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A 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 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 EntryLiving 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 EntryNotes for India as the digital trade juggernaut rolls on
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-hindu-arindrajit-basu-february-8-2022-notes-for-india-as-the-digital-trade-juggernaut-rolls-on
<b>Sitting out trade negotiations could result in the country losing out on opportunities to shape the rules.</b>
<p>The article by Arindrajit Basu was <a class="external-link" href="https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/notes-for-india-as-the-digital-trade-juggernaut-rolls-on/article38393921.ece">published in the Hindu</a> on February 8, 2022</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Despite the cancellation of the Twelfth Ministerial Conference (MC12) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) late last year (scheduled date, November 30, 2021-December 3, 2021) due to COVID-19, digital trade negotiations continue their ambitious march forward. On December 14, Australia, Japan, and Singapore, co-convenors of the plurilateral Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on e-commerce, welcomed the ‘substantial progress’ made at the talks over the past three years and stated that they expected a convergence on more issues by the end of 2022.</p>
<h3>Holding out</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But therein lies the rub: even though JSI members account for over 90% of global trade, and the initiative welcomes newer entrants, over half of WTO members (largely from the developing world) continue to opt out of these negotiations. They fear being arm-twisted into accepting global rules that could etiolate domestic policymaking and economic growth. India and South Africa have led the resistance and been the JSI’s most vocal critics. India has thus far resisted pressures from the developed world to jump onto the JSI bandwagon, largely through coherent legal argumentation against the JSI and a long-term developmental vision. Yet, given the increasingly fragmented global trading landscape and the rising importance of the global digital economy, can India tailor its engagement with the WTO to better accommodate its economic and geopolitical interests?</p>
<h3><strong>Global rules on digital trade</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The WTO emerged in a largely analogue world in 1994. It was only at the Second Ministerial Conference (1998) that members agreed on core rules for e-commerce regulation. A temporary moratorium was imposed on customs duties relating to the electronic transmission of goods and services. This moratorium has been renewed continuously, to consistent opposition from India and South Africa. They argue that the moratorium imposes significant costs on developing countries as they are unable to benefit from the revenue customs duties would bring.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The members also agreed to set up a work programme on e-commerce across four issue areas at the General Council: goods, services, intellectual property, and development. Frustrated by a lack of progress in the two decades that followed, 70 members brokered the JSI in December 2017 to initiate exploratory work on the trade-related aspects of e-commerce. Several countries, including developing countries, signed up in 2019 despite holding contrary views to most JSI members on key issues. Surprise entrants, China and Indonesia, argued that they sought to shape the rules from within the initiative rather than sitting on the sidelines.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India and South Africa have rightly pointed out that the JSI contravenes the WTO’s consensus-based framework, where every member has a voice and vote regardless of economic standing. Unlike the General Council Work Programme, which India and South Africa have attempted to revitalise in the past year, the JSI does not include all WTO members. For the process to be legally valid, the initiative must either build consensus or negotiate a plurilateral agreement outside the aegis of the WTO.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India and South Africa’s positioning strikes a chord at the heart of the global trading regime: how to balance the sovereign right of states to shape domestic policy with international obligations that would enable them to reap the benefits of a global trading system.</p>
<h3><strong>A contested regime</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are several issues upon which the developed and developing worlds disagree. One such issue concerns international rules relating to the free flow of data across borders. Several countries, both within and outside the JSI, have imposed data localisation mandates that compel corporations to store and process data within territorial borders. This is a key policy priority for India. Several payment card companies, including Mastercard and American Express, were prohibited from issuing new cards for failure to comply with a 2018 financial data localisation directive from the Reserve Bank of India. The Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on data protection has recommended stringent localisation measures for sensitive personal data and critical personal data in India’s data protection legislation. However, for nations and industries in the developed world looking to access new digital markets, these restrictions impose unnecessary compliance costs, thus arguably hampering innovation and supposedly amounting to unfair protectionism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is a similar disagreement regarding domestic laws that mandate the disclosure of source codes. Developed countries believe that this hampers innovation, whereas developing countries believe it is essential for algorithmic transparency and fairness — which was another key recommendation of the JPC report in December 2021.</p>
<h3><strong>India’s choices</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India’s global position is reinforced through narrative building by political and industrial leaders alike. Data sovereignty is championed as a means of resisting ‘data colonialism’, the exploitative economic practices and intensive lobbying of Silicon Valley companies. Policymaking for India’s digital economy is at a critical juncture. Surveillance reform, personal data protection, algorithmic governance, and non-personal data regulation must be galvanised through evidenced insights,and work for individuals, communities, and aspiring local businesses — not just established larger players.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hastily signing trading obligations could reduce the space available to frame appropriate policy. But sitting out trade negotiations will mean that the digital trade juggernaut will continue unchecked, through mega-regional trading agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). India could risk becoming an unwitting standard-taker in an already fragmented trading regime and lose out on opportunities to shape these rules instead.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Alternatives exist; negotiations need not mean compromise. For example, exceptions to digital trade rules, such as ‘legitimate public policy objective’ or ‘essential security interests’, could be negotiated to preserve policymaking where needed while still acquiescing to the larger agreement. Further, any outcome need not be an all-or-nothing arrangement. Taking a cue from the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) between Singapore, Chile, and New Zealand, India can push for a framework where countries can pick and choose modules with which they wish to comply. These combinations can be amassed incrementally as emerging economies such as India work through domestic regulations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Despite its failings, the WTO plays a critical role in global governance and is vital to India’s strategic interests. Negotiating without surrendering domestic policy-making holds the key to India’s digital future.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Arindrajit Basu is Research Lead at the Centre for Internet and Society, India. The views expressed are personal. The author would like to thank The Clean Copy for edits on a draft of this article.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-hindu-arindrajit-basu-february-8-2022-notes-for-india-as-the-digital-trade-juggernaut-rolls-on'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-hindu-arindrajit-basu-february-8-2022-notes-for-india-as-the-digital-trade-juggernaut-rolls-on</a>
</p>
No publisherbasuDigitalisationDigital KnowledgeInternet GovernanceE-CommerceDigital India2022-02-09T15:04:36ZBlog EntryLearn it Yourself
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it
<b>The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah in an article published in the Indian Express on 30 October 2011. </b>
<p>Technologies and learning have always had a close link. In the past,
distance learning programmes of higher education through the postal
service, remote education programmes using satellite TV and interactive
learning projects using information and communication infrastructure,
have all been deployed with varied results in promoting literacy and
higher education. In the last two decades, the internet has also joined
this technology ecology in trying to provide quality and affordable
education to remotely located areas through “citizen service centres”
envisioned to reach 6,40,000 Indian villages in the future.</p>
<p>These technology-based information outreach programmes expand the
ability of traditional formal learning centres like universities, to
cater to the needs of those who might not have access to learning
resources. This vision of networked education relies on existing systems
of centralised syllabus making, teacher-to-student information
transfer, grade-based evaluation and accreditation systems, and a
degree-centred approach to learning.</p>
<p>I was in New York last week, at an international summit on the future
of learning, Mobility Shifts, organised by the New School, where more
than 260 speakers from 21 countries discussed the possibility of
learning beyond the bounds of the school and university system. Many
discussions were around the declining public education system (with huge
disinvestment moves from the government), privatisation of education,
increasing tuition and fees, and the non-relevance of current education.
