Centre for Internet and Society

The Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond

sneha-pp — 2016-01-28T08:25:18Z

Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.

The Zen of Pad.ma

Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.

Biographies

Sebastian Lütgert, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.

Jan Gerber, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16) - Selected Sessions

sumandro — 2016-01-18T09:23:06Z

We are proud to announce that the first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16), organised around the theme of 'studying internet in India,' will be held on February 26-28, 2016, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for generously supporting it. Here are the details about the session selection process, the selected sessions, the Conference programme (draft), the pre-Conference discussions, accommodation, and travel grants. The Conference will include a book sprint to produce an open handbook on 'methods and tools for internet research.'

Session Selection Process

We received 23 superb session proposals for the IRC16. All the teams that submitted sessions were invited to vote for their eight favourite session in a double-blind manner - the teams did not know the names of the people who proposed other sessions, and we at CIS did not know which team has voted for which particular set of sessions. After receiving all the votes, we could not help but change the format of the Conference (as planned earlier) to accommodate 15 sessions in total. All Discussion and Workshop sessions of the Conference are double track, except for the three Discussion sessions that received most number of votes.

Selected Sessions

#DigitalDesires: Received 8.15% votes. Proposed by Silpa Mukherjee, Ankita Deb, and Rahul Kumar.
#FollowTheMedium: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Zeenab Aneez and Neha Mujumdar.
#STSDebates: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.
#DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Aakash Solanki, Sandeep Mertia, and Rashmi M.
#InternetMovements: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Becca Savory, Sarah McKeever, and Shaunak Sen.
#FutureBazaars: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Maitrayee Deka, Adam Arvidsson, Rohini Lakshané, and Ravi Sundaram.
#MinimalComputing: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.
#WebOfGenealogies: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Ishita Tiwary, Sandeep Mertia, and Siddharth Narrain.
#WikiShadows: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.
#LiterarySpaces: Received 5.43% votes. Proposed by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.
#ArchiveAnarchy: Received 4.34% votes. Proposed by Ranjani M Prasad and Farah Yameen.
#AFCinema2.0: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Akriti Rastogi and Ishani Dey.
#ManyPublicsOfInternet: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Sailen Routray and Khetrimayum Monish.
#PoliticsOnSocialMedia: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Rinku Lamba and Rajarshi Dasgupta.
#SpottingData: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.

Dates and Venue

The IRC16 will take place during February 26-28, 2016, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are delighted to announce that the Conference will be hosted by the Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU, and will be generously supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF).

Conference Programme

Access the draft programme (v.2.1): Download (PDF).

Pre-Conference Conversations

Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in the pre-conference conversations: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers.

Accommodation

CPS and CIS will provide accommodation to all non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions, during the days of the Conference.

Travel Grants

We will offer 10 travel grants, up to Rs. 10,000 each, for within-India travel. The following non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions have been selected for travel grants: Aakash Solanki, Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Neha Mujumdar, Purbasha Auddy, Rahmanuddin Shaik, Rashmi M, Rohini Lakshané, Sailen Routray, P.P. Sneha, and Zeenab Aneez.

The travel grants are made possible by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF).

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions

Digital Futures of Indian Languages - Notes from the Consultation

Tejaswini Niranjana — 2016-01-15T05:55:53Z

A consultation on 'digital futures of Indian languages' was held at the CIS office in Bangalore on December 12, 2015, to generate ideas and structure the Indian languages focus area of the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF). It was led by Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), and Tanveer Hasan, A2K programme at CIS; and was supported by CDIF. Here are the notes from the Consultation.

The group that gathered at CIS on Dec 12, 2016, brought a wealth of digital Indian language experience to the meeting, including database creation, working to develop wikimedia, TEI initiatives, digital glossary creation, localisation and standardisation, development of open platforms and content management systems for teaching-learning, font development, and optical character recognition (OCR).

