now how we imagine the virtual archive. These are as she says, questions that may be routed through technology, but not necessarily about technology. Also, even with the traditional archive, making material accessible and usable was a concern, and this is where the archivist or custodian played an important role. She speaks about using pre-digital archives, where there are handwritten descriptions of material, all meticulously preserved, indexed and cross-referenced, and you know what material to look for because the archivist knew what was in the archive and how to find it. She speaks of her own experience of setting up the archives at TIFR, which was not digital then, but has been digitised now, and even though she has not been associated with them for a while now she still gets the occasional email requesting help to find something in the archive, because she knows the material. A lot of the new digital archives therefore, despite their huge collection which are also searchable, need archivists and assistants who oversee the organisation of material, because those cross-references and connections have just not been made (often it is not humanly possible because of the sheer volume of data), which is really what the historians will look for, and that is the challenge here.</p>
<p>Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the Centre for Public History, also sees this as a problem of not imagining the archive as a database, but as this legacy where content is being held together under this one overarching frame. She finds that there is a metanarrative that is created at the level of the database, because of the context in which the archive becomes a database – the historical / institutional questions, and what is being used to create the archive. A point of divergence however could be that it’s easier to lie with the archive, because with the database there is the empirical identifier, so the truth claim is better. This is something that Dr. Chowdhury agrees upon as well, as she finds that because archives have the potential of being multilayered, and are therefore complex, verification is difficult; it’s only another scholar who will check the materials referenced or used by one – and the interpretation would change, and this had implications for the way the archive generates scholarship. Another difference is pulling data from the archive in a way that it allows the making of computational hypotheses about other possibilities, which is the heart of DH – such as topic modelling and algorithmic shortcuts to crunch through data to posit some hypothetical claims. She feels that in India at the moment we are not doing in enough with the archive as database, which also restricts its many possibilities. Even in terms of access to the archive, which the digital archive is supposed to make easier, it comes with certain conditions, such as copyrights, privacy and even different kinds of Creative Commons licenses for open source content. It also depends on what Dr. Ray Murray describes as the ‘flavour of the archive’, something particularly relevant to a lot of new private archival spaces like the Indian Memory Project, or Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, which focussed on 'building the archive', as opposed to working with an existing archive of material. As such these are somewhat ephemeral archives, always in the making, and where the digital intersects clearly with the archival space is in terms of finding an audience for it; the internet creates these niche spaces of interest, so you find that people want to access such spaces, and do it differently from the traditional archive, as the varied nature and functionalities of these two examples demonstrate.</p>
<p>What the long discussion seems to illustrate then is the gradual shift of the archive to become something of a metaphor, as the way the archive has been previously imagined, and its functions have changed with the advent of the internet. As Wolfgang Ernst asks:</p>
<blockquote>Does the archive become metaphorical in multimedia space? This is a plea for archiving the term archive itself for the description of multimedia storage processes. Digital archaeology, though, is not a case for future generations but has to be performed in the present already. In the age of digitalizability, that is, when we have the option of storing all kinds of information, a paradoxical phenomenon appears: cyberspace has no memory. (Ernst 2013: 138)</blockquote>
<p>What Ernst suggests is that the Internet forms a different kind of multimedia archive, or anarchive, or is a phantasm, which differs from the printed of state archives because “the archive is a given, well-defined lot; the Internet, on the contrary, is a collection not just of unforeseen texts but of sound and images as well, an <em>anarchive</em> of sensory data for which no genuine archival culture has been developed so far in the occident” (139). The internet, in documenting the discontinuities and ‘disorder’ of the history of multimedia forms thus gives rise to a new memory culture, and this is important to the process of understanding how new archival spaces are being created, and theorised.</p>
<p>Archive-building has an impact on how knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated is a crucial aspect of meaning-making practices. Related to this is another issue in terms of the amount of data that is available in the archives by the sheer amount of material that it can now hold, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data; accessing or interpreting such large volumes of information would require critical tools and new kinds of architecture. These shifts also relocate the figure of the collector from traditional practices to new ways of visualising collections and the art of collecting itself, which are now beyond the scope of the human subject. As illustrated by practices such as distant reading, it is now humanly difficult to read, and process such large volumes of data that the digital archive now makes available to us. What this then throws up as questions for archival practice, and DH of course, is the new modes by which knowledge is produced through access to such corpora – for instance the impact such changes have on history, its reading and writing, the growth of public history and the role of the internet archive in fostering its growth. On a much broader level, it also points towards the implications of this shift for pedagogy and scholarship in the humanities, in the digital age, questions which will be discussed in the next chapter.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Michel Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004: 18).</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Ibid.</p>
<p><strong>[3] </strong>A session on 'Digital Humanities and the State of the Archives in South Asia' was conducted by Prof. Abhijit Bhattacharya and his team as part of a workshop on research methodology in Women's Studies, held at Tezpur University between April 6-7, 2010.See http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sparrowonline.org/" target="_blank">http://www.sparrowonline.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://sarai.net/" target="_blank">http://sarai.net/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/" target="_blank">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/" target="_blank">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/" target="_blank">http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://osianama.com/" target="_blank">http://osianama.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/" target="_blank">http://studio.camp/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p> </p>
<p>Balachandran, Aparna, and Rochelle Pinto.<em>Archives and Access. </em>Bangalore: The Centre for Internet and Society, 2011</p>
<p>Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" In<em> Illuminations</em>, edited by Hannah Arendt.Translated by Harry Zohn, 59-67.New York: Schoken Books, 1968</p>
<p>Derrida, Jacques.<em> Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.</em>Translated by Eric Prenowitz.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna. "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarshi<em>p" </em>In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, edited by M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.Accessed December 11, 2015.<a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a></p>
Ernst, Wolfgang. "Discontinuities:Does the Archive become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?" In <em>Digital Memory and the Archive, e</em>dited by Jussi Parikka, 113 - 140.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013
<p></p>
<p></p>
Manoff,
M. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” <em>Portal:
Libraries and the Academy, </em>Vol.4, No.1 (2005): 9-25.Accessed December 10,
2015. <a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687">http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687</a>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText">Portelli, Alessandro
"What makes oral history different?”. In <em>The Oral History Reader</em>, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair
Thomson, 32-42. London: Routledge, 2006.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:08:22ZBlog EntryThe Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fourth among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <strong>The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</strong></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In an article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly describing the emergence of the term cyberinfrastructure, Patrik Svensson speaks of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the humanities, pointing towards a seemingly new found interest and investment in resources and tools for humanities research, pedagogy and publication in many universities and other knowledge institutions (Svensson 2011). Though the term has not been significantly used otherwise, it is interesting to note the implications of such a statement in the context of other such important ‘turns’ in the history of ideas, such as the linguistic or cultural turn. Particularly in the predominant debates around digital humanities, which are largely Anglo-American, infrastructure is an important and inherent component of any thinking around this area, as it derives many of its theoretical and practical concerns from a history of humanities computing. A lot of early work in DH was done in in the area of digital archives and knowledge repositories, such as The Walt Whitman Archive, Rossetti and Blake archives (Gold and Groom 2011, Drucker 2011), where digitization and algorithmic querying were important developments in terms of imagining and opening up the archive. From there to seemingly complex projects on data mapping, visualization, distant reading and cultural analytics, which require parsing through a huge corpora of humanities data, the growth of infrastructure has been a key aspect of these developments, although this many not be emphasized in the early literature about the field. The use of computational methods and the move towards the use of big data in the humanities has been an important change in terms of objects of the enquiry and methodology, and infrastructure is an essential condition of both these changes.</p>
<p>Like with other disciplines the nature of infrastructure and resources available to the humanities – in the form of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and now online repositories, language laboratories, and bibliographic, writing and editing tools and software – have also in some manner influenced the nature or scope of questions that could be asked of an object or text. It is therefore useful to explore the influence of infrastructure at a very conceptual level, in terms of what new ways of enquiry have been made possible with digital technologies and the internet. Now with new tools that can parse many pages of text at a go, or an algorithm that can derive patterns from a data set of images, video or other cultural artifacts, the scope of the enquiry seems to have increased exponentially, as much literature around DH suggests (Berry 2011). Indeed this point is also a bone of contention for many traditional humanities scholars, as it not only seems to be a technologically deterministic notion, but also one that takes away from more conventional methods of humanities research, which are based on close reading and interpretation of texts. In the Indian context however, these possibilities still seem distant owing to several gaps in terms of requirements of infrastructure, resources and material. In many institutions, the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in the form of libraries, classroom teaching-learning resources and access to the internet and other digital tools for the humanities continues to remain a problem. Existing institutional infrastructure is lesser that what is required, and mostly outdated.</p>
<p>This conflict over whether new tools and resources for the humanities is taking away or adding to humanities research is better understood in the light of how the concept of infrastructure has been understood, and specifically in the context of communication and research. Brian Larkin (2008) describes infrastructures as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense”. He talks about both technical (such as transport, telecommunications, urban planning, energy and water) and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as the knowledge of a language, or cultural style and religious learnings. He therefore defines infrastructure as “this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” This definition opens out the understanding of the term a little more, for it brings within the ambit different kinds of goods – such as knowledge, and proposes that infrastructure has the power to bind people within collectivities, thus emphasizing both its limitations as well as potentialities.</p>
The notion of infrastructure as not being neutral to culture is further emphasized when Larkin talks about its mediating capacities, brought about by a layering of new technologies over old ones. "Infrastructures…mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of infrastructures themselves" (Ibid.: 6). Thus the understanding of infrastructures as merely a means of the execution of ideas is one of the obstacles in terms of imagining them as more central to the work of the humanities. Often, the notion of infrastructure has been understood in terms of the institutional infrastructure in place, and not in terms of the smaller networks, tools or resources that build it, which are often located at the level of individuals. Ownership is a key aspect of the problem here, because the ownership of such infrastructure is largely with the state or large corporate entities, and not something within the ambit of small and private institutions or even individuals, and this often mandates the manner of their use. Indeed in the case of DH, there are certain kinds of technologies and resources that cannot be replicated easily at all, as such it is something that needs investment from the state and large knowledge institutions such as the university. Another problem, as rightly identified by Svensson is that the imagination of research infrastructures has been primarily in terms of the needs of the natural sciences, as a result of which resources, tools and materials for the humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment. Thus not only is there a challenge in terms of the availability of infrastructure, but also with respect to the optimum utilization of what is available.