However, along with this digital expansion of the traditional education
system is an emerging trend that challenges the ways in which we
understand education and learning – DIY Learning or Do It Yourself
Learning.</p>
<p>DIY Learning is a product of the networked condition. It recognises
that as more people get onto digital information networks, there is a
possibility of producing peer-to-peer learning conditions, which do not
have to follow our accepted models of learning and education.</p>
<p>We have seen the rise of various decentralised and democratised
knowledge repositories like Wikipedia. The search based algorithms of
search engines also take into consideration the idea that knowledge is
personal. User generated content sites like eHow.com show that the
individual learner is not merely a recipient of information and
knowledge. Information seeking spaces like Quora have shown that
knowledge-sharing communities can incite new conditions of learning. Our
contexts, experiences, everyday practices, aspirations etc. equip us
with valuable information, which not only shape how we learn but also
what we find relevant to learn for ourselves. DIY Learning picks up on
the idea that the infrastructure of education is not necessarily
designed towards learning. Learning often happens outside the
classrooms, in informal conversations.</p>
<p>Thus DIY Learning offers a new model of learning. It destabilises the
established hierarchy of knowledge production and pedagogy and creates
an each-one-teach-one model with a twist. Instead of a centralised board
of curriculum designer who shape syllabi for the “average” student, you
have the possibility of customised, highly individual, interest-based
learning curricula where the student is a part of deciding what s/he
wants to learn. DIY Learning doesn’t recognise the distinctions between
teachers and students, but recognises them as “peers” within a network,
encouraging conversations and reciprocal learning rather than
information transfer based classroom models. Instead of mass-produced
education that caters only to an imagined average, the DIY Learning
model recognises that within the same student group, there are different
rates and scales of learning, thus offering environments suited to the
aptitude of the students.</p>
<p>Within the DIY Learning model, aspects of education, from the design
of curriculum and learning methods, to grading and evaluation are geared
towards individual preferences and aspirations.</p>
<p>Many people think of DIY Learning as an alternative to mainstream
learning processes and structures. However, it is perhaps more fruitful
to think of DIY Learning as a way of figuring out the problems that
beset our traditional educational system. It allows us to rethink the
relationships between learning, education, teaching and technologies. It
recalibrates the space of the classroom and reconfigures the role of
the teacher and the student.</p>
<p>DIY Learning emphasises that merely building schools and universities
is not enough to assure that learning happens. Learning happens through
experiences, practice, conversations, internalisations and through
making mistakes. DIY Learning offers these possibilities in an education
universe that is constantly refusing to take risks, innovate and adapt
to the needs of the present. By itself it might not be able to take on
the roles and functions of the existing education systems. But it does
warn us that we are preparing our students for our pasts rather than
their futures. And the time to change is now.</p>
<p>The original story was published in the Indian Express, it can be read <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/learn-it-yourself/867069/">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-05-14T12:08:32ZBlog EntryMobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts-2011
<b>The summit was organised by the New School and sponsored by MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla. It was held from October 10 to October 16, 2011 at the New School, New York City.
</b>
<p>Nishant Shah participated in the summit and spoke on Digital
Outcasts: Social Justice, Technology and Learning in India. The video of
the event is online.</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts.pdf" class="external-link"><img alt="" />Agenda and Program details</a> PDF document, 1611 kb</p>
<p><strong>VIDEO</strong></p>
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/32528893?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/32528893">Mobility Shifts 2011, Nishant Shah</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/mobilityshifts">The Politics of Digital Culture</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts-2011'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts-2011</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-03-30T14:55:16ZBlog 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>
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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 EntryConsultation on Figures of Learning in the Digital Context - Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/consultation-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context
<b>The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society organised a consultation on ‘Figures of Learning in the Digital Context’ on September 22, 2014 in Bangalore. </b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Conducted as part of its ‘Making Methods for Digital Humanities’ project, the discussion was an attempt to examine changes in the learning environment with the advent of digital technologies and new modes of knowledge production by mapping concepts and changes around a set of figures of learning, old and new, to understand the discursive shifts that produce and locate them in the contemporary moment. (See the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/events/consultation-on-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context" class="external-link">concept note here</a>).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Making Methods project seeks to make specific interventions in structures of learning, methods of storing and documenting information, and processes of interaction and interface design, in an effort to describe and queer the contours of what we understand as the field of Digital Humanities today.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The consultation brought together a small but diverse set of people from different fields. Participants presented on figures of learning drawn from their own fields of research and practice. Archana Prasad, artist and founder of <a href="http://jaaga.in/">JAAGA,</a> Bangalore spoke about the organisation and its growth as an alternative space for learning through collaborative processes in art, design and technology – the studio space made of pallet racks, its various projects and groups that converge at JAAGA reflect this diversity and interdisciplinarity. She spoke about changes in her own role from being a facilitator for diverse groups to come together, to becoming more of a mentor in the later years, the problems of sustainability of such a space and the efforts made through different projects in emphasising learning though peer-to-peer methods. Interesting projects in focus were the participatory artwork and reality game called <a href="http://investmentzone.info/">Investmentzone</a> which is an effort to collaboratively work and transform public spaces and the JAAGA residential study programme. The discussions were useful in understanding processes that can be used to foster alternative and participatory learning environments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Asim Siddiqui, Ph.D. student at the <a href="http://barefootphilosophers.wordpress.com/">Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities</a>, used the figure of the ‘performer’ to talk about his research enquiry into the philosophy of performative art traditions and the role of the body, performance and practice in learning. He spoke about the relative passivity of the body in the classroom, and the predominance of certain normative discourses within which teaching-learning practices operate and therefore produce a sort of instrumental form of knowledge, which he found problematic. He drew from examples of embodied action in dance, theatre and music to look at how some of these nuances and conflicts may be brought into classroom pedagogy to make it more illustrative and inclusive. This led to an interesting discussion around problems with current teaching-learning practices and the lack of adequate measures to make them contextual and relevant to students’ lived experience. The digital now bringing in a different dimension to learning and the lack of an understanding of the body in the digital space as preventing the possibility of a somatic element to knowledge was also discussed. The problem of disciplinary constraints and the separation of humanities and social sciences came up with reference to technology becoming more prominent in classrooms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Bitasta Das, instructor and coordinator of the <a href="http://www.iisc.ernet.in/ug/">UG Humanities programme</a> at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore spoke further on this issue of separation of the disciplines from her experience of teaching in the UG programme. Her presentation on the ‘distracted inventor’ focussed on the role of technology in the classroom, and how there is a need for teachers to constantly innovate to keep students engaged, particularly in a course such as this. The notion of distraction was a useful contrast to the attention economy debates that have become increasingly prevalent. The possibility of distraction as serendipitous and productive, particularly in science which is also a space of invention and discovery was discussed as one way of taking the idea forward. Some of the work done by students in the programme, under the larger rubric of integration of disciplines, was also presented in the consultation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Nishant Shah presented on the idea of the production of error in computing, which is also the result of a deliberate and long process or history which can be traced from scribes copying texts to print culture and now to the machine itself, which also produces or re-produces error. He spoke about the gap between the interface and the information that a person consumes in the digital context, which is contrary to what is understood by abbreviations such as Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO). He sought to critically examine this notion of transparency that the digital supposedly provides, when in effect the notion of error is as much present, but is being effectively effaced in various ways. The production of error therefore is an interesting process in signifying the limits of knowledge, and he proposed the idea of using the figure of the hipster to further explore this process of error or the glitch as a productive one.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Ekta Mittal , media practitioner and one of the founder-members of the media and arts collective <a href="http://maraa.in/about/our-team/">Maraa</a> presented on the figure of the worker, drawing on her research and work on a film on the Bangalore Metro construction workers. The attempt was to break through the existing discourse and simple binaries to present multiple meanings of the city, migrant labour, development, and new narratives of freedom and pleasure. Through documentation of the lives of labourers who belong to different parts of the country and their stories of migration, some of them illegal, and the question of identity and livelihood the film tries to dislocate the figure of the worker from a certain predominant discourse of the marginalised and invisible. The figure of the worker as a ghost, poet, wanderer, and now a lurker who often favours his condition of anonymity and invisibility is something that the presentation also focussed on as a way to take these ideas forward.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The consultation brought together a small but interesting set of people and ideas, this time specifically looking at diverse art and classroom teaching - learning practices. It also brought to the fore several unconventional processes of learning such as gamification, distraction, performance and embodied action that are outside the traditional notion of learning in the context of digital technologies. These ideas would contribute to further initiatives in engaging with larger questions about technology and processes of knowledge production.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/consultation-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/consultation-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context</a>