There was a detailed discussion of existing digital projects in Indian languages, and presentation of a few new ideas for development of applications that would strengthen digital infrastructure for research and teaching in social sciences and humanities. Among the proposed ideas were:

concept-clustering tool for multiple language comparisons,
semantic mapping tool or data visualisation tool that connects concepts to exisiting wikipedia entries,
online interactive bank of questions, to convert learnables into material that can be grasped conceptually,
annotation tool that aggregates tagged material across databases, eg. Shodhganga, Digital South Asia Library, Digital Library of India (Hindi example), and
gamifying as a way of enhancing teacing-learning as well as research process.

The participants agreed that increased archiving and digitisation, and annotation of digitised material, was a priority for Indian language work. Alongside the curation of the material to be thus processed – whether as an archive or a database, it was important also to develop better OCR systems, fonts and typefaces, DIY scanners, tagging and annotation tools.

CDIF would like proposals that might further some of these objectives. Priority will be given to those projects for which there is no funding already potentially available from other sources. Wherever possible, CDIF will try to synergise its work with existing efforts taken up by the government, or by platforms such as Wikimedia. CDIF will see its primary role not as a funding body but as an incubator of new ideas, and to this end will seek to provide technical support and other expertise apart from seed money.

Participants

Tejaswini Niranjana, CILHE, CSCS, CIS
SV Srinivas, CSCS, APU
Rajesh Ranjan, Govt of India
Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai
Sohnee Harshey, TISS Mumbai
Sherin B.S., EFLU Hyderabad
Swati Dyahadroy, Pune University Women’s Studies Centre
Tanveer Hasan, CIS
Tito Dutta, CIS
Sneha P.P., CIS
Jnanaranjan Sahu, Odia Wikimedia community
Spandana Bhowmick, JU, Kolkata and IFA Bangalore
Ravikant, Historian, CSDS Delhi
Veeven, Telugu wikimedia community
Rahmanuddin Shaik, CIS
Abhinav Garule, CIS consultant, Marathi
Ashwin Kumar AP, formerly CSCS, now Tumkur University
Subhashish Panigrahi, CIS
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, CSCS
Ravichandra Enaganti, Telugu Wikipedia
Ananth Subray, CIS consultant, Kannada
Om Shivaprakash, Kannada Wikimedia community
Pavithra H, Kannada Wikimedia community

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-futures-of-indian-languages-2015-consultation-notes

RAW Lectures #02: Anil Menon on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom'

sumandro — 2016-02-09T08:43:57Z

Anil Menon will give a talk on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom' at the Centre for Internet and Society's office in Bangalore on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 6 pm. Please join us for tea and coffee before the lecture at 5.30 pm.

Update: The video recording of the lecture can be accessed here.

The RAW Lectures series was initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes. The lectures also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Anil Menon will present the second lecture of the series on Wednesday, January 13, 2016, at 6 pm.

Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom

Story-telling, like the internet, depends on the existence of fixed protocols between the sender and the receiver. However, by manipulating ambiguity and contexts, speculative fiction constantly creates new and ever-changing protocols of reading. This makes it hard to define what exactly speculative fiction is. Spec-fic may be described as a catch-all term to describe genres such as magic-realism, fabulist fiction, slipstream, science-fiction, fantasy and various fusions thereof. In my talk, I will outline the history of spec-fic on the subcontinent, and show how it was used by authors such as Kylas Chundar Dutt to undermine imperialist narratives. In the last decade, the internet, which may be conceived as a speculative network, has emerged as another such tool. Internet access in India is growing at an extraordinary rate, but less well-known is the fact that Indian spec-fic is also undergoing a rather remarkable renaissance. I will show that these two threads of development are related, mutually reinforcing, and point to an interesting metaphor of speculative sovereignity, perhaps unique to India, and that serves to undermine any would-be tyrant’s protocols.