<p> </p>
<p>Some of the practitioners and scholars interviewed as part of this mapping have also repeatedly brought up a number of concerns about (or the lack of) infrastructure they have had to use, modify and develop as part of their projects and research. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore finds it rather ironic that a city like Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal has such little thinking in the humanities. There are of course several reasons for this, she says, and in many places infrastructure development is restricted for certain reasons, like for example in Kashmir, where the use of internet and mobile phones is regulated strictly due to security concerns. The key question of course is to have more of a dialogue between places to ensure that they are not functioning in isolation. She also emphasizes that the problems are also at a more basic level, like with transcription for example <strong>[1]</strong>. The advent of the digital has brought with it several new possibilities, but she also talks about the many misconceptions that seem to be prevalent with regard to the digital, particularly in terms of preservation and storage capacity. The question of format is of great importance and a determining factor in much of research that mobilizes digital technologies. As part of her work on archiving oral histories, she has often had to emphasize that there are specific formats for a digital oral archive. As she says:</p>
<blockquote>You should not switch to say MP3 just because it’s cheaper, more convenient and a lighter file. I often have people arguing that I just bought a recorder, it gives me a clear recording [in the MP3 format] etc. If you were to archive that file you would find that within a few years you begin to lose data on that file. The digital archive has also made people think a lot more about what they are preserving, in what format. These are things you then teach yourself, you do not archive in certain formats, or rely on an archive of MP3 files, because every time you copy them onto something it would have lost a little bit of its description. So these are things that make the historian more oriented, you think a lot more about what you are doing.</blockquote>
<p>She therefore warns against these presumptions that a digital archive will resolve completely problems of space and preservation, as a change in format can easily render your data inaccessible and essentially useless. The idea of ‘loss of data’ and lack of space is something easily missed, as there a notion of the digital being an endless space, but that too comes at a cost. As Jonathan Sterne (2013) explains in his work on the MP3 as a cultural artifactiv, it is a format that works through compression and elimination of excess sound, which eventually greatly affects the quality of the sound object itself. The notion of the digital rendering a certain quality of sound, and by implication generating a ‘better’ digital artifact itself, is therefore highly debatable.</p>
<p>There are other considerations to bear in mind as well. As Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the CPH points out, the context of such work in the global south is very different, and lack of good infrastructure is definitely one of the major problems. There are issues of bandwidth, problems such as surveillance, and issues with regulation of internet access, now the issue of network neutrality and so on, all of which have implications for possible digital humanities work and specifically work on digital archives. A significant challenge she sees is that we don't have mechanisms to translate between/ from Indian languages. She says that:</p>
<blockquote>It would be amazing to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages which at the moment is an impossibility. This is where a place like Bangalore comes into the picture... We need to pull on resources that are being pioneered in places like the IITs, or institutions here working with natural language processing...technologies that we cannot in a humanities context create, but pull those in to use them for humanities research. But the questions that we are asking are necessarily quite different, from what we have in the West.</blockquote>
<p>The problem with Indian languages brings out the problems that are specific to the global south and therefore the infrastructure needs of humanities research work. Padmini Murray mentions Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University as an effective illustration of the challenges faced by researchers working in languages other than English. She explains “The very level of creating the code for Bichitra was different, because it had to be done from scratch. Finding a set of reliable Bangla characters is difficult because the ligatures get mixed up, so they created a character set from scratch to create Bichitra, and for Prabhed [the collation software] which works within it.” The problem of a lack of standardization for Indic language inputs is therefore an immediate practical concern for archival work in different languages in India <strong>[2]</strong>.</p>
<p>Indiancine.ma <strong>[3]</strong>, an online archive of Indian film, has similarly been experimenting with different ways of reading and annotating film text, with a focus right now on films that are out of copyright. It uses an open-source platform named Pandor/a <strong>[4]</strong> for media archives, which helps to organise and manage large, decentralized collections of video, to collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations, and to archive as a desktop-class web application. The editing tool enables a user to pause, cut and annotate a particular scene or sequence in the film according to a time code, thus creating enormous new possibilities in terms of how we engage with the film text at several levels. The different ways of organising content through different filters also helps map content in unique ways and read them. According to Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert, who are part of the team that developed the archive and its predecessor Pad.ma <strong>[5]</strong>, Indiancine.ma is a work in progress, and it will always be, so as to allow new opportunities to present themselves with every change in the software and tools being used. They are particular about the archive being open to a variety of users and uses – that is, it is not only a tool or space of publication for humanities researchers, but is also a software project, a resource for a film fan club, and many other things as it is open to interpretation. It is meant for people to build together and have conversations across domains and disciplines. In their work with people from both the humanities and sciences, they do see a void or gap between domains, and reiterate that it is very difficult for people to have a conversation across their disciplinary moorings. Infrastructure development has also become divided across these lines, and suffers from a kind of tunnel vision which often prevents it from being developed in response to the needs of the communities it is meant to address. As Sebastian recollects the experience of creating Pad.ma, a similar online video archive using the same platform, Pandor/a, he speaks of collaborating with people from a non-technology background, at the artists collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[6]</strong>, and how the lack of a hierarchy between technologists and non-technologists only contributed to making these projects better. A lot of the early software projects in India suffered due to this distance between people from technology and non-technology backgrounds, and the lack of a common language for them to communicate. Both Sebastian and Jan themselves come with training and experience in diverse areas, ranging from philosophy and visual arts to software development, and believe that their contribution to this archive is more conceptual than technological. They also see the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) culture, then a rather incipient movement in India when they had just begun work on these projects, as one that can foster more conversations and collaborative work in technology and research in India. When they had started out of course, it was very difficult to convince people to use free and open source software, or even get filmmakers to release their footage for an open access platform like Pad.ma. CAMP was one of the few spaces then that had this open source culture, and it encouraged people to collaborate extensively, across areas of expertise. As Sebastian says “You deal with a relatively complex informatics system, but you are fully aware that you can modify and change things, and deal with them in a transparent way, which is great.” Both claim that nobody owns Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma, but everybody looks after it in a way, because they all use it differently depending on their interests, and this nurtures and builds the platform in different ways. The availability of this somewhat outside/alternate space for collaboration, and working within the open source context has been instrumental in the growth of these two online open access archives.</p>
<p>The computational aspects of Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and even Bichitra to some extent is may be something to look forward to for researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of such research with these platforms. Given that both are essentially large corpora of material, introducing new algorithmic tools to work with them is not a distant possibility, something that has also been the core of a lot of DH work in the Anglo-American context. Jan and Sebastian have tried this already with one of their earlier projects, 0xdb <strong>[7]</strong>, which is another online archive of cinema, by running a color recognition algorithm on it. There is an instance of face detection and speech recognition software that could be run on this platform, with interesting results. The existing filters on Indiacine.ma also make it possible to search for images or sequences based on colour and object recognition. For instance, an interesting experiment is to search for ‘telephone’ in the archive, which pulls up images containing telephones from across the entire corpus, outlining an interesting trajectory of the use of the instrument. While helpful in terms of querying and searching over a large corpus, they also emphasize the need to be able to make sense of it in a meaningful way. As Jan says “Most of this software is developed really as a means of control, in the area of surveillance etc., and not for exploring; it is more of a content identifying tool rather than to discover things. Clustering or referencing credits are other possibilities, but its more statistical analysis of the footage; are they really adding anything qualitative to cinema studies is still an open question”. Given this disjuncture in what these tools are developed for and how they are finally used, a point of concern is whether the research questions are also driven by the possibilities and limitations of the software itself. While that remains a broader question, Sebastian feels that more than a software, this is a new digital eco-system itself, and using these platforms in different ways, in fact even beyond what they were imagined for, will drive the technology in new directions. The limitation of computational tools as he sees now is really the speed, and given the expenses involved, they may not be feasible to implement and expect results anytime soon.</p>
<p>Both the above platforms demonstrate a certain ability to read texts both closely, as well as from a distance through the use of algorithmic tools, thus demonstrating the possibilities of analysis afforded by the infrastructure it has been built with. More importantly, they also highlight the limits of such tools and resources due to several challenges posed by the material itself. In the case of Bichitra, the problems of developing a code for Bengali characters has put forth a number of technological challenges; a pointer towards one among many problems for archiving materials in Indian languages. Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are more symptomatic of the context in which new technologies can develop today given the support and space for collaboration and conversations across domains of expertise. The problems of format and technological obsolescence brought up by scholars at CPH is an important one; while colluding with proprietary software is inevitable in some cases, as suggested by the practitioners and researchers behind these platforms, keeping back-ups of material and being able to migrate out of a digital platform at any given point is also extremely essential. Such flexibility of material, and immense interoperability – across domains, formats and social-cultural contexts including language is something that researchers in DH, or for that matter in any field that actively engages with the internet and digital technologies would look for in the infrastructure that they build for research, scholarship and pedagogy. Infrastructure continues to remain a critical aspect knowledge production and dissemination, and it is imperative now more than ever, that it is addressed at the conceptual level of any research intervention involving digital technologies and knowledge production.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See section on <em>Archives</em> for a more detailed discussion on this issue: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See the section on <em>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</em> for more on this: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="https://pan.do/ra">https://pan.do/ra</a></p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">http://pad.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/">http://studio.camp/</a></p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">https://0xdb.org/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2011. <a href="http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440">http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440</a>.</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a>.</p>
<p>Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5</a>.</p>
<p>Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In <em>Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria</em>. London: Duke University Press, 2008</p>
<p>Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' <em>New Media and Society</em>. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006</p>
<p>Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:07:06ZBlog EntryReading from a Distance – Data as Text
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the third among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <strong>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</strong></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on DH given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding <strong>[1]</strong> to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of social media such as Storify <strong>[2]</strong> or Scoop-it <strong>[3]</strong> have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm <strong>[4]</strong>. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation (Wieseltier 2013). But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts.
<p> </p>
<p>The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts '<em>massively addressable at different levels of scale</em>' as suggested by Michael Witmore (Witmore 2012: 324-327, emphasis as in the original). According to him: "[A]ddressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction" (Ibid. 325). This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, "textuality is addressability and further ... this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event" (Ibid. 326). What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book (Ibid. 327).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Of Texts and Hypertextuality</h2>
<p>An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of 'Bichitra' <strong>[5]</strong>, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore variorum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation. Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri <strong>[6]</strong>, Professor Emeritus, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata has been part of the process of setting up this variorum. According to him the most novel aspects of this platform, or as he calls it - 'integrated knowledge site' - are to do with these functions of cross-referencing and integration. The bibliography is a hyperlinked structure, which connects to all the different digital versions of a particular text (the most being 20 versions of a single poem). The notion of a bibliography has always evoked hypertextuality – the possibility to link and cross - reference texts, but with the advent of the digital, this possibility has been fully realized, as seen in the case of the hypertext <strong>[7]</strong>. For collation, the project team developed a unique software, titled 'Prabhed,' (meaning difference in Bengali) that helps to assemble text at three levels (a) chapter in novel, act/scene in drama, canto in poem; (b) para in novel or other prose, speech in drama, stanza in poem; (c) individual words.. For instance, you can choose a particular section of a book, poem or play - and compare its occurrences across different editions and versions of the work to note their matches and differences. If two paragraphs have been removed from one chapter, and put into another, that can be traced through the collation software. If a particular word has been omitted in a later edition, or if certain lines have been rearranged in a poem, these changes can be tracked <strong>[8]</strong>. What makes the search engine 'integrated' is not simply that it can search all Tagore's works in one go, but that it links up with the bibliography and thereby with the actual text of the works. It is interesting to note here the different changes that the text undergoes to become available for study on a digital platform, where it is amenable to intense searching and querying of this kind. It is now possible to search across a large corpus of texts, for minute changes in words or sentences, and ask questions of these in terms of their usage, instances and contexts of their occurrence, thus facilitating a kind of enquiry previously never undertaken in textual studies.</p>