</p>
No publishersnehaResearchResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeFigures of Learning2015-11-13T05:37:04ZBlog 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>
<p> </p>
<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>
<ol>
<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>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<hr />
<div id="ftn1">
<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>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<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>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<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>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<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>
</div>
</div>
<p>
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>
</p>
No publishersnehaDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:29:48ZBlog EntryTechnology, Social Justice and Higher Education
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education
<b>Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation. </b>
<p>The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer Technologies<br /></h3>
<p>The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where
through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story
telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought
environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we
facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions
of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these
critically in order to build a better learning environment for
themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr class="even">
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/sies.jpg/image_preview" title="sies " height="266" width="400" alt="sies " class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td>
<div align="left">Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to
the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to
accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students
involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and
community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes
of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often
circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they
thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.</div>
<br />
<div align="left"> </div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific
projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses
by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage
with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories
and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction
and learning.</p>
<p><em>The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:</em></p>
<h3>The Costs of Belonging</h3>
<p>Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the
students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it
was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational
institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat
English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend
circles within the college environment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/problem.jpg/image_preview" title="problems" height="365" width="548" alt="problems" class="image-inline image-inline" /></p>
<div align="left">It was particularly insightful for us to understand
that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping
‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became
apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative
action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in
the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers,
internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for
most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even
when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there
were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity
with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and
institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a
significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways,
these students were digital natives if defined through access, because
they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they
wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in
creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.<br /><br />Based
on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting,
exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the
gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel
excluded from the power of the digital.<br /><br /></div>
<h3>The Need for Diversity<br /></h3>
<div align="left"><br />
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/others.jpg/image_preview" alt="others" class="image-inline image-inline" title="others" /></td>
<td>It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every
student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital
web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being
synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked
by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of
modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost
all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital
technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English,
fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and
display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.<br /><br /><br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p>Such an idea might also help in
reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web
through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find
themselves tentative and intimidated online.</p>
<p>The breakthrough that the
participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper
in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language
resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of
transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning
lesson for us.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning</h3>
<div align="left">As a part of their orientation to the world of the
digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the
students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the
possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they
are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience
and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new
insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital
storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and
accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help
us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.<br /><br />Working
together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as
it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories,
emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable
tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups
learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established
hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting
was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY
education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill
gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated
special trainings with different experts in areas of language,
communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the
methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure
that is different from the regular classroom learning.<br /><br />What would
happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How
would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater
than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each
other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of
the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities,
where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities,
cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys,
ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in
not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in
re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.<br /><br /><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/workshop.jpg/image_preview" title="classroom" height="337" width="509" alt="classroom" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br />
<div align="center"><br />
<div align="left">Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative
story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating
awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the
digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show
some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies.
How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as
peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we
organise a faculty training workshop later in December. <br /><br />These
three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and
executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as
the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It
is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage
and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social
inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and
engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge
production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing
better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher
Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but
also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream
learning within higher education in India.</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFeaturedHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-03-30T14:54:21ZBlog EntryReading from a Distance — Data as Text
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance
<b>The advent of new digital technologies and the internet has redefined practices of reading and writing, and the notion of textuality which is a fundamental aspect of humanities research and scholarship. This blog post looks at some of the debates around the notion of text as object, method and practice, to understand how it has changed in the digital context. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">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 Digital Humanities, 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 (see <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml">TEI</a>) to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of apps such as Storify or Scoop it 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<a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>. 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. 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. 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 Micheal Witmore. According to him “Addressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction”. 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”. 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.<a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change. 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, process etc 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. One example of such a digital text perhaps is the hypertext<a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a>. 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 in some sense as the ideal text. 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 post-structural notion of what comprises an open text as it were, 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 <a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a>. 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, his book Graphs, Maps and Trees 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’. 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<em>, </em>hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.” 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. An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of ‘ <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php">Bichitra’</a>, 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 varioum, 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 understood in the field of computing is data that is so vast or complex that it cannot be processed by existing database management tools or processing applications<a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a>. 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 American 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 form of cultural and literary production. <a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by including corpora, 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. 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. <a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 one may ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading 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. This is an interesting use of the term, given that the suggestion to use quantitative methods such as clustering and pattern recognition in fields that are premised on close reading and interpretation is itself a provocative one and has implications for content. 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 the Digital Humanities 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> References: </strong></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, “Texts”, Planned Obsolescence – Publishing, Technology and Future of the Academy, New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. pp.89 – 119.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Kirschenbaum, M.G, “The Remaking of Reading: Data Mining and the Digital Humanities”, Conference proceedings; National Science Foundation Symposium on Next Generation of Data Mining and Cyber-Enabled Discovery for Innovation, Balitmore, October 10-12, 2007, <a class="external-link" href="http://www. cs. umbc. edu/hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum. pdf">http://www. cs. umbc. edu/hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum. pdf</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Landow, George. P, Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, Balitmore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992 pp 2-12</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso: London and New York, 2005. p.1</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Whitmore, Michael , “Text: A Massively Addressable Object”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Wilkens, Mathew, “Canons,Close Reading and the Evolution of Method” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a></li></ol>
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<p><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> For more on cluster analysis and algorithms see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> See Witmore, 2012. pp 324 - 327</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> 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 Landow, 1991. pp 2-12)</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> Barthes, 1977. pp 155 - 164</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5">[5]</a> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a> See Wilkens (2012). pp 249-252</p>
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<p><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a> See Fitzpatrick (2011), pp 89 -119</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance</a>
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No publishersnehaDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:29:12ZBlog EntryAsia in the Edges: A Narrative Account of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School in Bangalore
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/routledge-inter-asia-cultural-studies-volume-15-issue-2-nishant-shah-asia-in-the-edges
<b>The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School is a Biennial event that invites Masters and PhD students from around Asia to participate in conversations around developing and building an Inter-Asia Cultural Studies thought process. Hosted by the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society along with the Consortium of universities and research centres that constitute it, the Summer School is committed to bringing together a wide discourse that spans geography, disciplines, political affiliations and cultural practices for and from researchers who are interested in developing Inter-Asia as a mode of developing local, contextual and relevant knowledge practices. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is the narrative account of the experiments and ideas that shaped the second Summer School, “The Asian Edge” which was hosted in Bangalore, India, in 2012. The peer reviewed article was <a class="external-link" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2014.911462">published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies</a> Journal, Volume 15, Issue 2, on July 3, 2014. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/asia-in-the-edges.pdf" class="external-link">Click to download the file</a>. (PDF, 95 Kb)</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">At the heart of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) project has been a pedagogic impulse that seeks to train young students and scholars in critical ways of thinking about questions of the contemporary. The ambition of developing an “Asian way of thinking” is not merely a response to the hegemony of North-Western theory in thought and research, especially in Social Sciences and Humanities. It is also a way by which new knowledge is developed and shared between different locations in Asia, to get a more embedded sense of the social, the political and the cultural in the region. Apart from building a widespread network of researchers, activists, academics and artists who have generated the most comprehensive and critical insights into developing ontological and teleological relationships with Asia, there have always been attempts made to integrate students into the network’s activities. From student pre-conferences that invited students to build intellectual dialogues, to subsidies and fellowships offered to allow students to travel from their different institutions across Asia, various initiatives have inspired and facilitated the first encounter with Asia for a number of young researchers who might have lived in Asian countries but not been trained to understand the context of what it means to be in Asia. Over time, through different structures, such as the institutionalisation of the <em>Inter-Asia Cultural Studies</em> Journal and the growth of the eponymous conference, the IACS has already expanded the scope of its activities, involving new interlocutors and locations in which to grow the environment of critical academic and research discourse.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Building upon the expertise and networks of scholarship developed for over a decade, the IACS Society initiated the biennial Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, in order to engage younger scholars and students with some of the key questions that have been discussed and contested in the cultural studies discourse in Asia. The IACS Summer School that began in 2010 in Seoul, is a travelling school that moves to different countries, drawing upon local energies, resources and debates to acquaint students with the critical discourse as well as the experience of difference that marks Asia as a continent. The summer school in 2012 was hosted jointly by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Indian Institute of Sciences.<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For a snapshot of the Summer School, see Table 1 below:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Table 1. The 2012 Inter-Asia cultural studies summer school: a snapshot</strong></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The Asian Edge</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Core course: Methodologies for Cultural Studies in Asia (2–11 August, 2012)<br />Optional courses<br />The Digital Subject / Technology, Culture and the Body (13–16 August, 2012)<br />Language of Instruction: EnglishHomepage: <a class="external-link" href="http://culturalstudies.asia/?page_id=86">http://culturalstudies.asia/?page_id=86</a><br />Organisers: Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore<br />Host: Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore<br />Co-organisers: Consortium of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium Institutions; Institute of East Asian Studies, Sungkonghoe University, Korea<br />Course Coordinators: Nitya Vasudevan & Nishant Shah<br />Number of Students: 35 students from 12 Asian countries<br />Number of Faculty: 17 from 5 Asian countries<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2] </a></p>