Anil Menon

Anil Menon’s research work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Intl J. of Neural Networks, Neural Proc. Letters, IEEE Trans On Evolutionary Computation, Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, British J. of the History of Science, and Small Business Economics. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Interzone, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, Jaggery Lit Review, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His stories have been translated into German, French, Chinese, Romanian and Hebrew. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and the Carl Brandon Society's 2011 Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books 2012), an international anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana epic. His most recent work is the novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Website: http://anilmenon.com/.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon

December 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2016-01-13T14:07:01Z

Our newsletter for the month of December 2015 is below.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is happy to share the twelfth issue of CIS newsletter (December 2015). Previous editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights
The 4th edition of the Global Congress themed around "Three Decades of Openness, Two Decades of TRIPS" was organized in New Delhi from December 15 - 17, 2015. The largest ever in Asia, the Congress was jointly organised by CIS, NLU-D, Open A.I.R., CREATe, Columbia University and American University. Nehaa Chaudhari summarized the developments of the 4th Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest in a blog post that was originally published on the Global Congress blog. Sunil Abraham wrote a blog entry stating the institutional position of CIS on the Net Neutrality discussion going on in India. Catch News interviewed Sunil Abraham about the recent advertisement by Facebook titled "What Net Neutrality Activists won't Tell You or, the Top 10 Facts about Free Basics" . Sunil argued against the validity of all the 'top 10 facts'. Odia author and cultural historian Jagannath Prasad Das has recently permitted 30 volumes of his notable works to be re-license under an open license (Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0) . Subhashish Panigrahi wrote a blog post on this in Discover Bhubaneswar, a web portal in Odisha. CIS has established institutional partnerships with University of Mysore and Guru G Learning Labs for furthering Wikipedia growth. Tanveer Hasan analyses the developments and lists out the possible future plans in this regard. CIS along with Observer Research Foundation, Centre for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Internet Policy Observatory organized an event in New Delhi on Net Neutrality across South Asia . Today the quantity of data being generated is expanding at an exponential rate. From smartphones and televisions, trains and airplanes, sensor-equipped buildings and even the infrastructures of our cities, data now streams constantly from almost every sector and function of daily life, stated Scott Mason in a blog post. The Government of India is in the process of developing 100 smart cities in India which it sees as the key to the country's economic and social growth. Vanya Rakesh gave an overview of the Smart Cities project currently underway in India in a blog post. For the second part of the Smart City podcast series, Sruthi Krishnan and Harsha K from Fields of View spoke with Sumandro Chattapadhyay on data, people, and smart cities. Fields of View has produced and shared the recording. An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken last year. The 'mapping digital humanities in India' 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. P.P Sneha published the third,fourth, and fifth sections of the study this month. The RAW programme has initiated a new annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC). The first edition of the Conference, organised around the theme of "studying internet in India" will be held in Delhi in February 2016

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Updates

● December 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; December 31, 2015).

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Access to Knowledge
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As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entries

Abuse of Dominant Position in Indian Competition Law: A Brief Guide (Sarthak Sood; December 9, 2015).
GCIP2015: Notes from the Inaugural Session (Spadika Jayaraj; SpicyIP; December 14, 2015).
GCIP Day 1 Session 3: Challenges in Re-Articulating Public Interest (Spadika Jayaraj; SpicyIP; December 17, 2015).
GCIP 15 Day 2: Discussions on Health Technology, Innovation and Access (Spadika Jayaraj; SpicyIP; December 17, 2015).
Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions in abeyance (Anubha Sinha; Anubha Sinha; December 21, 2015).
4th Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest: Statement of Conclusion for the IP and Development track (Nehaa Chaudhari; December 25, 2015). This was also published on the Global Congress Blog.

Event Organized

Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest (Organized by National Law University, Delhi, American Assembly, Columbia University, Open A.I.R., American University, and CIS; New Delhi, December 15 - 17, 2015).

Participation in Event

CODE Session (Organized by IDRC; December 17, 2015; New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari and Anubha Sinha participated in the event.

Media Coverage

NLSIU Conference on Access to Copyrighted Works for Persons with Disability: An enriching experience (Abolee Vaidya and Nuhar Bansal; SINAPSE; December 14, 2015). This is an event report on a one-day national conference on the 'Access to Copyrighted Works for Persons with Disability' for which Pranesh Prakash was a speaker .