<p>The project however is not without its challenges, as Prof. Chaudhuri further outlines. Working with Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India. In Bengali some work has been done in the form of a scientifically designed keyboard software called Avro, which stores all the conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics <strong>[9]</strong>. Developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned material in Indian languages remains a crucial issue for most digitization and archival initiatives in India. Other issues include the problem of vowel markers appearing before the consonants, even if phonetically they follow and are keyed in afterwards. To get the font and keyboard software to recognize this is a big challenge. The third challenge, especially in the case of works printed from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, is that there are vast differences in spelling; the same word can be spelt in different ways, and as there is no lexicon, one may not do any kind of general search. There is also the issue of a high degree of inflection in the language. A word may have a suffix (or, <em>vibhakti</em>) attached to it to indicate the case: one for the subject of the sentence, another for the object, another for the possessive case and so on. These are multiplied by the different forms of the verbs. The development of a lexicon in Bengali would be one of the ways to resolve many of these issues. However, as most people can only see and interact with the digital interface of Bichitra, and not really understand the process behind it, or the amount of work involved in making the platform work the way it does, funding for research and development, maintenance and sustainability is difficult to obtain. Backroom file management, which includes both paper and digital files remains a big but largely invisible task on such a platform. The total number of files generated from Bichitra is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, and many of these are offline files which would not even go on to the website. Hence while uploading the files, the basic groundwork for a retrieval system for different files serving different functions had already been laid, including the creation of a bibliography, which was a huge exercise in itself. The process of making text available as hypertext is labor that is invisibilized, and is rarely or never available to the end user.</p>
<p>Prof. Chaudhuri also speaks of ways in which the notion of textuality has been rendered differently through the use of the internet and digital technologies. Digital or electronic text has helped theorize better the notion of a fluid text - the fact that a text is never complete, but only bound between the covers of a book at a given point of several processes that are technological as well as social. The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change in the last several decades. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content and process seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the 'text' through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces.</p>
<p>Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker, further espouses this thought when she talks about the new possibilities of textual analysis of film that are now possible, particularly in terms of temporal control, first with the DVD, then the internet and now with online archival platforms like Indiancine.ma <strong>[10]</strong> and the Public Access Digital Media Archive, or Pad.ma <strong>[11]</strong>. The first is an online archive of Indian film from the pre-copyright era (so effectively before 1955), while the second is an archive of found and archival footage, images sound clips and unfinished films <strong>[12]</strong>. Both platforms allow the user to search through an array of material, view/listen to them download or embed them as links. They make available to users not just an online database for storage and retrieval but also a space to work with a range of materials in multiple video and audio formats and themes through annotations and referencing. The annotation tool is perhaps the most innovative aspect of these platforms, wherein a user can pause, isolate a section of a sequence and annotate it using a range of options and filters. The annotations are textual, in the form of comments, commentary and marginalia (in the case of Pad.ma) and can also link to other paraphernalia around the film object, such as posters, images, advertisements and other literature. Users can also contextualize material by adding transcripts, descriptions, events, keywords, and even locating the events in the video on a map. These have brought to the fore several questions on relevance, accessibility and ownership, as in the case of raw footage from films, and opened up possibilities for such materials to be re-contextualized by the reader in different ways. This layering of annotations around the film object also creates a new research object, or text that then necessitates new methods of studying it as well. As opposed to the earlier practice of the researcher/critic having to watch the film first and then comment or analyse it, and relying on memory to generate the scholarship, it is now possible to pause, analyse or read and come back to the film and annotate the text in several ways. What does this do to the film text - the process documenting the form is new, not cinema as a form itself – is a question that comes up quite prominently here. The computational aspect also is important here, given the vast amount of footage that is now available, which then requires better lexical indexing to compute and manage large data sets. This has been a constant endeavour with Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma as well.</p>
<p>As in the case of film, what becomes prominent here is the move to a digital text of some sort. One such example of a digital text perhaps is the hypertext. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited as the 'ideal text' by Barthes (Landow 2006: 2). Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the possibilities of multilinearity of a text that can be realised in the digital, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture. As such it is only the narrative, and not the form itself that is multi-linear in hypertext fiction.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Textual Criticism in the Digital</h2>
<p>But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the 'text' is manifested through practices of reading and writing (Barthes 1977). So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, in his book <em>Graphs, Maps and Trees</em> talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an 'abstract model of literary history' (Moretti 2005: 1). He describes this approach as "within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study." He further says, "Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a <em>specific kind of knowledge</em>: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005: 1, emphasis as in original). The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can 'facilitate' this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods of reading.</p>
<p>As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as not just a reference to volume but also its other aspects of data such as velocity, scope, and granularity among others significantly increases the ambit of what the term covers, with implications for new epistemologies and modes of research (Kitchin 2014). But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text – and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a certain form of cultural and literary production (Wilkens 2012). Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by working with corpora as opposed to select texts, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper (Fitzpatrik 2011). Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc. acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content (Ibid.). More importantly, it also points towards a change and diversity in the disciplinary method. Where close reading was once the only method by which a text became completely accessible to the reader, it is now possible to approach it through a set of processes, thus urging us to rethink the method of enquiry itself.</p>
<p>Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question we may still need to ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading (quoted earlier in this chapter) suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions (Kirschenbaum XXXX: 3). The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if DH can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located. The digital text, owing to the possibilities of ‘massive addressability,’ mentioned earlier is now more fluid and socialized. The renewed focus on the textual is most apparent in this manner of imagining the text, using the metaphor of a highly interlinked, networked and shared text. It also puts forth important questions then of how we understand technology a certain way, especially in the context of language and representation as an important factor of understanding new textual objects. Is technology a tool for textual analysis, or is it in inherent to our understanding of the nature of the text? Is the development of these methods of enquiry shaped by certain disciplinary requirements, and do they also challenge or create new conflicts for traditional methods of enquiry? The growth in the study of different media objects, such as video and cinema, and the advent of areas such as media studies, oral history, media archaeologies has further prompted concerns regarding the study of the digital object in these disciplines, and a rethinking of how we understand the notion of the text.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation." See: <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/">http://www.tei-c.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://storify.com/">https://storify.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.scoop.it/">http://www.scoop.it/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more on text mining see Lisa Guernsey in 'Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom,' in The New York Times, October 16, 2003 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print</a>. For more on data mining, distant reading, and the changing nature of reading practices see Matthew Kirschenbaum in 'The Remaking of Reading,' <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Interview with author, July 30, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as "a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." As quoted in George Landow, <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 2-12.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Bichitra, 'Collation Guide,' accessed on September 17, 2015, <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Omicron Lab, accessed September 17, 2015. <a href="https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html">https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> For more on these platforms see the section on DH institutions in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text". In <em>Image, Music, Text</em>. London: Fontana Press, 1977.</p>
<p>Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Texts" in <em>Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy</em>. New York: New York University Press, 2011.</p>
<p>Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "The Remaking of Reading". <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/%7Ehillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob. 'Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,' <em>Big Data & Society</em>, 2014, April–June, pp. 1–12, DOI: 10.1177/2053951714528481.</p>
<p>Landow, George. <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Moretti, Franco. <em>Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History</em>, Verso, 2005.</p>
<p>Wieseltier, Leon, 'Crimes Against Humanities,' The New Republic, September 3, 2013, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism">http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism</a>.</p>
<p>Wilkens, Mathew. "Canons, Close Reading and the Evolution of Method". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities </em> Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.</p>
<p>Witmore, Michael. "Text: A Massively Addressable Object". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:58ZBlog EntryA Question of Digital Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the second among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <strong>A Question of Digital Humanities</strong></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Problem of Definition</h2>
<p>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 <strong>[1]</strong>. 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 <em>for</em> the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s <em>of</em> 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)</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ol>
<li>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 <em>Nature of the book</em>, "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?<br />
<br /></li>
<li>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 <strong>[2]</strong> as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.<br />
<br /></li>
<li>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.</li></ol>
<p>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)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Problem of the Discipline</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>[3]</strong>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>[4]</strong> or the Vectors journal <strong>[5]</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> For a more detailed overview of the different phases of DH, see Patrik Svensson in 'Landscape of Digital Humanities,' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Volume 4 Number 1, 2010, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, <em>The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace</em>, Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET, <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558">http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> This is rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see <em>Conflict of the Faculties</em> (1798) by Immanuel Kant and <em>Discipline and Punish</em> (1975) by Michel Foucault.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php">http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Cutrofello, Andrew, <em>Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance</em>, State University of New York Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, <em>The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory</em>, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012.</p>
<p>Johns, Adrian, <em>The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making</em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Latour, Bruno, 'Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,' Trans. Couze Venn, <em>Theory Culture Society</em>, 247-260, 2002.</p>
<p>Parry, Dave, 'The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism', <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a>.</p>
<p>Ramsay, Stephen, 'On Building,' 2010, <a href="http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html">http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:46ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities in India?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the first among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <strong>Digital Humanities in India?</strong></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>[1]</strong> and a proposed short course in ‘Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics’ <strong>[2]</strong> 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 <strong>[3]</strong>. 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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ol>
<li>Are ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’ really two contradictory terms that are being bridged together? Is this a reiteration of the ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1990) debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the changes in the object(s) of enquiry in humanities disciplines due to the advent of the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects? How are these affecting the traditional methods of the humanities?<br /><br /></li>
<li>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?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the new skills and tools emerging with, and in turn defining, DH practices in India?</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>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)</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>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)</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>[4]</strong>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <strong>[5]</strong>, which along with the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill <strong>[6]</strong> and the recommendations of the Yashpal Committee report <strong>[7]</strong>, 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.</p>
<p>Following the NMEICT, several initiatives such as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) <strong>[8]</strong> programme, and the use of low-cost devices such as the Aakash tablets <strong>[9]</strong> 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) <strong>[10]</strong> and Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) <strong>[11]</strong>, and more recently the National Knowledge Network (NKN) <strong>[12]</strong> 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 <strong>[13]</strong>, Digital Library of India <strong>[14]</strong>, and National Library of India <strong>[15]</strong>, among many others. There is also a growing number of closed/commercial archives, some examples being the South Asia Archive <strong>[16]</strong> and Asia Art Archive <strong>[17]</strong>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Methodology</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>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)</blockquote>
<p>Deliberating on the interaction between humanities and technology, Susan Schreibman, in one the earliest books on DH describes the 'field' as follows:</p>
<blockquote>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)</blockquote>
<p>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 <em>an array of convergent practices</em>, and is also reproduced in the book <em>Digital Humanities</em> (Burdick et al 2012):</p>
<blockquote>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)</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> 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: <a href="http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf">http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/">http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nmeict.ac.in/">http://www.nmeict.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See <a href="http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf">http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf">http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf</a></p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://nptel.ac.in/">http://nptel.ac.in/</a></p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578">http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.ignou.ac.in/">http://www.ignou.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/">http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="http://nkn.in/">http://nkn.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.namami.org/">http://www.namami.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.dli.ernet.in/">http://www.dli.ernet.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/">http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.southasiaarchive.com/">http://www.southasiaarchive.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.aaa.org.hk/">http://www.aaa.org.hk/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunefeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities">https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities</a>.</p>