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<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Plotting Edges: The Rationale</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second summer school, hosted in August 2012, with the support of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and the Institute of East Asian Studies, was entitled “The Asian Edge.” We decided to stay with the metaphor of the Edge because it allowed us to experiment, both conceptually and in process, with new modes of engagement, interaction, knowledge production and pedagogy. The idea of an Asian Edge was interesting because it signalled a de-bordering of Asia. The Edge is also an inroad into that which might have remained invisible or inscrutable to those outside of it. The imagination of an Asian Edge brings in both the imaginations of geography as well as the notion of extensions, where Asia, especially in this hyper-real and geo-territorial age does not remain contained within the national boundaries. Within the Inter-Asia discourse, there has been a rich theorisation around what constitutes Asia and what are the ways in which we can reconstruct our Asianness that do not fall in the easy “Asian Studies” mode of being defined by the West as the ontological reference point. Chen Kuan-Hsing’s (2010) argument in <em>Asia as Method</em>, where he argues that Asia is a construct that emerged out of the Cold War and needs to be deconstructed and unpacked in order to understand the different instances and manifestations of India, have captured these dialogues quite comprehensively. Similarly, Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s (2009) landmark work <em>Indian Cinema in the time of Celluloid </em>marks how questions of nationalism, modernity, governance and technology have been peculiarly and particularly tied to cultural objects and industries such as cinema, not only in negotiations with the post-colonial encounters of India with its erstwhile colonial masters but also with the different locations and imaginations of India. Chua Beng-Huat (2000) in Consumption in Asia similarly points at the ways in which Asia works at different levels of materiality and symbolism, creating communities, connections and commerce in unprecedented ways, not only within Orientalist imagination but in Asia’s own imagination of itself. The Asian Edge was also a way of introducing new thematic interventions in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies discourse. While the IACS project has invited and initiated some of the most diverse and rich conversations around cultural production—ranging from creative industries to cultural politics; from cultural objects to flows of consumption and distribution—we haven’t yet managed to shift the debates into the realm of the digital. The emergence of digital technologies has transformed a lot of our vocabulary and conceptual framework, but we haven’t been able to translate all our concerns into the fast-paced changes that the digital ICTs are ushering into Asia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">With this summer school, we wanted to introduce the digital and the technological as a central trope of understanding our existing and emerging research within inter-Asia cultural studies. And the edge, borrowing from the Network theories that have their grounds in Computing, Actor-Network modelling and ICT4D discourse, gives us another way of thinking about Asia. As the computing theorist Duncan Watts (1999) points out in his model of our universe as a “small world”, the edge, within networks is not merely the containing limit. It is not the boundary or the end but actually the space of interaction, communication and exchange. An edge is the route that traffic takes as it moves from one node to another. Edges are hence tenuous, they emerge and, with repetition, become stronger, but they also die and extend, morph and mutate, thus constantly changing the contours of the network. The ambition was to refuse the separation of technology from the Cultural Studies discourse, introducing what Tejaswini Niranjana in her work on Indian Language education and pedagogy calls “Integration” (Niranjana et al. 2010) rather than “interdisciplinarity”. It was also to provide a different historical trajectory to technology studies, what science and technology historians Kavita Philip, Lily Irani, and P. Dourish (2010) call “Postcolonial Computing.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Asian Edge then became a space where we could consolidate the knowledge and key insights from the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies discourse, but could also open it up to new research, new modes of engagement, and new questions that need the historicity and also the points of departure. These ambitions had a direct impact on both the structure of the Summer School as well as the processes that were subsequently designed<br />to implement it.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">The core course: methodologies for cultural studies in Asia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Inter-Asia Summer School in Bangalore thus had some distinct ambitions, which were reflected in its structure. While it wanted to reflect the rich heritage of scholarship that has been produced through the decade-long interventions, and give the participating students a chance to engage with these intellectual stalwarts of Asia, it also wanted to reflect some of the more cuttingedge and future-looking work that is also a part of the movement’s younger scholars. Hence, instead of going with the traditional model where the pedagogues teach their own text, explaining the nuances and intricacies of their work, we decided to stage a dialogue between the existing scholarship and emerging work. The curriculum for the summer school was designed by Dr Tejaswini Niranjana, Dr Wang Xiaoming and Nitya Vasudevan, to form the first Inter- Asia Cultural studies reader, reflecting the various trends and debates around different themes that have occurred in the movement. The reader, which served as a basic textbook for the summer school, and has plans to be bilingual (English and Mandarin Chinese), introduced historical thought, critical interventions and conceptual frameworks drawn from different locations within Asia. The reader not only incorporated the scholars whose work has shaped the Inter-Asia cultural studies movement but also the formative modern thought that has been central to the social, cultural and political theorisation in Asia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, instead of inviting the scholars whose work has been central to the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies thought, the instructors for the courses were younger critical scholars who are building upon, responding to and entering into a dialogue with the work prescribed in the curriculum. The pedagogy, hence, instead of becoming a “lecture” that synthesises earlier work, became a threeway dialogue, where the students and the instructors were responding to common texts, not only in trying to understand them but also in the context of their own work and interests. Moreover, each session was co-taught, by instructors from different disciplines, locations and geographies, to show how the same body of work can be approached through different entry points and pushed into different directions. The classroom hours, thus became a “workshop” space where the students and the faculty were engaging in a dialogue that sought to make the historical debates relevant to the discussions in the contemporary world. They also showed how the older questions persist across time and space, and that they need to be engaged with in order to make sense of the world around us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Additionally, the Summer School classroom was designed as a space for collaborative pedagogy. The morning discussions around texts from the readers were followed by students presenting their work as a response to the texts prescribed for the day. Taking up a pecha-kucha format, it invited students to introduce themselves, their work, their context and their interventions and to open everything up for response and dialogue. The ambition was to build a community of intellectual support and interest, so that the students not only forge an affective bond but also a sense of collaboration and commonality in the work that they are already pushing in their existing research initiatives. The faculty for the day, along with some of the senior scholars also attended these presentations and helped tie in some of the earlier questions that might have emerged in the class, to the new material that was being introduced in the space.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While this dialogue around new research was fruitful, we also were aware that there is a huge value in getting the students to interact with some of the more formative scholars whose work was prescribed in the curriculum. Hence, alongside the classrooms, we also hosted three salons that brought some of the significant scholars from the Inter-Asia movement into a dialogue with each other, as well as into a conversation with local intellectuals and activists. The first salon, organised at the artist collaborator 1 Shanthi Road, saw Chen Kuan-Hsing and Tejaswini Niranjana, discussing the impulse of the Inter-Asia movement. Charting the history, the different trajectories and the ways in which it has grown, both through friendships and networks, and intellectual interventions and collaborations, the conversation gave an entrypoint to younger scholars in understanding the politics and the motivation of this thought journey. The second salon, organised at the Alternative Law Forum, had Ding Naifei (Taiwan) and Firdaus Azim (Bangladesh) in conversation with legal sexuality and human rights activists Siddharth Narrain and Arvind Narrain (India) to unpack the politics of rights, sexuality, modernity and identity in different parts of Asia. The third salon, hosted at the Centre for Internet & Society, saw Ashish Rajadhyaksha (India) in conversation with Stephen Chan (Hong Kong) looking at questions of infrastructure, sustainability and the new role that research has to play in non-university and non-academic spaces and networks. The salons were designed to be informal settings for conversations and socialising, giving the summer school students access to the senior faculty outside of the classroom setting.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The summer school also wanted to ensure that the students were introduced to the materiality and the texture of the local, to understand the different layers of modernity and habitation that the IT City of Bangalore has to offer. Hence a local tour, charting the growth of Bangalore from a sleepy education centre to the burgeoning IT City that it has become, guided by curator and artist Suresh Jairam, was included as a part of the teaching. The four-hour walking tour laid bare the different contestations and layers of an IT city in India, showing the liminal markets, local cultures of production, and the ways in which they need to be factored into our images and imaginations of modernity and the IT City. Along with these, there were student parties arranged in different local clubs and institutions of Bangalore, to offer informal spaces of socialising for the students but also to give them a glimpse of what public spaces and cultures of being social might look like in a city such as Bangalore.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The summer school found a new richness because two of the days were twinned with a workshop on Culture Industries, supported by the Japan Foundation, which became a pedagogic space for the summer school participants. The students had a new focus introduced to their work and a chance to meet other scholars and activists in the field from Asia, who presented their work as part of the Summer School. The creative industries workshop also afforded a chance for students to form new connections and collaborations with projects and research initiatives that were being discussed in that forum.