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Articles

30 Books of Odia Author and Historian Jagannath Prasad Das to Come Online on Odia Wikisource (Subhashish Panigrahi; Discover Bhubaneswar; December 4, 2015).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାର (Subhashish Panigrahi; Sambad; December 6, 2015).

Blog Entries

Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books (Subhashish Panigrahi and Abhinav Garule; December 3, 2015). This was published on Wikimedia Blog.
Guru-G Learning Labs and CIS A2K Institutional Partnership (Tanveer Hasan; December 3, 2015).
Community Prioritisation of Content Donation: Kannada Wikisource (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
Analysis of Institutional Partnerships: University of Mysore and Guru G Learning Labs (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
Touch Point Report: Department of Tourism Studies, Christ University and St. Aloysius College, Mangalore (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
TTT 2015 (Tanveer Hasan; December 5, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon at Mangaluru (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; December 29, 2015).

Events Organized

Talk on bringing 1000 books about the culture of Maharashtra on Marathi Wikipedia (The Energy and Resources Institute; Bangalore; December 1, 2015). Avinash Chaphekar, Joint Secretary, Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha gave a talk.
Odia Wikimedia community meetup (Organized by Odia Wikipedia Community and CIS; Cuttack; December 3, 2015).
Sau Dhuni Teen Project: December Edit-a-thon (Women's Studies Centre, University of Pune; December 3, 2015).

Participation in Events

Telugu Wikipedia Day 2015, Photo Walk (Organized by Telugu Wikipedians; Dr. YSR State Archaeological Museum, Hyderabad; December 13, 2015). Pavan Santhosh attended the event. One of the popular Telugu news channel TV9 covered the event and telecasted the same. Eenadu published a special item on photo walk on December 13, 2015.
English Wikipedia and the Telugu Wikipedia joint meetup and edit-a-thon (Organized by Wikipedia community; Golden Threshold, Hyderabad; December 20, 2015). The event was covered inSakshi and Andhra Jyoti.

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Post More Articles on Kannada Wikipedia (Indian Express; Mangaluru edition; December 12, 2015).

A Kannada Wikipedia Editathon was conducted in Mangalore on December 10, 2015. The following are the media coverage for the same:

Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Udayavani; December 7, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Vijayavani; December 11, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Vijaya Karnataka; December 11, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Udayavani; December 11, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Prajavani; December 10, 2015).
Kannada Wikipedia Editathon (Prajavani; December 13, 2015).

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.

►Free Speech and Expression

Interview

Facebook shares 10 key facts about Free Basics. Here's what's wrong with all 10 of them (Shweta Sengar; Catch News; December 24, 2015).

Blog Entry

CIS's Position on Net Neutrality (Sunil Abraham; December 4, 2015).

Event Organized

Net Neutrality across South Asia (Organized by Observer Research Foundation, Centre for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Internet Policy Observatory and CIS; New Delhi; December 12, 2015).

Participation in Event

Consultation on "Understanding the Freedom of Expression Online and Offline" (Organized by Digital Empowerment Foundation and Association for Progressive Communications; YMCA, New Delhi; December 10, 2015). Jyoti Panday was a speaker at this event.

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Benefits and Harms of "Big Data" (Scott Mason; December 30, 2015).

►Cyber Security

Blog Entry

Ground Zero Summit (Amber Sinha; December 22, 2015).

Participation in Events

Second Regional Conference on Connectivity for All: Future Technologies, Markets and Regulation (Organized by International Telecommunications Society, IIMA IDEA Telecom Centre of Excellence and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; New Delhi; December 13 - 15, 2015). Sunil Abraham was a panelist.

Event Organized

Bangalore Chapter Meet - DSCI (CIS, Bangalore; December 1, 2015). CIS hosted the Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI. Pronab Mohanty, Inspector General of Police gave a talk on Cybercrimes. Sunil Abraham presented the outcome of his study "Anonymity in Cyberspace".

►Privacy

Blog Entries

UID Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
DNA Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
Privacy Policy Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
Sectoral Privacy Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 2, 2015).
Security Research (Vanya Rakesh; December 3, 2015).
Eight Key Privacy Events in India in the Year 2015 (Amber Sinha; December 31, 2015).