<p>Digital Humanities Quarterly, "About DHQ," 2010, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html</a></p>
<p>Gutting, Gary. "The Real Humanities Crisis," The New York Times, November 30, 2013, accessed July 14, 2015. <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/
">http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/</a>.</p>
<p>Institute for the Future of the Book, "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0," 2009, <a href="http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/">http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/</a></p>
<p>Jay, Paul, and Gerald Duff, "The Fear of Being Useful," Inside Higher Ed. January 5. 2012. Accessed September 22, 2015. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities">https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities</a>.</p>
<p>Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, "The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction," A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:05:29ZBlog EntryCIS Featured in 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report
<b>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.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Access the 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' report <a href="http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>an open and collaborative interdisciplinary culture</em> in which each team member contributes expertise and is respected for it; <em>global engagement</em>, which includes participating in multi-institutional research projects; an <em>entrepreneurial culture</em> in which experimentation is valued; and a <em>focus on teaching and learning</em> as well as research. We noted variation in the kind of <em>facilities</em> these organizations occupied; collaborative space seemed to be more important than top-notch hardware.</p>
<p>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 <em>a tradition of digital scholarship</em>, as more established organizations could both build on existing structures and could be limited by them; <em>funding</em>; the degree of <em>involvement of the institution’s library</em>; and variations in <em>academic career structures</em>, such as paths to promotion and the recognition of alternative academic careers.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital ScholarshipResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Humanities2015-10-16T07:43:18ZBlog EntryMaking in the Humanities – Some Questions and Conflicts
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-in-the-humanities-2013-some-questions-and-conflicts
<b>The following is an abstract for a proposed chapter on 'making' in the humanities, which has been accepted for publication in a volume titled 'Making Humanities Matter'. This is part of a new book series titled 'Debates in the Digital Humanities 2015' to be published by University of Minnesota Press (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/cfps/cfp_2015_mhm). The first draft of the chapter will be shared by mid-August 2015.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>The object of enquiry in the humanities has traditionally been defined in the form of text, audio-visual or other kinds of ‘objects’ or cultural artifacts. With the growth of information and communication technologies, and the advent of the digital, the emergence of a ‘digital object’, as ambiguous as the term may sound, in the last couple of decades, has led to a rethinking of the conventional notion of research objects as well as modes of questioning, with larger consequences for the production and dissemination of knowledge. The rise of fields like ‘humanities computing’, ‘digital humanities’ and ‘cultural analytics’, suggest a combining of two separate domains, or polarized binaries (such as old and new media), and point to the availability of new objects of study, and therefore the need for new methods to study them. A large part of the discourse around these objects however, in trying to read them closely, obfuscates the processes by which they are constituted, which are often as novel and innovative as the artifacts themselves.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This paper will attempt to explore the processes of ‘making’ of these digital objects in the context of several sites of recent humanities scholarship in India that mobilise digital techniques as key methods. These will include two online video archival initiatives (Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma), a digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore's literary works (Bichitra) developed at the University of Jadavpur, Kolkata, and curatorial work undertaken by the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru. Film, text and archival objects acquire several nuances as they are ‘made’ into digital objects, which are also reflected in the methods of working with and studying them. At the same time, problems of authorship, authenticity, accessibility, and a lack of adequate methods to study these objects are some challenges faced across disciplines. The objective of the study is to outline some of the questions related to form and methods that emerge with the digital object, and in the process undertake a critical reading of the politics of making in the humanities. What is the role of ‘making’ in the humanities? Where does humanities research using digital technologies intersect with art and creative practices? How is this research manifested in new forms or objects and methods, and to what effects on the humanities? The paper will aim to respond to some of these questions through a discussion of the initiatives mentioned above.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-in-the-humanities-2013-some-questions-and-conflicts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-in-the-humanities-2013-some-questions-and-conflicts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:46:32ZBlog EntryJanuary 2015 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2015-bulletin
<b>Our newsletter for the month of January can be accessed below.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the first issue of the newsletter (January 2015). Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters">http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Highlights </b></p>
<ul>
<li>Forbes India in an article titled “<a href="http://forbesindia.com/article/special/minds-that-%28should%29-matter/39289/2">Minds that (should) matter</a>” names Sunil Abraham as one of the Thinkers who best explain a rapidly-changing India to the world (and the world to India).</li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Subhashish Panigrahi <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/opensource-2015-award-winners">won the 2015 Opensource.com Community Awards</a> under the category 'People's Choice Awards'. </li>
<li> Sumandro Chattapadhyay <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/sumandro-chattapadhyay.pdf">has joined CIS team</a> as Research Director. Sumandro has replaces Nishant Shah who stepped down from the position. </li>
<li> Rishika on behalf of CIS <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/disability-exceptions-in-copyright-legislations"> prepared an analysis of the disability exceptions in Copyright Legislations </a> . The blog post provides in detail the country-wise exceptions in copyright legislations. </li>
<li> NVDA team <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-e-speak-malayalam-with-nvda">conducted a training programme</a> on Malayalam eSpeak with NVDA in Thiruvananthapuram on January 24 and 25, 2015. Chakshumathi's main trainer Akhil M. took eSpeak Malayalam classes and Dr. Homiyar took classes on NVDA and accessible equipment.</li>
<li>The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Government of India invited comments on the First Draft of India's National IPR Policy. CIS made its <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/national-ipr-policy-series-cis-comments-to-the-first-draft-of-the-national-ip-policy">submission</a>.</li>
<li>As part of the Pervasive Technologies project, Nehaa Chaudhari has produced a research methodology document <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/pervasive-technologies-project-working-document-series-document-2-literature-review-on-competition-law-ipr-access-to-100-mobile-devices-1"> which maps the existing literature around questions of competition law intersecting with intellectual property law on the specific issue of enabling access to sub hundred dollar mobile devices </a> .</li>
<li>Maggie Huang, an intern at CIS as part of the Pervasive Technologies project has written <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/beyond-alcohol-and-angel-investors">a blog entry</a> which documents, synthesizes, and analyses learnings from attending various music industry trade conferences.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>CIS-A2K team on December 28, 2014 <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikimedia-hackathon-2014">organized a MediaWiki hackathon event</a> for Telugu Wikimedia community members to enhance their skills and understanding of technical matters related to MediaWiki usage. The theme of the workshop was “Mediawiki, its extensions and tools to work around” and it aimed at allowing Wikipedians to use MediaWiki tools more effectively.</li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Subhashish Panigrahi authored an op-ed that highlights the need for taking Odia language to the international fora instead of keeping it confined in the books. The op-ed was <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/op-ed-samaja-jan-2015">published in the Samaja</a> on January 30, 2015. </li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> A <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose"> journal article </a> by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran the steps taken by scientists and librarians in the West to reclaim ease of access to research findings with what is happening in India along with a few suggestions was published by the Indian National Science Academy Journals. </li>
<li> The Supreme Court, in <i>Sabu George v. Union of India and Ors</i>. (WP (C) 341/2008), is looking into the presence of material regarding pre-natal sex determination on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo that has been falling foul of section 22 of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 as amended in 2002. Geeta Hariharan and Balaji Subramanian <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination">analyse this in their blog post</a>.</li>
<li>As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of 'bodies of knowledge' which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. Tejas Pande <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-visual-designer2">wrote an abstract which examines</a> the figure of the visual designer, and emerging practices of mapmaking. </li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility and Inclusion</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The publication has been finalised and is being printed. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/national-resource-kit-project">project page</a>. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>.</p>
<h3>NVDA and eSpeak</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Monthly Update</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/january-2015-nvda-report.pdf">January 2015 Report</a> (Suman Dogra; January 31, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Event Organized</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-e-speak-malayalam-with-nvda">Training of Malayalam eSpeak with NVDA</a> (Co-organized by CIS, DAISY Forum of India and Chakshumathi Assistive Technology Centre; Thiruvananthapuram; January 24-25, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Other</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Blog Entries</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/disability-exceptions-in-copyright-legislations"> Disability Exceptions in Copyright Legislations </a> (Rishika; January 12, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/response-to-rti-applications-from-different-states-on-accessibility"> Response to RTI Applications from Different States on Accessibility </a> (Anandhi Viswanathan; January 31, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Pervasive Technologies</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the Pervasive Technologies project, Maggie Huang conducted interviews with fabless semiconductor industry professionals in Taiwan. The findings from the samples are highlighted in four part series. The third and fourth parts have been published:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/pervasive-technologies-project-working-document-series-document-2-literature-review-on-competition-law-ipr-access-to-100-mobile-devices-1"> Pervasive Technologies Project Working Document Series: Document 2 Literature Review on Competition Law + IPR + Access to < $100 Mobile Devices </a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 1, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/relationship-between-app-developers-and-app-platforms-an-intellectual-property-perspective"> Relationship between App Developers and App Platforms: An Intellectual Property Perspective </a> (Anubha Sinha; January 7, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/beyond-alcohol-and-angel-investors"> Beyond Alcohol and Angel Investors: Building Business Models in an Age of Mobile Music Streaming (Conference Learnings) </a> (Maggie Huang; January 20, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-development-of-the-national-ipr-policy"> National IPR Policy Series: The Development of the National IPR Policy </a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 22, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/rti-responses-mhrd-ip-chairs-details-of-funding-and-expenditure"> RTI Responses - MHRD IP Chairs: Details of Funding & Expenditure </a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 31, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/national-ipr-policy-series-cis-comments-to-the-first-draft-of-the-national-ip-policy"> National IPR Policy Series: CIS Comments to the First Draft of the National IP Policy </a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; January 31, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/seventh-global-ip-convention">Global Intellectual Property Convention</a> (Organized by ITAG Solutions; Mumbai; January 15 - 17, 2015). Rohini Lakshané attended the event. </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/library-and-information-professionals-summit-2015"> Library and Information Professionals Summit (LIPS) 2015 </a> (Organized by Society for Library Professionals, National Law University Delhi with UN Information Centre for India & Bhutan and Special Library Association (USA), Asian Chapter; January 23 - 24, 2015; New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari was on a panel discussing Internet Technology and Challenges for Libraries in IPR Regime. She made a presentation on <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/news/library-and-information-professionals-summit-2015">Technology (Internet?), Libraries and the Law (?)</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Upcoming Event</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/announcing-the-institutional-partner-for-the-global-congress-on-intellectual-property-and-the-public-interest-2015"> Announcing the Institutional Partner for the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 2015 </a> (Organized by the National Law School of India University; New Delhi; December 2015). </li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Op-ed</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/op-ed-samaja-jan-2015"> ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଅନ୍ତର୍ଜାତୀୟ ପ୍ରକଳ୍ପ </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; The Samaja, January 31, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikimedia-hackathon-2014">Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014</a> (Rahmanuddin Shaik; January 31, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikimedia-hackathon-2014">Telugu Wikimedia Hackathon 2014</a> (Rahmanuddin Shaik; January 31, 2015). <i>The event was conducted on December 28, 2014. However, the blog post was published in January 2015</i>.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>News and Media Coverage</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hans-india-december-31-2014-works-of-veerasalingam-pantulu-on-web"> Works of Veerasalingam Pantulu on web </a> (Hans India; January 1, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/zee-news-january-9-2015-centre-should-partner-local-communities-in-digital-india"> Centre should partner local communities in 'Digital India': Expert </a> (IANS and mirrored in Zee News; January 9, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-times-of-india-january-20-2015-sandhya-soman-musician-donates-gwalior-gharana-songs-to-free-e-library"> Musician donates Gwalior Gharana songs to free e-library </a> (Times of India; January 20, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Announcement</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/opensource-2015-award-winners">2015 Opensource.com Community Awards</a> : Every year, Opensource.com awards people from our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about open source. Subhashish Panigrahi from the CIS-A2K team won the award under the category 'People's Choice Awards'. </li>