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">These different components were thus designed and put together as a part of the core course for the Inter-Asia Summer School in Bangalore. Each component had a specific vision and was designed to offer different spaces of learning, pedagogy and interaction for everybody included. The core course was an overview of the diversity and exchange that are parts of the Inter-Asia movement. The course ended with a “booksprint” model where the students, inspired by the conversations at the summer school, were given a day to submit written work that would capture their own learning and growth in the process. The submissions could take the form of an academic essay, a sketch towards a research essay, a blog entry summarising key events from a particular conversation, or a narrative summary of the key points in their own research and how it relates to the conversations at the Summer School. While the core course was compulsory for all the participants, the Summer School also offered two optional elective courses, which the students could opt for after the core course was concluded. The optional courses were designed to introduce students to work and debates that had not yet emerged centrally in the Inter-Asia debates, but were part of their current conversations.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">New nodes: Optional courses: the digital subject/technology, culture and the body</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The optional courses, which lasted for four days, were a way of introducing the students to some new core debates that are emerging in the Cultural Studies discourse. The courses were designed to specifically concentrate on how the older questions and frameworks are being reworked with the emergence of digital technologies, thus helping students to consolidate their own work and also engage with research initiatives across different parts of Asia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The first optional course, entitled “The Digital Subject,” was coordinated by Nishant Shah and had lectures by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Lawrence Liang. It proposed to account for the drastic changes in the relationships between the State, the Citizen and the Markets with the rise of digital technologies in the twenty-first century. The course proposed that as globalisation consolidates itself in Asia, we see changes in the patterns of governance, of state operation, of citizen engagement and civic action. We are in the midst of major revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, powered by digital social change, some headed by cyber-utopians specialising in Web 2.0 and Social media. Phrases such as “Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” have become very common.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Instead of concentrating only on the newness of technology-mediated change, there is a need to engage with the changing landscape of political subjectivity and engagement through a reintegration of science and technology studies with cultural studies and social sciences. The course thus posited certain questions that need to be addressed, within the domain of cultural studies, around the digital: what does a digital subject look like? What are the futures of existing socio-cultural rights based movements? How do digital technologies produce new interfaces for interaction and mobilisation? How do we develop integrated science-technologysociety approaches to understand our technology-mediated contemporary and futures?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Through a series of seminars, workshops, film screening, lectures, and fieldtrips, the course challenged the students not only to look at new objects of the digital but also to ask new questions of the old, inspired by the new methods and frameworks that the digital technologies are opening up for us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second optional course entitled “Technology, Culture and the Body” was coordinated by Nita Vasudevan and had Audrey Yue, Ding Naifei, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wing-Kwong Wong, and Hsing-Wen Chang as instructors. The course began with a hypothesis that, at this moment in history, we seem to be embedded in what Heidegger calls “the frenziedness of technology.” Hence, now more than ever, it is important that we try to understand how the gendered body relates to technology, and what this means for the domain of the cultural. For instance, what are the freedoms that technology is said to offer this body? What are these freedoms posed in opposition to? How do we understand technological practice contextually, both historically and in the contemporary? Is it possible to have a notion of the body that is outside technology, and a notion of technology that is outside cultural practice?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The course called for a move away from the idea of technology as a tool used by the human body, or the idea of technology as mere prosthesis or extension, to map the different ways of understanding the relationship<br />between culture, technology and the body, specifically in the Asian context. It will involve examining practices, cultural formations and understandings that have emerged within various locations in Asia. The course engaged the students in closereadings of key events and texts, hosted workshops to present and critique their own work, and think of collaborative pathways towards future distributed research and pedagogic initiatives that can emerge within the Inter-Asia space.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Both courses had additional assignments that included close-reading of texts, practical field work, critical reflection and collaborative projects completed during the span of the course.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Tying things up: key learnings</h3>
<p>The Second Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School was an ambitious structure, and while there were logistical hiccups in the implementation, there were some key learning aspects that need to be highlighted.</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><em>Working with tensions</em>. Asia is not a homogeneous unified entity. There are several geo-political tensions that mark the relationships between different countries in Asia. While the academic protocol and individual interest in learning more can help negotiate these tensions, these tensions do play out in different linguistic, cultural and emotional unintelligibility, which becomes part of the pedagogic moment in the Inter-Asia classroom. Orienting the instructors to these tensions, and trying to build a collaborative environment where the students appreciate these tensions and learn to communicate with each other and engage with the different contexts is extremely valuable. In the summer school, we had students helping each other with translation, providing new contexts and critiques for each other’s work, and learning how to engage with the palpable difference of somebody from a different country. These tensions can sometimes slow the content and discussions in the classrooms, but taking it up as a collective challenge (rather than just thinking of it as a logistical problem where students not fluent in English need to be given tools of translation) made for a productive and rich learning environment.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><em>Ownership of community structures</em>. When young scholars from different parts of the world are thrown together for such an intense period of time, it is inevitable that there will be bonds of friendship and belonging that grow. We had debated about whether we should invest in doing online community building by creating platforms, discussion boards and other structures that accompany digital outreach and coordination. However, apart from the initial centralization for applications and programming, we eventually decided to make the participants owners of these activities.’ to give a better sense of the ‘digital structures of community building’. And it was fascinating to see how they formed social networks, blogs, Tumblrs and other spaces of conversation among themselves, making these spaces more vibrant and diverse, thus leading to conversations beyond the summer school.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><em>Infrastructure of participation</em>. The Summer School was an extremely subsidised event thanks to the generous support of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium, the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Indian Institute of Sciences, who helped in significantly reducing the costs of registration. The availability of travel fellowships, subsidies, scholarships, and an infrastructure of access cannot be emphasised enough in our experience. Owing to the subsidised costs, the living conditions and the logistics were not optimal. And while the students were extremely cooperative and accommodating with the glitches, we realised that better living conditions and amenities, especially for young students who are travelling to a different country for the first time, are as important as the classroom and the intellectual thought and design. Finding more resources to ease the conditions of travel and living will help build richer conversations inside and outside the classrooms. Sustained efforts to find more funding for a space for the IACS summer school need to be continued.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><em>Selection processes</em>. It was wanted to promote the Inter-Asia movement and hence a first preference was given to students who applied for the summer school through an open call for application. The students were asked to have references from people who have been a part of the movement, and also to send in a brief essay describing their expectations from the summer school. We were scouting for students—given that the numbers we could accept were limited—who were involved in not only learning but also in contributing to the social and political thought of the Inter-Asia movement. We also encouraged students who might not have been a part of a formal education system but are considering further education. Instead of building a homogeneous student base, there was an attempt made to find different kinds of students, from different locations, at different places in their own research work, and with different disciplines and modes of engagement. Scholarships and travel aid were offered to students who we thought deserved to be a part of the summer school but did not have access to university resources for participation. The diversity helped bring a more comprehensive compendium of skills and methods to the table.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Integration and relevance. Younger students often find it difficult to deal with historically formative texts from other contexts because they do not see how this responds to their context or is relevant to their work in contemporary times. Efforts at integrating the different cultures, showing the different trajectories of thought and research within Asia, and at locating the older texts in the context of modern-day research were hugely rewarding and more attempts need to be made to continue this process of making the historical archive of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Movement relevant and critical in new research.