Participation in Events

Kick Off Meeting for the Politics of Data Project (Organized by Tactical Tech; Phnom Penh; December 7-8, 2015). Amber Sinha participated in the event.
Unbundling Issues of Privacy, Data Security, Identity Matrics, for Financial Inclusion (Organized by Indicus Foundation and MicroSave; December 10, 2015; Metropolitan Hotel and Spa, New Delhi). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

►Miscellaneous

Blog Entry

Smart Cities in India: An Overview (Vanya Rakesh; December 21, 2015).

Participation in Event

Elite Capture of Governance (Organized by Forum for Urban Governance and Commons; December 16, 2015; Bangalore). Vanya Rakesh participated in the event.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Articles

The Free Basics debate: Trai has a point in imposing temporary ban on net neutrality (Sunil Abraham; FirstPost; December 24, 2015).
Millions of Indians Slam Facebook's 'Free Basics' App (Subhashish Panigrahi; December 29, 2015).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by contemporary concerns to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It is interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Upcoming Events

A.I. Hype Cycles and Artistic Subversions (CIS, Bangalore; January 22, 2016). Gene Kogan will give a talk.
First Edition of Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Organized by CIS; New Delhi; February 25 - 27, 2016).

Blog Entries

RAW Lecture #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video (P.P. Sneha; December 1, 2015).
FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; December 2, 2015).
Reading from a Distance - Data as Text (P.P. Sneha; December 7, 2015).
The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities (P.P. Sneha; December 7, 2015).
Living in the Archival Moment (P.P. Sneha; December 14, 2015).

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News & Media Coverage
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CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

India's net neutrality debate is unique and complex (Pratap Vikram Singh; Governance Now; December 14, 2015).
Start-up India turns the heat on Facebook Free Basics (Anita Babu; Business Standard; December 22, 2015).
A Scam Masquerading as Santa (Apurva Venkat & Vandana Kamath; Bangalore Mirror; December 25, 2015).
Facebook goes out all guns blazing in push for Free Basics, Net neutrality advocates cry foul (IBN Live; December 29, 2015).
Foreign Media on Zuckerberg's India Backlash (Bhuma Shrivastava; NDTV; December 30, 2015).
Mark Zuckerberg's India backlash imperils vision for free global web (Bhuma Shrivastava; Livemint; December 30, 2015).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Offices

Bengaluru - No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru, 560071. Location on Google Map .

Delhi - First floor, B 1/8, Hauz Khas, near G Block market, after Crunch, New Delhi, 110016. Location on Google Map.

► Follow Us

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru, 560 071.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2015-bulletin

A.I. Hype Cycles and Artistic Subversions

sharath — 2016-01-01T07:52:20Z

Gene Kogan will give a talk on "A.I. hype cycles and artistic subversions" on Friday, January 22, 2016 at the Centre for Internet and Society office, 6 pm - 8 pm.

Mona Lisa restyled by Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Crab Nebula, and Google Maps. Style Transfer. Gene Kogan.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of popular interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, as emerging methods have set new scientific benchmarks and introduced classes of neural networks capable of imitating human behavior, among other impressive feats. More importantly, the study of these algorithms is rapidly crossing over into mainstream culture and industry as AI applications begin to inhabit more of our daily lives. Numerous initiatives have appeared, attempting to demystify and make these previously obscure research tracks more accessible to the public. Open source software like Torch, Theano, and TensorFlow have equipped amateurs with the same software which is achieving state-of-the-art results in industry and academia.

This talk will examine the most recent wave of artistic projects applying these methods in various cultural contexts, producing troves of machine-hallucinated text, images, sounds, and videos, demonstrating a previously unseen capacity for imitating human style and sensibility. These experimental works attempt to show the capacity of these machines for producing aesthetically meaningful media, yet challenging and subverting them to illuminate their most obscure and counterintuitive properties.