<li>CIS-A2K team also <a href="http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaTE.htm">published the Telugu Wikipedia Stats tables</a>. Most metrics have been collected from a partial dump (aka stub dump), which contains all revisions of every article, meta data, but no page content.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/citizen-media-summit-2015">Citizen Media Summit 2015</a> (Organized by Global Voices; January 24 - 25, 2015). Subhashish Panigrahi was a speaker. </li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Openness</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Journal Article</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/indian-national-academy-journals-december-2014-subbiah-arunachalam-perumal-ramamoorthi-subbiah-gunasekaran-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose"> Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigenc of STM Publishers </a> (Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi and Subbiah Gunasekaran; Indian National Science Academy Journals, <i>Proc Indian Natn SciAcad</i> 80 No. 5 December 2014 pp. 919-929). </li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Articles and Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/global-voices-december-30-2014-indians-plead-for-net-neutrality-as-aitel-raises-data-charges"> Indians Plead for #NetNeutrality as Airtel Raises Data Charges </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; December 30, 2014). <i>The article was published in the month of December but mirrored on CIS website in January</i>. </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/global-voices-january-6-2015-subhashish-panigrahi-indian-netizens-criticize-online-censorship-of-jihadi-content"> Indian Netizens Criticize Online Censorship of 'Jihadi' Content </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; January 6, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/security-and-surveillance-optimizing-security-while-safeguarding-human-rights"> Security and Surveillance - Optimizing Security while Safeguarding Human Rights </a> (Elonnai Hickok; January 19, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination"> Search Engine and Prenatal Sex Determination: Walking the Tight Rope of the Law </a> (Geetha Hariharan and Balaji Subramanian; January 29, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Co-organized</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/security-governments-data-technology-policy"> Security, Governments, and Data: Technology and Policy </a> (Organized by CIS and Observer Research Foundation; January 8, 2015, New Delhi). Sunil Abraham, Pranesh Prakash, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this event. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/symposium-on-human-rights-and-internet-in-india"> Symposium on Human Rights and the Internet in India </a> (Organized by the Center for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information at the University of Hamburg; New Delhi; January 17, 2015). Bhairav Acharya was a panelist. </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/winter-school-on-privacy-surveillance-data-protection"> Winter School on Privacy, Surveillance and Data Protection </a> (Organized by the Centre for Communication Governance (CCG) in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information at the University of Hamburg and the Hans Bredow; Delhi; January 19 - 23, 2015). Bhairav Acharya was a facilitator.</li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/assocham-national-council-on-it-ites">ASSOCHAM National Council on IT / ITes</a> (Organized by ASSOCHAM; New Delhi; January 30, 2015). Geetha Hariharan participated in the event. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/overview-constitutional-challenges-on-itact"> Overview of the Constitutional Challenges to the IT Act </a> (Pranesh Prakash; December 15, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/reply-to-rti-filed-with-bsnl-regarding-network-neutrality-and-throttling"> Reply to RTI filed with BSNL regarding Network Neutrality and Throttling </a> (Tarun Krishnakumar; December 22, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://cis-india.org/news">News & Media Coverage</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-jan-1-2015-kim-arora-government-blocks-32-websites-to-check-isis-propaganda"> Government blocks 32 websites to check ISIS propaganda </a> (Kim Arora; The Times of India; January 1, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/mumbai-mirror-jaison-lewis-jan-1-2015-internet-users-fume-as-govt-blocks-32-sites"> Internet users fume as govt blocks 32 sites </a> (Jaison Lewis; Mumbai Mirror; January 1, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bbc-january-2-2015-india-jihadi-web-blocking-causes-anger"> India 'jihadi' web blocking causes anger </a> (BBC; January 2, 2015). This was also mirrored in <a href="http://thepuffington.com/anger-at-india-website-blocking/">Puffington Post</a>. </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-today-january-1-2015-govt-cracks-down-on-cyber-jehad-network-blocks-access-to-32-websites"> Govt cracks down on cyber jehad network, blocks access to 32 websites </a> (India Today, January 1, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-assam-january-2-2015-indian-govt-still-blocks-websites-india-censorship-on-internet"> Indian Government still blocks 20+ websites - Indian Censorship on Internet </a> (Times of Assam; January 2, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-january-20-2015-devanik-saha-indiaspend-350-per-cent-surge-in-cyber-crimes-in-last-3-years"> 350% surge in Cyber crimes in last 3 years </a> (Devanik Saha & Indiaspend.org; Hindustan Times; January 20, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-january-31-2015-toi-literary-kicks-off-today"> TOI literary festival kicks off today </a> (The Times of India; January 31, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities">Digital Humanities</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Staff Movement</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Sumandro Chattapadhyay has joined CIS as Research Director. His academic interests span over topics of history and politics of informatics in India, new media and technology studies, and data infrastructures and economies. He is also keenly interested in questions and techniques of digital humanities. Recently, Sumandro has completed a study on <a href="http://ajantriks.github.io/oddc/">policy and practices of open data in India</a> as part of the Open Data Research Network managed by the World Wide Web Foundation. He is an involved member of DataMeet, a leading community of open data and data science enthusiasts from India. Sumandro studied economics in Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan, and in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has variously worked on topics of urban development, information technology in governance, data visualisation, and early electronic governance in India with <a href="http://www.mod.org.in/">MOD Institute</a>, <a href="http://www.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/SitePages/index.aspx">Azim Premji University</a> and the <a href="http://sarai.net/">Sarai Programme</a> at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Blog Entry</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-visual-designer2">Figures of Learning: The Visual Designer</a> (Tejas Pande; January 30, 2015). </li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Twitter:<a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K"> </a><a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K">https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a> </li>
<li> Facebook group: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k">https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a> </li>
<li> Visit us at:<a href="https://cis-india.org/"> </a> <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge</a> </li>
<li> E-mail: <a href="mailto:a2k@cis-india.org">a2k@cis-india.org</a> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Support Us</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Request for Collaboration:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at <a href="mailto:vishnu@cis-india.org">vishnu@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i> CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects. </i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2015-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2015-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeWikipediaAccessibilityInternet GovernanceDigital HumanitiesNVDAOpennessResearchers at Work2015-02-26T17:02:23ZPageMapping Digital Humanities in India - Concluding Thoughts
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts
<b>This final blog post on the mapping exercise undertaken by CIS-RAW summarises some of the key concepts and terms that have emerged as significant in the discourse around Digital Humanities in India. </b>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The present exercise in mapping Digital Humanities (henceforth DH) in India has brought to the fore several learnings, and challenges 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. Even as we wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the 'field' as such is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world and the term itself is yet to find a resonance in many quarters, other than a few institutions and a number of individuals. However, what it does do for us immediately, is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the 'digital', and what may be the new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 name of sorts, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The ubiquitous history of the term in 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. 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 even cyber/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, areas of focus or object of enquiry, 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. 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The question of methodology then comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. At present it looks like 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 now longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH. The practice itself is still evolving, and while DH in the Anglo-American context can trace a history in humanities computing, with now an active interest in other spaces where the digital is an inherent part of the discourse, in India there has been little work in mainstream academic spaces such as universities or research centres, and some interest from the information and technology sector. 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. This mapping exercise largely relied on interviews as part of its methodology, without any engagement with the actual practice, mainly because of a lack of consensus on what constitutes DH practice. However, 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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. 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 the discourse around 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. 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While in the Anglo-American context the predominant narrative or <em>raison d'etre</em> of DH seems to be the so-called 'crisis' in the humanities, it may after all be just one of reasons, and not a primary cause, at least in the Indian context. Moreover, in a paradoxical sense the emergence of DH has been seen as endangering the future of the traditional humanities, in terms of a move away from certain conventional methods and forms of research and pedagogy. While this may be relevant to our understanding of the emergence of DH, understanding the emergence of the field as resolving a crisis also renders the discourse into a uni-dimensional, problem-solving approach, thus making invisible other factors, such as the technologised history of the humanities or several other factors that have contributed to these changes. 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 the internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what where earlier considered unifying notions for the university, namely that of reason and culture, which have now moved towards an idea of excellence based on a certain techno-bureaucratic impulse, as noted by Bill Readings in his work on the rise of the post-modern university<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If one may try to locate within this the debates around 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 or the distance between the practice and the subject, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, with English Department at the University of Jadavpur 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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. As Patrik Svensson (2010) points out "The individual term digital humanist may be problematic because it may seem both too general in not relating to a specific discipline or competence (thus deemphasizing the discipline-specific or professional) and too specific in emphasizing the "digital" part of the scholarly identity (if you are scholar) or giving too much prominence to the humanities part of your professional identity (if you are a digital humanities programmer or a system architect). The more general and non-personal term digital humanities is more inclusive, but somewhat limited because of its lack of specificity and relatively weak disciplinary anchorage. For both variants, there is also a question of whether "the digital" needs to be specified at all, and it is not uncommon <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html#N10309">[9]</a> to encounter the argument that technology and the digital are part or will be part of any academic area, and hence the denotation "digital" is not required" <a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a>. Svensson further points out that since the term, like digital humanities, has proliferated so much in academic spaces, through publishing and funding initiatives that it has become a term of self-identification, but it could be a reference to the digital as 'tool' rather that the object of study itself. However, he also speculates that given digital humanists work across several disciplines, their understanding of humanities as a construct is stronger as the identity is linked to it at large. <a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This debate is importantly, symptomatic of a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, because of what seems to be a move away from the university to alternate spaces and modes of knowledge production. As Immanuel Wallerstein (1996) suggests, such a conflict of authority has already been documented earlier, in terms of the displacement of theology first and then Newtonian mechanics as dominant sources of knowledge, and the now in the manner in which the separation of disciplines is being challenged. The potential of technology in general and the internet in particular in democratising knowledge has been explored in several cases, with many such online spaces now becoming a suitable 'alternate' to the university mode of teaching and learning. What they have also given rise to are questions about the authenticity of knowledge produced and disseminated and who are the stakeholders in the process. The debates over MOOC's and the Wikipedia, and at some level the criticism that DH and certain methods like distant reading have attracted from traditional humanities scholars are a case in point. However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. 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.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>References</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Patrik, Svensson, "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>,4:1 <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a> 2010.</li>
<li>Readings, Bill, <em>The University in Ruins</em> Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.</li>
<li>Wallerstein, Immanuel, "The Structures of Knowledge, or How Many Ways May We Know?" Presentation at "Which Sciences for Tomorrow? Dialogue on the Gulbenkian Report: <em>Open the Social Sciences</em>," Stanford University, June 2-3, 1996 http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm </li></ol>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em> The author would like to thank the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore for support towards the fieldwork conducted as part of this mapping exercise, and colleagues at CIS and CSCS for their feedback and inputs<strong>. </strong> </em></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Concepts/Glossary of terms </strong></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;"> Ontology - A lot of the work being done to define DH is in fact to understand its ontological status, the nature of its being and existence. As pointed out in the part of this section, the difficulty in arriving at a consensus on a definition is largely due to a lack of clarity over the ontological basis of such a field, rather than its epistemological stake, which one may already be able to discern in a few years. There is a slippage due to a lack of connection between the history of the term and its practice, particularly in India, where DH is still a 'found term' of sorts. See <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities"> http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Humanities - The predominant discourse in the Anglo-American context on DH seems to have set it up in a conflict with or as a threat to the traditional humanities disciplines, the causal link here being the 'crisis' of the disciplines. While there is such a narrative of crisis in the Indian con text as well, anything 'digital' is understood in terms of a problem-solving approach, and at another level seeks to further existing concerns of the humanities themselves, such as around the text. The important shift that DH may open up here is in terms of thinking about the inherited separation of technology and the humanities, and if it indeed possible now to think of a technologised history of the humanities.See <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities"> http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Digital - the debate around and interest in DH has reinforced the need for a larger and more elaborate exploration of the 'digital' itself, and as mentioned in an earlier post, deciphering the nuances of the current state of digitality we inhabit will be key to understanding the field of DH much better. This is challenging because India is a mutli-layered technological landscape, which is also quite dynamic, ever-changing and in a period of transition to the digital. Taking this back to more fundamental questions of technology and its relation to the subject would also provide more insights into DH.See <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition"> http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Subject - DH is a manifestation of the relationship between technology and the human subject, and provides different ways to negotiate the same. The 'digital humanist' as the likely subject of this discourse has remained largely undefined in this series of explorations, partly because of the lack of resonance with the term among humanities scholars and the fact that everybody at some level is already a digital subject, and therefore a digital humanist. An exploration of how the digital constitutes or constructs a subject position is likely to reveal better the nuances of this term and the reason for its relation to or distance from the practice.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Method - the methodology of a discipline is the connection between theory and field of practice, and the method of DH is still being developed. Whether it is data mining, distant reading, cultural informatics, sentiment analysis or creative visualisations of data sets drawing from aspects of media, art and design, the methodology and interests of DH are necessarily diverse and interdisciplinary. In many a case the distinction among methods, content and forms do blur as newer modes or approaches to DH come into being. This becomes a particular problem in understanding DH in the context of pedagogy and curricular resources, and would therefore require a rethinking of the understanding of a singular methodology itself.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Archive - A large part of the DH work in India seems to be focussed around the archive - both as a concept and practice. With the digital becoming in a sense the default mode of documentation across the humanities disciplines, and the opening up of the archive due to more public and digital archival efforts, the concept of the archive and archival practice have undergone several changes in terms of becoming now more networked and accessible. As mentioned earlier, we are living in an archival moment where there is a transition from analogue to digital, and it is in this moment of transition that a lot of new questions around data and knowledge will emerge. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Text - the text has been one of significant aspects of the DH debate, given that the academic discourse on DH in the West and now in India is primarily located in English departments. The understanding of the text as object, method and practice as mediated through digital spaces and tools is an important part of the discourse around DH, and has implications for how we understand changes in the nature of the text, and reading and writing as technologised processes in the digital context. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Process: An important point of emphasis in DH has been that of process, perhaps even more than content or outcomes. Given that the method of DH is collaborative and peer-to-peer, the processes of doing, making or teaching-learning etc become increasingly visible and important to understanding the nature of the field and knowledge production itself. More importantly, it also seeks to bring in the practitioner's experience into the realm of research and pedagogy.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Liminal : DH is a good example of a liminal space; which is a space that is on both sides of a threshold or boundary, and is therefore at some level undefined and transitional. The liminal space is often located at the margin of a body of knowledge or discipline, and it is at the margins of disciplines that new knowledge is produced. The discourse and even criticism around DH highlights the difficulties with defining the present nebulous nature of these liminal spaces and what they could transform into in the future. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Interdisciplinarity - Closely tied to the notion of liminal spaces is the notion of interdisciplinarity. DH by nature is interdisciplinary, given that it draws upon methods and concerns from the other disciplines, but instead of limiting the definition to just this, it also provides a space to understand the challenges of negotiating and using an interdisciplinary approach to the humanities and other disciplines and develop these questions further. See http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy. </li></ol>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="100%" />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> See Bill Readings, <em>The University in Ruins</em> Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, pp 1-20.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> See Patrik Svensson. "The Landscape of Digital Humanities". <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>,4:1 <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> <em> Ibid.</em></p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:36:10ZBlog EntryNovember 2014 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/november-2014-bulletin