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Planning the futures. The participants had all indicated that post the Summer School, they would be excited to see what future avenues for participation there could be. With this summer school, we hadn’t looked at modes of sustained engagement with the participants. While they did take the initiative to communicate with each other, the momentum that was generated because of these discussions could not be captured in its entirety because we did not have any formal structures and processes to continue the engagement. Especially if the IACS summer schools are some sort of an orientation into the IACS movement, then there should be more systemic thought given to how those interested in engaging with the questions can do so, through their own academic and institutional locations, but also through different kinds of support structures that continue the conversations and exchange that begin at the Summer School.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><em>Synergy with the local</em>. For us, as well as for the students, the synergy with the local movements, activists, artists and research was fruitful and productive. One of the values of a travelling summer school is that every summer school can take up a particular theme that is locally relevant and weave it into the summer school. For Bangalore, it made logical sense for us to bring questions of Digital Technologies and Identity/Bodies into the course. Even within the core course, there was an effort to integrate these as key questions that open up new terrains of thought and research within Inter-Asia cultural studies. The optional courses, which were introduced for the first time, were exciting and generated a lot of interest and engagement from the participants. Attempts at creating these kinds of synergies need to be supported along with new and experimental modes of pedagogy and learning.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Second Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School was a great opportunity to harness the potentials of the incredibly rich and diverse network that the IACS movement has built up over more than a decade. For us, it also became a playground where, inspired by the hacker culture and DIY movements that dot the landscape of Bangalore, we experimented with different forms of learning and knowledge production. Involving the students as stakeholders in the process, engaging with them as peers, making them responsible for collaborative learning, and creating spaces of participation and socialisation helped us circumvent many of the problems of language and cultural diversity that might have otherwise crippled the entire process. Pushing these modes of interaction and integration, while also creating an environment of trust, reciprocity and goodwill, is probably even more important than the curriculum and teaching, because these interactions create new nodes and connections, with each student and his/her interaction creating new edges that will hopefully shape and contribute to the contours of critical thought and intervention in Asia.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">References</h3>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. <em>Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization</em>. Durham and London: Duke University Press.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Chua, Beng-Huat, ed. 2000. <em>Consumption in Asia: Lifestyle and Identities</em>. London: Routledge.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Philip, Kavita, Lily Irani, and P. Dourish. 2010. “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey.” <em>Science Technology Human Values</em> 37 (1): 3–29.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2009. <em>Indian Cinema in the time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency</em>. New Delhi: Combined Academic Publications.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Niranjana, Tejaswini, et al. 2010. <em>Strengthening Community Engagement of Higher Education Institutions</em>. Bangalore: Centre for the Study of Culture and Society.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Watts, Duncan. 1999. “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon.” <em>AJS</em> 105 (2): 493–527.</li></ol>
<h3>Author's Biography</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Nishant Shah is the Director of Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, an International Tandem Partner at the Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana University, and a Knowledge Partner with Hivos, in The Hague. He is the editor of the four-volume anthology Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and writes regularly for the Indian newspaper The Indian Express and for the Digital Media and Learning Hub at dmlcentral.net. His current areas of interest are Digital Humanities, Digital Activism and Digital Subjectivity.</p>
<hr />
<p align="JUSTIFY">[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. <span class="discreet">A mammoth project such as the Inter-Asia Summer School requires resources, support and generosity from family, friends, and colleagues that can never be measured or cited in a note. However, there are a few people who need to be mentioned for their incredible spirits and the resources that they extended to us. Dr Raghavendra Gaddakar at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences and his entire staff were patient and hospitable hosts, housing the entire summer school for over a fortnight. The faculty, students and staff at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Bangalore helped in designing courses, finding venues and organising events that added to the richness of the summer school. Raghu Tankayala and Radhika P, both at CSCS were our rocks through this process, taking up a lion’s share of logistical arrangements. The help of the entire staff at the Centre for Internet and Society, who were there every step, helping with every last detail, and the Executive Director Sunil Abraham who lent us infrastructure and financial support to organise various events and salons, is unparalleled and I know I would have found it impossible to work without the knowledge that they would always be there to watch my back. All the instructors who agreed to join the teaching crew made this summer school what it became (a full list can be found at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/iacs-summer-school-2012" class="external-link">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/iacs-summer-school-2012</a>). Both Nitya Vausdevan and I owe a huge amount of gratitude to the IACS society and the Consortium, as well as the stalwarts of the IACS movement who put faith in our vision, and pushed us, supported us, inspired us and helped us to carry out the different things we had planned. The local partners who make our life worth living—friends and colleagues at 1 Shanthi Road and The Alternative Law Forum—have been our rocks and we cannot thank them enough for their support and encouragement. A special thanks to Daniel Goh, who apart from being a faculty member, also helped us put together the website to manage the workflow for the entire project.</span></p>
<p>[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. <span class="discreet">A full list of instructors and the prescribed curriculum can be found at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-overnance/iacs-summer-school-2012" class="external-link">http://cis-india.org/internet-overnance/iacs-summer-school-2012</a>.</span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/routledge-inter-asia-cultural-studies-volume-15-issue-2-nishant-shah-asia-in-the-edges'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/routledge-inter-asia-cultural-studies-volume-15-issue-2-nishant-shah-asia-in-the-edges</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital KnowledgeInter-Asia Cultural StudiesPeer Reviewed ArticlePublicationsResearchers at Work2015-04-14T12:47:38ZBlog EntryFigures of Learning: The Conditional Artist
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-conditional-artist
<b>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. This abstract by Tara Kelton explores the conditional artist, and the outcomes of inserting chance in the realization of art work through the use of new multimedia and digital technologies. </b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For five weeks George Korsmit and his assistants worked from a platform on a mobile scaffold to create this largescale mural. The corner points of each quadrilateral and the colors used to fill it in were determined within specific parameters by throwing dice.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This annotated visual essay presents the strategy in which artists provide instructions/parameters for the creation of artworks, to be executed by hired labour / users and describes how contemporary practitioners have employed this strategy across new technologies and webbased services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turks, YouTube and Facebook.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">By inserting chance into the realization of artworks, a distance is created between the artist and the product, and the artist cannot predict a precise outcome this results in new, unexpected visual forms and potentially infinite variation. The relationship between human gesture and interface is inverted rather than using a mouse to command software interfaces, instead, computational parameters direct human gestures. The essay will also demonstrate how instructional art strategies are used as tools for critiquing systems of power, both on and offline, drawing attention to the invisible labor that powers these systems, using their own mechanisms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Visual examples include both the historical and contemporary, from the work of early conceptual and computer artists (Sol Lewitt, John Baldessari) to present day art and design practitioners (Studio Moniker, IOCOSE).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-conditional-artist'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-conditional-artist</a>
</p>
No publisherTara KeltonResearchResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeFigures of Learning2015-11-13T05:42:25ZBlog EntryResearch Symposium on Digital Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries in India, New Delhi, Feb 27-28
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018
<b>It is our privilege to collaborate with LabEx ICCA (Université Paris 13), UNESCO New Delhi, Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH), and Centre d'études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS), to organise a Research Symposium on Digital Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries in India. The symposium gathers researchers and practitioners engaging with the changing landscape of cultural and creative industries in India in the context of the rapid expansion of digital technologies and social media. We invite you to join us for a critical exploration of the prevalent discourse around cultural and creative industries, to identify what could be the different forms of digital creative and cultural industries developing in India, and how they problematise the questions of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity, and labour.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Venue: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/UNESCO+NEW+DELHI/@28.5962104,77.1766346,17z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x390d1d69e65aea35:0x95c8f02076400bf2!2sUNESCO+NEW+DELHI!8m2!3d28.5962104!4d77.1788233!3m4!1s0x390d1d69e65aea35:0x95c8f02076400bf2!8m2!3d28.5962104!4d77.1788233?hl=en" target="_blank">Conference Room, UNESCO New Delhi, 1 San Martin Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, 110021</a> (<em>Note: Please bring your identity document to enter the UNESCO premises</em>)</h4>