A recent article by the speaker about this: From Pixels to Paragraphs: How artistic experiments with deep learning guard us from hype.

Relevant projects by the speaker that will be presented include: Style Transfer, A Book from the Sky 天书, Learning to Generate Text and Audio, and Deepdream Prototypes.

Gene Kogan

Gene Kogan is an artist and programmer who is interested in generative systems and applications of emerging technology in artistic and expressive contexts. He writes code for live music, performance, and visual art. He contributes to numerous open-source software projects and frequently gives workshops and demonstrations on topics related to code and art.

He is a contributor to openFrameworks, Processing, and p5.js, an adjunct professor at Bennington College and NYU, a former resident at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, and a former Fulbright scholar in Bangalore, India, 2012-2013.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/ai-hype-cycles-and-artistic-subversions

Living in the Archival Moment

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:08:22Z

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.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

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.

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.

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," [1] 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 [2]. 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.

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 [3]. 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.

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) [4], 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.

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.

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.

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) [5], 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 [6], 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 [7], the Indian Memory Project [8], and Osianama [9]. 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'.

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 [10], 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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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)

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 anarchive 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.

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.

Notes

[1] Michel Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004: 18).

[2] Ibid.

[3] 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

[4] See: http://www.sparrowonline.org/.

[5] See: http://sarai.net/.

[6] See: http://pad.ma/.

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

[8] See: http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/.

[9] See: http://osianama.com/.

[10] See: http://studio.camp/.

References

Balachandran, Aparna, and Rochelle Pinto.Archives and Access. Bangalore: The Centre for Internet and Society, 2011

Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt.Translated by Harry Zohn, 59-67.New York: Schoken Books, 1968

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.Translated by Eric Prenowitz.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996

Drucker, Johanna. "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.Accessed December 11, 2015.http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34

Ernst, Wolfgang. "Discontinuities:Does the Archive become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?" In Digital Memory and the Archive, edited by Jussi Parikka, 113 - 140.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013

Manoff, M. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol.4, No.1 (2005): 9-25.Accessed December 10, 2015. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687

Portelli, Alessandro "What makes oral history different?”. In The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 32-42. London: Routledge, 2006.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment

The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:07:06Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 [1]. 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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 [2].

Indiancine.ma [3], 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 [4] 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 [5], 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 [6], 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.

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 [7], 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.

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.

Notes

[1] See section on Archives for a more detailed discussion on this issue: http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment.

[2] See the section on Reading from a Distance – Data as Text for more on this: http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text.

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

[4] See: https://pan.do/ra

[5] See: http://pad.ma/

[6] See: http://studio.camp/

[7] See: https://0xdb.org/

References

Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", Culture Machine. Vol 12, 2011. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440.

Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34.

Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5.

Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria. London: Duke University Press, 2008

Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' New Media and Society. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006

Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html.

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

Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:06:58Z

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on DH given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding [1] to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of social media such as Storify [2] or Scoop-it [3] 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 [4]. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation (Wieseltier 2013). But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts.

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 'massively addressable at different levels of scale' as suggested by Michael Witmore (Witmore 2012: 324-327, emphasis as in the original). According to him: "[A]ddressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction" (Ibid. 325). This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, "textuality is addressability and further ... this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event" (Ibid. 326). What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book (Ibid. 327).