<b>We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcome you to the eleventh issue of the newsletter (November 2014). </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters"></a> </small> <small> </small></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><small> Highlights </small><small></small></h2>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><small>On 13 November, 2014, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion had released a Call for Suggestions for India's proposed National IPR Policy. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-on-proposed-ip-rights-policy-to-dipp">CIS sent its comments</a>.</small></li>
<li><small>As part of the Pervasive Technologies we published four methodology documents: Rohini Lakshané wrote on <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/patent-landscaping-in-the-indian-mobile-device-market"> Patent Landscaping for the Indian Mobile Device market </a> ; Anubha Sinha wrote on <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/methodology-intellectual-property-in-mobile-application-development-in-india"> Intellectual Property in Mobile Application Development in India </a> ; Maggie Huang wrote on <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/methodology-access-to-music-through-mobile">Access to Music through the Mobile</a>; and Nehaa Chaudhari wrote on <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/methodology-sub-hundred-dollar-mobile-devices-and-competition-law"> Sub Hundred Dollar Mobile Devices and Competition Law </a> .</small></li>
<li><small>Odisha's <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/nineteen-books-by-ama-odisha-relicensed">most circulated newspaper Sambad has collaborated</a> with CIS-A2K to relicense 19 books published by its sister concern "Ama Odisha".</small></li>
<li><small>Vipul Kharbanda in a blog entry <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2"> examines the relationship between privacy and transparency in the context of the right to information in India </a> .</small></li>
<li><small>Geetha Hariharan in a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/good-intentions-recalcitrant-text-2013-ii-what-india2019s-itu-proposal-may-mean-for-internet-governance"> blog entry </a> explores what India's ITU proposal means for Internet Governance.</small></li>
<li><small>Pranesh Prakash wrote an <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-november-18-2014-pranesh-prakash-the-socratic-debate-whos-internet-is-it-anyway"> article in the Economic Times </a> exploring net neutrality.</small></li>
<li><small>In her <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">final blog post on the mapping exercise</a> undertaken by CIS-RAW, P.P.Sneha summarises some of the key concepts and terms that emerged as significant in the discourse around Digital Humanities in India. </small> </li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►Job </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-institutional-partnership">Programme Officer</a> (Access to Knowledge - Institutional Partnerships): CIS is seeking applications for the post of Programme Officer for its Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme. The position will be based in its Bangalore office. Programme Officer will collaboratively work with the A2K Team and would report to the Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS. </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility and Inclusion</a> </small></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small>Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The publication has been finalised and is currently in the process of being printed. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/national-resource-kit-project">project page</a>. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>. </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►NVDA and eSpeak </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Monthly Update </b></small><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/november-e-speak-nvda-2014-report.pdf">November 2014 Report</a> (Suman Dogra; November 30, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Upcoming Event </b></small><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/events/training-in-e-speak-malayalam">Training in Use of eSpeak with Malayalam</a> (co-organized by CIS, DAISY Forum of India and Chakshumathi Assistive Technology Centre; Trivandrum; January 24 - 25, 2015, Trivandrum). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►Other </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Blog Entry </b></small><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/central-guidelines-and-schemes">Central Guidelines and Schemes</a> (Anandhi Viswanathan; November 6, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a> <br /> </small></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small>As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects. </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> <small> Submission </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-on-proposed-ip-rights-policy-to-dipp"> Comments on the Proposed Intellectual Property Rights Policy to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion </a> (Pranesh Prakash, Nehaa Chaudhari, Anubha Sinha and Amulya P.; November 30, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Blog Entries </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mhrd-ipr-chairs-underutilization-of-funds-and-lack-of-information-regarding-expenditures"> MHRD IPR Chairs - Underutilization of Funds and Lack of Information Regarding Expenditures </a> (Amulya Purushothama, November 19, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> <small> Participation in Events </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/news/center-for-global-communication-studies-november-6-2014-ubiquity-mobility-globality-charting-directions-in-mobile-phone-studies"> Ubiquity, Mobility, Globality: Charting Directions in Mobile Phone Studies </a> (Organized by Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; November 6 - 7, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari made a presentation on Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace. </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/countering-us-pressure-on-indias-ip-regime">Countering US pressures on India's IP regime</a> (Organized by Lawyer's Collective; November 16, 2014). Anubha Sinha attended the event. </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/technology-gender-based-violence">Technology and Gender Based Violence</a> (Organized by the Bachchao Project; November 24, 2014). Rohini Lakshané was a speaker at the event. She spoke about various strategies that women use to respond to online harassment, such as reporting the abuser, and enlisting support from online followers, or friends or family in order to deal with the abuser. </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►Pervasive Technology </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Blog Entries </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/patent-landscaping-in-the-indian-mobile-device-market">Methodology: Patent Landscaping</a> (Rohini Lakshané; November 10, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/methodology-intellectual-property-in-mobile-application-development-in-india"> Methodology: Intellectual Property in Mobile Application Development in India </a> (Anubha Sinha; November 17, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/methodology-access-to-music-through-mobile">Methodology: Access to Music through the Mobile</a> (Maggie Huang; November 18, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/methodology-sub-hundred-dollar-mobile-devices-and-competition-law"> Methodology: Sub Hundred Dollar Mobile Devices and Competition Law </a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; November 25, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►Wikipedia </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English). </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small>Op-Ed </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/the-samaja-november-17-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-odia-wikisource-its-potential"> Odia Wikisource, its Potential </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi, The Samaja, November 17, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small><b>Blog Entries </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/55-works-of-iconic-indian-writer-released-under-free-licence-to-benefit-wikisource"> 55 Works of Iconic Indian writer released under Free Licence to benefit Wikisource </a> (T. Vishnu Vardhan, November 13, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/odia-author-nirmala-kumari-mohapatra-21-books-under-cc"> Odia author Nirmala Kumari Mohapatra's 21 books relicensed under CC-by-SA 4.0 </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi, November 17, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/nineteen-books-by-ama-odisha-relicensed"> Nineteen Books Published by Ama Odisha Relicensed under CC-by-SA 4.0 </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi, November 25, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small>News and Media Coverage </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage: </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/just-kannada-november-23-2014-kannada-wikipedia-presentation-coverage"> ಭಾಷಣದಿಂದ ಭಾಷೆ ಉಳಿಯಲ್ಲ, ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲೇ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಸಿಗುವುದು ಅಗತ್ಯ: ಪವನಜ </a> (Just Kannada; November 23, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/prajavani-november-24-2014-kannada-wikipedia-presentation-in-mysuru"> Kannada Wikipedia Presentation in Mysuru </a> (Prajavani; November 24, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-november-24-2014-govind-d-belgaumkar-now-tulu-set-to-be-promoted-through-wikipedia-articles"> Now, Tulu set to be promoted through Wikipedia articles </a> (Hindu; November 24, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-november-26-2014-ravi-prasad-kamila-tulu-wikipedia-in-incubation-stage"> 'Tulu Wikipedia' in incubation stage, 600 articles uploaded, says U.B. Pavanaja </a> (Ravi Prasad Kamila; Hindu; November 26, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/odisha-sun-times-november-28-2014-odia-wikisource-launched-in-odisha-capital"> Odia Wikisource launched in Odisha capital </a> (Odisha Sun Times; November 28, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/orissa-diary-november-28-2014-odia-wikisource-aims-to-bring-valuable-and-rare-books-on-the-internet"> Odia Wikisource aims to bring valuable and rare books on the Internet </a> (Odisha Diary; November 28, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Event Co-organized </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/odia-wikisource-sabha-2014">Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014</a> (Co-organized by CIS-A2K and Odia Wikimedia Community; November 28, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event. </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Participation in Event </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/seminar-e-publishing-odia-books">A Seminar on E-publishing of Odia Books</a> (Organized by Molybtech Technology Solutions; November 30, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi was a speaker. </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►<b>Openness </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> <small> Blog Entry </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/privacy-v-transparency">Privacy vs. Transparency: An Attempt at Resolving the Dichotomy</a> (Sunil Abraham <i>with feedback and inputs from Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Elonnai Hickok, Bhairav Acharya and Geetha Hariharan</i>; November 14, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>News and Media Coverage </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/open-up-tim-davies-november-3-2014-getting-strategic-about-openness-and-privacy"> Getting Strategic about Openness and Privacy </a> (Tim Davies; Open Data Research Lead at Web Foundation; November 3, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> <small> Participation in Event </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/crypto-currencies">Content co-ordination for the Panel Discussion on Crypto-Currencies</a> (organized by the Law and Technology Society; November 15, 2014). Sharath Chandra Ram was a panelist and made a presentation Scalability and Security Issues in Distributed Trust based Cryto-Currency Systems like BITCOIN </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a> </small></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►Privacy </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> As part of our Surveillance and Freedom: Global Understandings and Rights Development (SAFEGUARD) project with Privacy International we are engaged in enhancing respect for the right to privacy in developing countries. During the month we published the following blog entries: </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small>Blog Entries </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2">White Paper on RTI and Privacy V1.2</a> (Vipul Kharbanda; November 9, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/introduction-about-the-privacy-and-surveillance-roundtables"> Introduction: About the Privacy and Surveillance Roundtables </a> (Manoj Kurbet; November 27, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Event Organized </b></small><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/iocose-talk-at-cis">IOCOSE's talk at CIS</a> (CIS, Bangalore; November 27, 2014). There was a presentation of the work of the artists group IOCOSE, current artists in residence at T.A.J./SKE Residency. </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Upcoming Event </b></small><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cpdp-2015">CPDP 2015</a> : The eighth international conference on computers, privacy and data protection will be held in Brussels from January 21 to 23, 2015. CIS is a moral supporter of CPDP. </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Participation in Events </b></small><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hague-institute-for-global-justice-november-4-2014-e-consultation-on-cyber-security-justice-and-governance-begins"><b> </b>E-Consultation on Cyber Security, Justice, and Governance Begins! </a> (Organized by the Hague Institute for Global Justice; November 4, 2014). Sunil Abraham facilitated the e-consultation on "Internet access, the freedom of expression online, and development in the Global South". </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/learning-forum-transparency-and-human-rights-in-the-digital-age"> Learning Forum: Transparency and Human Rights in the Digital Age </a> (Organized by Global Network Initiative; November 6, 2014). Pranesh Prakash gave a talk on transparency reports and their use and abuse in India; the Intermediary Liability Rules in India (and its non-provision of any transparency mechanism); and the need for transparency in private speech regulation, not just governmental speech regulation. </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/fourth-discussion-meeting-of-expert-committee-to-discuss-draft-human-dna-profiling-bill"> Fourth Discussion Meeting of the Expert Committee to Discuss the Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill </a> (Organized by the Department of Biotechnology; New Delhi; November 10, 2014). Sunil Abraham was unable to participate because of technical problems. </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ground-zero-summit-2014">Ground Zero Summit 2014</a> (Organized by India Infosec Consortium; November 13-14, 2014). Geetha Hariharan participated in this event. </small> </li>