<h4>RSVP: Registration is closed</h4>
<h4>Booklet: <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/docs/labex-icca-cis-unesco_symposium-2018_booklet.pdf">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Programme: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/files/research-symposium-on-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-programme-2018/at_download/file">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Poster: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cis-india/website/master/img/labex-icca-cis-unesco_symposium-2018_poster.png">Download</a> (PNG)</h4>
<h4>Organisers: <a href="https://icca.univ-paris13.fr/" target="_blank">LabEx ICCA, Université Paris 13</a>, <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/newdelhi" target="_blank">UNESCO New Delhi</a>, <a href="http://csh-delhi.com/" target="_blank">Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH)</a>, <a href="http://ceias.ehess.fr/" target="_blank">Centre d'études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud (CEIAS)</a>, and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India</h4>
<hr />
<img src="digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018/leadImage" alt="Research Symposium on Digital Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries in India, New Delhi, Feb 27-28" width="50%" />
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Concept Note</strong></h3>
<p>Digital technologies involve, accompany and provoke changes in the structuring of industrial sectors. How are they more particularly transforming the creation, production, distribution processes in cultural and creative industries? What are reconfigurations and challenges associated with the rise in power of actors from the industries of communication and information? What are the new stakeholder strategies, economic models and power relationships involved? Does digital have the effect of empowering the smallest actors / self-employed / freelancers or on the contrary does it allow large players to relieve themselves of the promotion, production costs on individual creator?</p>
<p>A growing interest in fields such as digital humanities, new media, digital cultures and the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector is another important development here. The rise of a number of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practice, research and teaching has also brought up significantly the question of new skills or expertise required in these fields. The need for digital literacy and ‘re-skilling’ to adapt to new forms of arts and humanities practice in a digital environment has often come with much criticism, as it is viewed as an effort towards vocationalisation and professionalization of these disciplines, a result of the changing mandates of the university and higher education in general. How do we then productively engage with these questions of skill, expertise and labour that goes into the building of new digital industries, which are often located within and at the periphery of academia and creative practices? Importantly, how can concerns about a perceived conflict of creativity and industry be addressed as these transformations take place rapidly with the advent of the digital is an important point of focus.</p>
<p>A critical exploration of the prevalent discourse around creative industries would offer ways of identifying what could be the different forms of digital creative and cultural industries developing in India, and how they problematize for us questions of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity and labour. The conflation and overlap of both ‘cultural’ and ‘creative industries’ and the location of these terms within a larger discourse around policy, economic development, livelihoods and rights, takes on different dimensions post the digital turn. In the context of initiatives like Digital India, and efforts to consolidate an IPR regime, the implications of policy reforms for creative work, especially that performed within informal/underground economies and in the cultural heritage sector are many. These discussions would inform and draw from the ongoing efforts in fostering of a digital economy in India, and the many ways in which it determines cultural production in the rest of the world.</p>
<p>Topics that will be addressed at the symposium include, but are not restricted to:</p>
<p>- Digital turns and transformations in cultural and creative industries</p>
<p>- Media infrastructure, digital platforms, and changing landscape of actors</p>
<p>- Digital transitions in the Indian news industry</p>
<p>- Online/offline lives of creative industries and media consumption</p>
<p>Presented by the Labex ICCA and the Center for Internet and Society (CIS), the symposium will gather Indian, French, and international specialists in the cultural industries, new media and technology, information and communication sciences, and social sciences but also professionals and industrial actors in the cultural and artistic sectors. The event is driven an ambition to promote the creation of an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional Franco-Indian research network to initiate, develop and share research on cultural industries in India and more widely in South Asia.</p>
<h4>Organising Committee</h4>
<p>- Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA, Université Paris 13 / CSH)</p>
<p>- Philippe Bouquillion (LabEx ICCA, Université Paris 13)</p>
<p>- Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)</p>
<p>- Sumandro Chattapadhyay (The Centre for Internet and Society)</p>
<p>- Puthiya Purayil Sneha (The Centre for Internet and Society)</p>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Symposium Programme (Draft)</strong></h3>
<h4>First Day – Tuesday, February 27, 2018</h4>
<p>10:00-10:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>10:30-11:00<br />
<strong>Welcoming Address</strong><br />
<em>Snigdha Bisht (UNESCO Cultural Department)</em><br />
<strong>Introductions</strong><br />
<em>Shailendra Sigdel (UNESCO Institute for Statistics), Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA / CSH), and Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)</em></p>
<p>11:00-12:30<br />
<strong>Session 1: Digital Opportunities and Challenges in the Cultural Industries</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Tanishka Kachru (National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad), Akshaya Kumar (IIT Indore), and Vivan Sharan (KOAN Advisory)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA / CSH)</em></p>
<p>12:30-13:30<br />
<strong>Lunch</strong></p>
<p>13:30-15:00<br />
<strong>Session 2: Digital Transitions in the News Landscape</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Zeenab Aneez (Freelance Journalist), Ravichandran Bathran (Dalit Camera), and Franck Rebillard (University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle and Labex ICCA)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)</em></p>
<p>15:00-15:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>15:30-17:00<br />
<strong>Session 3: Technology, Creativity, and (Re)Skilling</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Padmini Ray Murray (Srishti School of Art Design and Technology), Sneha Raghavan (Asia Art Archive), and Xenia Zeiler (University of Helsinki)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Puthiya Purayil Sneha (The Centre for Internet and Society)</em></p>
<h4>Second Day – Wednesday, February 28, 2018</h4>
<p>10:00-10:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>10:30-12:30<br />
<strong>Session 4: Digital Platforms and Media Distribution</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Narendra Ganesh (KPMG), Mae Thomas (Maed in India), Philippe Bouquillion (Université Paris 13 / LabEx ICCA), and Nikhil Pahwa (Medianama)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Sumandro Chattapadhyay (The Centre for Internet and Society)</em></p>
<p>12:30-13:30<br />
<strong>Lunch</strong></p>
<p>13:30-15:00<br />
<strong>Session 5: Copyright, Creative Content, and Rights of Performers</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Nandita Saikia (Lawyer), Anubha Sinha (The Centre for Internet and Society), and Manojna Yeluri (Artistik License)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Neha Paliwal (Sahapedia)</em></p>
<p>15:00-15:30<br />
<strong>Tea and Coffee</strong></p>
<p>15:30-17:00<br />
<strong>Session 6: Technologies of Aesthetic Imagi/nation</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Farrah Miranda (Artists), Rashmi Munikempanna (Artist), Swati Janu (Architect), and Tara Atluri (Writer, Researcher, Artist)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Tara Atluri (Writer, Researcher, Artist)</em></p>
<p>17:00-18:00<br />
<strong>Concluding Remarks</strong><br />
<em><strong>Speakers:</strong> Christine Ithurbide (LabEx ICCA / CSH), Neha Paliwal (Sahapedia), Philippe Bouquillion (Université Paris 13 / LabEx ICCA), Puthiya Purayil Sneha (The Centre for Internet and Society), Tara Atluri (Writer, Researcher, Artist), and Vibodh Parthasarathi (Jamia Millia Islamia)<br />
<strong>Chair:</strong> Sumandro Chattapadhyay (The Centre for Internet and Society)</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Location of Venue</strong></h3>
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d3503.1188754990826!2d77.17663461441647!3d28.596210382432034!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x390d1d69e65aea35%3A0x95c8f02076400bf2!2sUNESCO+NEW+DELHI!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sin!4v1518344368273" frameborder="0" height="450" width="600"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-transitions-in-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-india-symposium-2018</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroDigital NewsRAW EventsDigital EconomyDigital KnowledgeDigital MediaCreative IndustriesResearchers at Work2018-02-26T11:04:24ZEventNIPFP Seminar on Exploring Policy Issues in the Digital Technology Arena
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/nipfp-seminar-on-exploring-policy-issues-in-the-digital-technology-arena
<b>Anubha Sinha participated in this seminar as a discussant on the "Regulating emerging technologies" panel. The event was held at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla on October 10 - 11, 2019.
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<p>Click to view the <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/exploring-policy-issues-in-the-digital-technology-arena">agenda here</a>. The session briefs can be <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/session-briefs">seen here</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/nipfp-seminar-on-exploring-policy-issues-in-the-digital-technology-arena'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/nipfp-seminar-on-exploring-policy-issues-in-the-digital-technology-arena</a>
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No publisherAdminPrivacyDigital KnowledgeInternet GovernanceDigital TechnologiesDigital India2019-10-20T07:40:16ZNews Item