Of Texts and Hypertextuality

An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of 'Bichitra' [5], an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore variorum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation. Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri [6], Professor Emeritus, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata has been part of the process of setting up this variorum. According to him the most novel aspects of this platform, or as he calls it - 'integrated knowledge site' - are to do with these functions of cross-referencing and integration. The bibliography is a hyperlinked structure, which connects to all the different digital versions of a particular text (the most being 20 versions of a single poem). The notion of a bibliography has always evoked hypertextuality – the possibility to link and cross - reference texts, but with the advent of the digital, this possibility has been fully realized, as seen in the case of the hypertext [7]. For collation, the project team developed a unique software, titled 'Prabhed,' (meaning difference in Bengali) that helps to assemble text at three levels (a) chapter in novel, act/scene in drama, canto in poem; (b) para in novel or other prose, speech in drama, stanza in poem; (c) individual words.. For instance, you can choose a particular section of a book, poem or play - and compare its occurrences across different editions and versions of the work to note their matches and differences. If two paragraphs have been removed from one chapter, and put into another, that can be traced through the collation software. If a particular word has been omitted in a later edition, or if certain lines have been rearranged in a poem, these changes can be tracked [8]. What makes the search engine 'integrated' is not simply that it can search all Tagore's works in one go, but that it links up with the bibliography and thereby with the actual text of the works. It is interesting to note here the different changes that the text undergoes to become available for study on a digital platform, where it is amenable to intense searching and querying of this kind. It is now possible to search across a large corpus of texts, for minute changes in words or sentences, and ask questions of these in terms of their usage, instances and contexts of their occurrence, thus facilitating a kind of enquiry previously never undertaken in textual studies.

The project however is not without its challenges, as Prof. Chaudhuri further outlines. Working with Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India. In Bengali some work has been done in the form of a scientifically designed keyboard software called Avro, which stores all the conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics [9]. Developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned material in Indian languages remains a crucial issue for most digitization and archival initiatives in India. Other issues include the problem of vowel markers appearing before the consonants, even if phonetically they follow and are keyed in afterwards. To get the font and keyboard software to recognize this is a big challenge. The third challenge, especially in the case of works printed from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, is that there are vast differences in spelling; the same word can be spelt in different ways, and as there is no lexicon, one may not do any kind of general search. There is also the issue of a high degree of inflection in the language. A word may have a suffix (or, vibhakti) attached to it to indicate the case: one for the subject of the sentence, another for the object, another for the possessive case and so on. These are multiplied by the different forms of the verbs. The development of a lexicon in Bengali would be one of the ways to resolve many of these issues. However, as most people can only see and interact with the digital interface of Bichitra, and not really understand the process behind it, or the amount of work involved in making the platform work the way it does, funding for research and development, maintenance and sustainability is difficult to obtain. Backroom file management, which includes both paper and digital files remains a big but largely invisible task on such a platform. The total number of files generated from Bichitra is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, and many of these are offline files which would not even go on to the website. Hence while uploading the files, the basic groundwork for a retrieval system for different files serving different functions had already been laid, including the creation of a bibliography, which was a huge exercise in itself. The process of making text available as hypertext is labor that is invisibilized, and is rarely or never available to the end user.

Prof. Chaudhuri also speaks of ways in which the notion of textuality has been rendered differently through the use of the internet and digital technologies. Digital or electronic text has helped theorize better the notion of a fluid text - the fact that a text is never complete, but only bound between the covers of a book at a given point of several processes that are technological as well as social. The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change in the last several decades. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content and process seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the 'text' through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces.

Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker, further espouses this thought when she talks about the new possibilities of textual analysis of film that are now possible, particularly in terms of temporal control, first with the DVD, then the internet and now with online archival platforms like Indiancine.ma [10] and the Public Access Digital Media Archive, or Pad.ma [11]. The first is an online archive of Indian film from the pre-copyright era (so effectively before 1955), while the second is an archive of found and archival footage, images sound clips and unfinished films [12]. Both platforms allow the user to search through an array of material, view/listen to them download or embed them as links. They make available to users not just an online database for storage and retrieval but also a space to work with a range of materials in multiple video and audio formats and themes through annotations and referencing. The annotation tool is perhaps the most innovative aspect of these platforms, wherein a user can pause, isolate a section of a sequence and annotate it using a range of options and filters. The annotations are textual, in the form of comments, commentary and marginalia (in the case of Pad.ma) and can also link to other paraphernalia around the film object, such as posters, images, advertisements and other literature. Users can also contextualize material by adding transcripts, descriptions, events, keywords, and even locating the events in the video on a map. These have brought to the fore several questions on relevance, accessibility and ownership, as in the case of raw footage from films, and opened up possibilities for such materials to be re-contextualized by the reader in different ways. This layering of annotations around the film object also creates a new research object, or text that then necessitates new methods of studying it as well. As opposed to the earlier practice of the researcher/critic having to watch the film first and then comment or analyse it, and relying on memory to generate the scholarship, it is now possible to pause, analyse or read and come back to the film and annotate the text in several ways. What does this do to the film text - the process documenting the form is new, not cinema as a form itself – is a question that comes up quite prominently here. The computational aspect also is important here, given the vast amount of footage that is now available, which then requires better lexical indexing to compute and manage large data sets. This has been a constant endeavour with Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma as well.