<li><small><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/wilton-park-november-17-19-privacy-security-surveillance">Privacy, security and surveillance: tackling international dilemmas and dangers in the digital realm</a> </small><small>(Organized by Wilton Park; November 17-19, 2014). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist in the session "Beyond the familiar: how do other countries deal with security and surveillance oversight?" </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ►Free Speech </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> Under a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, CIS is doing research on the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government and contribute studies, reports and policy briefs to feed into the ongoing debates at the national as well as international level. As part of the project we bring you the following outputs: </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small><b>Blog Entries </b></small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/good-intentions-recalcitrant-text-2013-ii-what-india2019s-itu-proposal-may-mean-for-internet-governance"> Good Intentions, Recalcitrant Text - II: What India's ITU Proposal May Mean for Internet Governance </a> (Geetha Hariharan; November 1, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indias-statement-at-itu-plenipotentiary-conference-2014"> India's Statement at ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, 2014 </a> (Geetha Hariharan; November 4, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <b>Newspaper Article </b></small><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-november-18-2014-pranesh-prakash-the-socratic-debate-whos-internet-is-it-anyway"><b> </b>The Socratic debate: Whose internet is it anyway? </a> (Pranesh Prakash; Economic Times; November 18, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/news">News & Media Coverage</a> <br />CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage: </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-economic-times-vasudha-venugopal-november-2-2014-twitter-users-find-several-accounts-suspended-for-unknown-reasons"> Twitter users find several accounts suspended for unknown reasons </a> (Vasudha Venugopal; Economic Times; November 2, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/digit-november-3-2014-silky-malhotra-several-indian-twitter-users-accounts-suspended-due-to-tech-glitch"> Several Indian Twitter users' accounts suspended due to tech glitch </a> (Silky Malhotra; digit; November 3, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/mumbai-mirror-november-19-2014-jaison-lewis-game-release-cancelled-over-gay-character"> Game release cancelled over gay character </a> (Jaison Lewis; Mumbai Mirror; November 19, 2014). </small> </li>
<li> <small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/businessworld-november-25-2014-leave-the-net-alone">Leave the Net Alone</a> (Businessworld; November 25, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities">Digital Humanities</a> <br /> </small></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small>CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia: </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small>Blog Entry </small> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><small> </small></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><small><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts"><b> </b>Mapping Digital Humanities in India - Concluding Thoughts </a> (P.P.Sneha; November 30, 2014). </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><small> <a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a> </small></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small>The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities. </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ► Follow us elsewhere </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <small> Twitter:<a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K"> </a><a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K">https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a> </small> </li>
<li> <small> Facebook group: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k">https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a> </small> </li>
<li> <small> Visit us at:<a href="https://cis-india.org/"> </a> <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge</a> </small> </li>
<li> <small> E-mail: <a href="mailto:a2k@cis-india.org">a2k@cis-india.org</a> </small> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ► Support Us </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71. </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> ► Request for Collaboration: </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at<a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> or Nishant Shah, Director - Research, at <a href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a>. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at <a href="mailto:vishnu@cis-india.org">vishnu@cis-india.org</a>. </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> </small></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><small> <i> CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects. </i> </small></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/november-2014-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/november-2014-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaInternet GovernanceAccessibilityAccess to KnowledgeDigital Humanities2014-12-15T13:27:04ZPageOctober 2014 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2014-bulletin
<b>Welcome to the tenth issue of the newsletter (October 2014).</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcome you to the tenth issue of the newsletter (October 2014). Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters">http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters</a></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Highlights</h2>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> CIS sent its <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/comments-to-rights-of-persons-with-disablities-bill-2014">comments and recommendations</a> on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014. It was submitted to the Parliamentary Standing Committee in October 2014. </li>
<li> CIS has published the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/central-guidelines-and-schemes">Central Guidelines and Schemes</a>. </li>
<li> CIS was one of the signatories of a <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-to-prime-minister-on-indo-us-bilateral-relations-on-intellectual-property">letter</a> sent to the Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi sharing its concerns on India's position on intellectual property, particularly in the context of bilateral relations between the United States of America and India. The letter was sent on October 22, 2014. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>In 2013, the Indian Patent Office released Draft Guidelines for the Examination of Computer Related Inventions, in an effort to clarify some of the ambiguity. Shashank Singh <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guidelines-for-examination-of-computer-related-inventions">analyses</a> the various responses by the stakeholders to these Guidelines and highlights the various issues put forth in the responses.</li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Subhashish Panigrahi wrote an op-ed in <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/subhashish-panigrahi-october-13-2014-editorial-in-samaja">the Samaja</a> (Odia daily) on the hurdles that the Odia language has been facing and the potential aspects of the language including it being used massively on the Internet, Wikipedia and other media platforms. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>International Telecommunications Union is hosting its Plenipotentiary Conference this year in South Korea. India introduced a new draft resolution on ITU's Role in Realising Secure Information Society. The Draft Resolution has grave implications for human rights and Internet governance. Geetha Hariharan <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/good-intentions-going-awry-i-why-india2019s-proposal-at-the-itu-is-troubling-for-internet-freedoms"> analyses </a> this.</li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Vipul Kharbanda <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dna-database-for-missing-persons-and-unidentified-dead-bodies">analyses</a> the possible implications of the public interest litigation that has been placed before the Supreme Court petitioning for the establishment of a DNA database in respect to unidentified bodies in his latest blog entry. </li>
<li> In a blog post published in Lila Interactions P.P.Sneha <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access">explores</a> the possibilities of redefining the idea of access through the channels of education and learning. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Job</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-institutional-partnership">Programme Officer</a> (Access to Knowledge - Institutional Partnerships): CIS is seeking applications for the post of Programme Officer for its Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme. The position will be based in its Bangalore office. Programme Officer will collaboratively work with the A2K Team and would report to the Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS. </li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility and Inclusion</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The updated draft is being reviewed by the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/national-resource-kit-project">project page</a>. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►NVDA and eSpeak</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Monthly Update</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/october-2014-nvda-report.pdf">October 2014 Report</a> (Suman Dogra; October 31, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Other</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submission</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/comments-to-rights-of-persons-with-disablities-bill-2014"><b> </b>Comments to the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill </a> , 2014 (Nirmita Narasimhan and Anandhi Viswanathan; October 30, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/central-guidelines-and-schemes">Central Guidelines and Schemes</a> (Anandhi Viswanathan, October 14, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/the-legal-framework-for-enforcement-of-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities"> The Legal Framework for Enforcement of Rights of Persons with Disabilities </a> (CLPR; October 14, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Media Coverage</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/news/the-hill-john-d-kemp-and-brandon-m-macsata-october-13-2014-communication-technology-opens-doors-for-everyone-not-only-people-with-disabilities"> Communication technology opens 'doors' for everyone, not only people with disabilities </a> (John D. Kemp and Brandon M. Macsata, The Hill, October 13, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/letter-to-prime-minister-on-indo-us-bilateral-relations-on-intellectual-property"><b> </b>Letter to the Prime Minister on Indo-US Bilateral Relations on Intellectual Property </a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; October 22, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/guidelines-for-examination-of-computer-related-inventions"> Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions: Mapping the Stakeholders' Response </a> (Shashank Singh; October 29, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Wikipedia</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/subhashish-panigrahi-october-13-2014-editorial-in-samaja"><b> </b>ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ବିକାଶରେ ପ୍ରତିବନ୍ଧକ ଓ ସମ୍ଭାବନା </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi, Samaja; October 13, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/bharat-majhi-writings-now-available-under-cc-license"> Bharat Majhi Writings Now Available Under a Creative Commons License </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 14, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/global-voices-subhashish-panigrahi-october-18-2014-more-than-400-million-people-await-launch-of-odia-wikisource"> More Than 40 Million People Await the Launch of Odia Wikisource </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi, Global Voices and Wikimedia Blog; October 21, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/ramakrushna-nanda-four-books-under-cc-license"> Odia Littérateur Ramakrushna Nanda's 4 Books Now Available Under a Creative Commons License </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 22, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/open-source-subhashish-panigrahi-october-22-2014-open-access-platform-to-save-the-odia-indian-language"> Open Access Platform to Save the Odia Indian Language </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi, Opensource.com; October 22, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/odia-wikisource-goes-live">Odia Wikisource Goes Live!</a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 26, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/samskrita-vaibhavam">Samskrita Vaibhavam</a> (Sanskrit Wiki Outreach Program) (Shubha and Sayant Mahato; October 30, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/tulu-wikipedia-workshop-cum-editathon-at-udupi">Tulu Wikipedia Workshop cum Editathon at Udupi</a> (Dr. U.B.Pavanaja, October 31, 2014). The event was covered by <a href="http://v4news.com/enliven-the-tulu-viki-fidia-first-and-then-add-tulu-to-the-8th-schedule-dr-ug-pavanaja-bangalore-rep-in-udupi/"> V4News.com </a> and <a href="http://www.mangaloretoday.com/newsbriefs/2-Day-Workshop-on-Tulu-in-internet.html">Mangalore Today</a>. </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/converting-from-non-unicode-nudi-baraha-font-encoding-to-unicode-kannada"> Converting from nonUnicode (Nudi, Baraha, ...) font encoding to Unicode Kannada </a> (Dr. U.B.Pavanaja; October 31, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Events Co-organized</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/sangeet-baithak">Sangeet Baithak: A Hindustani Music Resource Donation Event in Mumbai</a> (Organized by CIS-A2K and Khayal Trust; Shivaji Park, Dadar, Mumbai; October 7, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/india-women-in-science-wiki-edit-a-thon">Indian Women in Science Wiki edit-a-thon</a> (Organized by IndoBioScience and CIS-A2K; Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; October 11, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/ada-lovelace-edit-a-thon-2014">Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014</a> (Organized by IndoBioScience and CIS-A2K; Urban Solace; October 14, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">News and Media Coverage</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://v4news.com/enliven-the-tulu-viki-fidia-first-and-then-add-tulu-to-the-8th-schedule-dr-ug-pavanaja-bangalore-rep-in-udupi/"> Enliven the Tulu Viki Fidia first and then add Tulu to the 8th Schedule : Dr.UG Pavanaja, Bangalore Rep. in Udupi </a> (V4News.com; October 15, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/mangalore-today-october-17-2014-wikipedia-can-establish-tulu-in-a-wider-way"> Wikipedia can establish Tulu in a wider way </a> (Mangalore Today; October 17, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-renuka-phadnis-october-19-2014-wikipedia-editathon-attempts-to-raise-awareness-of-the-contribution-of-indian-women-to-science"> Pushing women scientists </a> (Renuka Phadnis; Hindu; October 19, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/karnataka-muslims-nisar-ahmed-syed-october-22-2014-wiki-media-foundation-keen-on-developing-urdu-wikipedia"> Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia </a> (Nisar Ahmed Syed; October 22, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/siasat-daily-october-24-2014-wiki-media-foundation-keen-on-developing-urdu-wikipedia"> Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia </a> (Siasat Daily; October 24, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/barcamp-bangalore">Barcamp Bangalore</a> (Organized by SAP Labs; Bangalore; October 12, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja and Rahmanuddin Shaik took part in the event. </li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Privacy</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of our Surveillance and Freedom: Global Understandings and Rights Development (SAFEGUARD) project with Privacy International we are engaged in enhancing respect for the right to privacy in developing countries. We have produced the following outputs during the month although these may not be part of the SAFEGUARD project:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/gujarat-high-court-judgment-on-snoopgate-issue"><b> </b>The Gujarat High Court Judgment on the Snoopgate Issue </a> (Vipul Kharbanda; October 27, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dna-database-for-missing-persons-and-unidentified-dead-bodies"> DNA Database for Missing Persons and Unidentified Dead Bodies </a> (Vipul Kharbanda; October 31, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Upcoming Event</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cpdp-2015">CPDP 2015</a> : The eighth international conference on computers, privacy and data protection will be held in Brussels from January 21 to 23, 2015. CIS is a moral supporter of CPDP. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/training-for-internet-governance-activists"><b> </b>Training for Internet Governance Activists </a> (Organized by Global Partners Digital, UK; Cambridge; September 23 - 24, 2014). Geetha Hariharan attended the event. <i>The event was held in September and the details published in October</i>. </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-conference-cyber-security-and-cyber-governance"> The India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance </a> (Organized by FICCI and CYFY; October 15 - 17, 2014; New Delhi). CIS was a knowledge partner. Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session "Privacy is Dead". </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/expert-consultation-on-cyber-security-justice-and-governance"> Expert Consultation on Cyber Security, Justice and Governance </a> (Organized by Hague Institute for Global Justice, Observer Research Foundation and STIMSON; October 18, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a speaker in the session "Internet Access, Freedom Online, and Development in the Global South". </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Free Speech</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/good-intentions-going-awry-i-why-india2019s-proposal-at-the-itu-is-troubling-for-internet-freedoms"> Good Intentions, Recalcitrant Text - I: Why India's Proposal at the ITU is Troubling for Internet Freedoms </a> (Geeta Hariharan; October 28, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/good-intentions-recalcitrant-text-2013-ii-what-india2019s-itu-proposal-may-mean-for-internet-governance"> Good Intentions, Recalcitrant Text - II: What India's ITU Proposal May Mean for Internet Governance </a> (Geeta Hariharan; November 1, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><br /> <a href="http://cis-india.org/news">News & Media Coverage</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/washington-post-october-9-2014-rama-lakshmi-is-india-the-next-frontier-for-facebook"> Is India the next frontier for Facebook? </a> (Rama Lakshmi; Washington Post; October 9, 2014). </li>
<li> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-express-october-23-2014-j-anand-if-mncs-make-early-inroads-they-will-keep-market-share"> If MNCs make early inroads, they will keep market share: Sunil Abraham, CIS </a> (J.Anand; Financial Express; October 23, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities">Digital Humanities</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access">Rethinking Conditions of Access</a> (P.P.Sneha, Lilainteractions; October 15, 2014). </li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Twitter:<a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K"> </a><a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K">https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a> </li>
<li> Facebook group: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k">https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a> </li>
<li> Visit us at:<a href="https://cis-india.org/"> </a> <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge</a> </li>
<li> E-mail: <a href="mailto:a2k@cis-india.org">a2k@cis-india.org</a> </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Support Us</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Request for Collaboration:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at<a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> or Nishant Shah, Director - Research, at <a href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a>. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at <a href="mailto:vishnu@cis-india.org">vishnu@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i> CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects. </i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2014-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2014-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeAccessibilityInternet GovernanceDigital HumanitiesOpenness2014-11-23T16:40:23ZPageRethinking Conditions of Access
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access
<b>P. P. Sneha explores the possibilities of redefining the idea of access through the channels of education and learning. </b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The advent and pervasive growth of the internet and digital technologies in the last couple of decades have caused several changes in the way we now imagine education and processes of learning, both within and outside the classroom. The increasing use of digital tools, platforms and methods in classroom pedagogy, and the access for students to resources through online and collaborative repositories such as Wikipedia have led to a change in not just teaching practices, but also in the learning environment, which has now become more open, iterative and participatory in nature. While increased access to the internet may be one factor contributing to this change, the conditions of such access – how it is made available, to whom and for what purpose – still remain contentious. As per recent statistics, India has more than 200 million internet users, but as several studies on online users have illustrated, the numbers are hardly indicative of the nature of online engagement. The problem of the ‘digital divide’, though much debated and addressed, still persists in India, as in several other countries, with lack of infrastructure and low broadband speed being two among several reasons for the slow move in bridging this gap.</p>
<div><a class="hasimg" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/digital_inclusion_index_map_thumb.jpg"><img src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/digital_inclusion_index_map_thumb.jpg" alt="null" height="199" width="335" /><img class="himage" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/digital_inclusion_index_map_thumb-bw.jpg" alt="null" height="199" width="335" /></a></div>
<div>Last year, the Digital Inclusion Index map indicated India as only BRICS country ‘at extreme risk’ on the ‘digital divide’</div>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The problem of the digital divide itself has largely been understood as one of access to the internet and/or broadly digital technologies, but the conditions of this access, in terms of the nature of its use and adaptability to a dynamic and ever-changing technological landscape is something that needs to be looked at critically, in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the problem itself, and its inherent conflicts. The technological landscape we inhabit today is quite diverse, and rather multi-layered, as a result of which conditions of access also differ across spaces and in degrees. The problematisation, therefore, will need to be more qualitative and nuanced, to take into account several variables spread over social, cultural and economic categories.</p>
<p><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-4133" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/quote-internet-speed-ps-1.png" alt="quote internet speed ps 1" height="580" width="195" /></p>
<div class="hyphenate">
<p style="text-align: justify;">The assumption of the internet, as an open and accessible, therefore neutral space, has also been questioned time and again, with the latest debates around net neutrality being illustrative of this conflict. Though there is a growing interest in exploring and using the democratic potential that the internet offers, as demonstrated by several forms of online social activism and the growth of open access digital knowledge repositories and public archival spaces, there are also pertinent concerns about privacy, accessibility and the quality of online interaction and content. A large part of this uncertainty and the conflicts we see around access and regulation may be attributed to the fact that the nature of the internet, or the digital itself as concept, method or space has not been adequately explored or theorised. As a public sphere, it often reprises certain systemic forms of injustice and marginalisation seen offline, and conflates them with notions pertaining to the personal. As such, social, economic and linguistic barriers mediate the access we have to certain kinds and forms of discourse online, thereby making physical access the first step towards being part of the labyrinthian world that is the internet.</p>
<div><a class="hasimg" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/maharashtra_farmers_computers_20060821.jpg"><img src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/maharashtra_farmers_computers_20060821.jpg" alt="null" height="231" width="335" /><img class="himage" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/maharashtra_farmers_computers_20060821-bw.jpg" alt="null" height="231" width="335" /></a></div>
<div>How can e-learning start, when the general access is very fragmented?</div>
<p style="text-align: justify;">These conflicts are present in the classroom and other spaces and processes of learning as well, where traditionally there has been resistance to the use of technology, and particularly the internet as it is seen as a disturbance or a deterrent to learning. But technology has always been a part of the classroom, and now with the mobile phone becoming ubiquitous, it is indeed difficult to imagine that a student who has access to such a device would be disconnected from the internet, or not look toward other digital tools and methods to engage with, for educational or recreational purposes. However, indeed, how much of this engagement is effectively connected to learning is still a bone of contention, and is yet to be explored adequately.</p>
</div>
<p><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-4134" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/quote-internet-speed-ps-2.png" alt="quote internet speed ps 2" height="430" width="195" /></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">What are the changes in the learning environment that the advent of digital technologies has produced? What challenges do they pose for both teachers and students? And what are the possible solutions that these areas of research are opening up? A more integrated and inclusive approach in designing methods and tools for use in the classroom could be one way of making issues and conflicts in this space more transparent. Several efforts in education technology and experiments in digital learning have focused precisely on this aspect. The sheer visibility and vastness of the internet offers several possibilities in terms of access to materials, tools and resources online. Several large-scale efforts in digitisation made by both the state and public organisations are attempts to utilise this potential, and they speak of the growing interest in making material available online for both classroom teaching and research.</p>
<div><a class="hasimg" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024.jpg"><img src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024.jpg" alt="null" height="587" width="335" /><img class="himage" src="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024-bw.jpg" alt="null" height="587" width="335" /></a></div>
<div>The MOOCs are slowly challenging the universities<a title="MOOCs vs. Universities" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Mooc-vs-University-in-2013-584x1024.jpg" target="_blank">. See the image full screen</a></div>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is an example of the fervour of online platforms of learning, which provide students across the world with an access to teaching and course material from some of the best institutions. However, there have been, at least in their earlier versions, several critiques of these platforms, as well, precisely because they replicate a certain classroom teaching model that is not accessible to students everywhere. This urges us to revisit the premise of such structures.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The ‘digital turn’ in the last couple of decades has engendered several changes in the way knowledge is now produced, disseminated and consumed by people located in different areas. It has also created a need to constantly rethink existing systems of learning we have in place, to plug the gaps that develop between people, skills and resources. It is only through more attempts to problematise the notion of access qualitatively, and to better understand the role of digital technologies and the internet in terms of changes in learning environments, that we may be able to understand and utilise its potential to the best.</p>
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<div style="text-align: justify;" class="hyphenate"><strong>P.P. Sneha</strong> works with the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. She has a Master’s degree in English, and has previously worked in the area of higher education. This essay is a reflection on some of the learnings from projects on the quality of access to higher education and a mapping of the digital landscape and the growth of Digital Humanities in India, conducted by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (with support from the Ford Foundation), and the CIS. The original post can be <a class="external-link" href="http://www.lilainteractions.in/internet-slowdown-day/">read here</a>.</div>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/lila-inter-actions-october-14-2014-rethinking-conditions-of-access</a>
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No publishersnehaDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:35:00ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities and the Alt-Academy
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy
<b>The emergence of Digital Humanities (DH) has been contemporaneous to the ‘crisis’ in the humanities, spurred by changing social and economic conditions which have urged us to rethink traditional methods, locations and concepts of research and pedagogy. This blog post examines the emergence of the phenomenon of the alt-academy in the West, and examines the nuances and possibilities of such a space in the Indian context.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As some of the previous <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition">blog posts</a> have illustrated, most of the prominent debates around DH have largely been within the university context, or have least focussed around the university as the centre, and therefore emphasise the move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, or at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and areas which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a specific kind of teachinglearning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The notion of a ‘digital classroom’ has been made possible by the proliferation of new digital tools and the internet; with increased access to open access archives and dynamic knowledge repositories such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>, there is a move towards a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ <a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> —– not only in terms of people but also spaces, methods and objects of learning — to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ <a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> who now inhabit what previously seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. However, it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that is now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters to the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. It may be useful to explore this change further to arrive at some idea of whether such a space exists in the Indian context, and how it informs the way we conceptualise DH; as practitioners, researchers, teachers or the lay person.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster these new and alternate knowledge-making practices.While the early DH debates in the Anglo-American context seemed to be dominated by certain disciplines like English, media studies and computational and information sciences, practitioners and researchers alike have branched out significantly, with research focussing more on questions of data-mining, mapping and visualisation with an increasing focus on processes and design, and using a diverse range of texts or objects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In India, which significantly borrows the discourse from the same context, and also is still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition to the digital, the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the academic circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research (some discussed in the earlier blog posts as well), which would be likely spaces where one may see DH–related work being done. An important part of the discourse in the context of education is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom. Educational or instructional technology has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom, and this has been supported by several large-scale digitisation projects as well but the digital divide still persists, as a result of which these initiatives come with a peculiar set of problems of their own (as discussed in the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment">earlier blog post</a> on archival practice) the most important being the lack of connection among such practices, research and pedagogy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While education technology is a separate field which works on better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology, it does form part of the context within which DH is to develop either as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach, and the two areas are very often conflated in some parts of the discourse in India. While moving beyond the ICTs debate — which is premised primarily around access to knowledge, DH has been posited as making an intervention into prevailing systems of knowledge — so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it — will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University speaks about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies, particularly in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research, which he sees even with his students now, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms like Academia.edu or <a href="http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/">Scalar,</a> that he finds a vast change. It not only makes the process more transparent but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Curriculum development in DH comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets — we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital — but the rate of change is faster than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities (thus also seen as a threat to the disciplines themselves), and having its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">What this essentially refers to is the alternate modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders. Wikipedia is an existing example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, <a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says: “The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and a historical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an <em>inherent </em>quality but a <em>transitive </em>one 6<a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">He further goes on to elaborate that the question of the authority of knowledge should ideally be located within a larger ‘knowledge apparatus’, comprising of certain technologies and practices, (in this case that of reading, writing, editing, compilation, classification and creative appropriations) which help inflate the definitions of authority and knowledge even more.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’— often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of practices and occupations are but alternatives — from alternative medicine to education — to the already established system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The attempts to subsume these alternate practices, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question. Another aspect of this is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which therefore prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. By extension then, the term DH itself therefore may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of knowledge production have been brought to the foreground, which have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> References: </strong></p>
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<li># Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 Accessed July 27, 2014 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/ </li>
<li>Davidson, Cathy N. & David Theo Goldberg, <em> The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) ( Cambridge: </em> MIT Press, 2010) Accessed March 15, 2014 http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-thinking</li>
<li>See Liang, Lawrence “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15<sup>th</sup> to the 18<sup>th </sup>century” in INC Reader#7 Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011, p.50-62 </li></ol>
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<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> . See Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo. Goldberg, <em> The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning Cambridge: </em> <em> </em> MIT Press, 2010</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> . For more on this see # Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> . See Lawrence Liang, “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15<sup>th</sup> to the 18<sup>th</sup> Century” in INC Reader#7Critical Point ofView: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> Adrian John’s as quoted in Liang. See Adrian Johns, <em>The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making</em>, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy</a>
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No publishersnehaDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:29:48ZBlog Entry