As in the case of film, what becomes prominent here is the move to a digital text of some sort. One such example of a digital text perhaps is the hypertext. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited as the 'ideal text' by Barthes (Landow 2006: 2). Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the possibilities of multilinearity of a text that can be realised in the digital, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture. As such it is only the narrative, and not the form itself that is multi-linear in hypertext fiction.

Textual Criticism in the Digital

But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the 'text' is manifested through practices of reading and writing (Barthes 1977). So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, in his book 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' (Moretti 2005: 1). He describes this approach as "within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study." He further says, "Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific kind of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005: 1, emphasis as in original). The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can 'facilitate' this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods of reading.

As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as not just a reference to volume but also its other aspects of data such as velocity, scope, and granularity among others significantly increases the ambit of what the term covers, with implications for new epistemologies and modes of research (Kitchin 2014). But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text – and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a certain form of cultural and literary production (Wilkens 2012). Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by working with corpora as opposed to select texts, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper (Fitzpatrik 2011). Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc. acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content (Ibid.). More importantly, it also points towards a change and diversity in the disciplinary method. Where close reading was once the only method by which a text became completely accessible to the reader, it is now possible to approach it through a set of processes, thus urging us to rethink the method of enquiry itself.

Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question we may still need to ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading (quoted earlier in this chapter) suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions (Kirschenbaum XXXX: 3). The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if DH can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located. The digital text, owing to the possibilities of ‘massive addressability,’ mentioned earlier is now more fluid and socialized. The renewed focus on the textual is most apparent in this manner of imagining the text, using the metaphor of a highly interlinked, networked and shared text. It also puts forth important questions then of how we understand technology a certain way, especially in the context of language and representation as an important factor of understanding new textual objects. Is technology a tool for textual analysis, or is it in inherent to our understanding of the nature of the text? Is the development of these methods of enquiry shaped by certain disciplinary requirements, and do they also challenge or create new conflicts for traditional methods of enquiry? The growth in the study of different media objects, such as video and cinema, and the advent of areas such as media studies, oral history, media archaeologies has further prompted concerns regarding the study of the digital object in these disciplines, and a rethinking of how we understand the notion of the text.

Notes

[1] "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation." See: http://www.tei-c.org/.

[2] See: https://storify.com/

[3] See: http://www.scoop.it/

[4] For more on text mining see Lisa Guernsey in 'Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom,' in The New York Times, October 16, 2003 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print. For more on data mining, distant reading, and the changing nature of reading practices see Matthew Kirschenbaum in 'The Remaking of Reading,' http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf.

[5] See: http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/.

[6] Interview with author, July 30, 2015.

[7] A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as "a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." As quoted in George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 2-12.

[8] Bichitra, 'Collation Guide,' accessed on September 17, 2015, http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php.

[9] Omicron Lab, accessed September 17, 2015. https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html.

[10] See: http://pad.ma/.

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

[12] For more on these platforms see the section on DH institutions in India.

References

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text". In Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Texts" in Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "The Remaking of Reading". http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf.

Kitchin, Rob. 'Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,' Big Data & Society, 2014, April–June, pp. 1–12, DOI: 10.1177/2053951714528481.

Landow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso, 2005.

Wieseltier, Leon, 'Crimes Against Humanities,' The New Republic, September 3, 2013, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism.

Wilkens, Mathew. "Canons, Close Reading and the Evolution of Method". In Debates in the Digital Humanities Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Witmore, Michael. "Text: A Massively Addressable Object". In Debates in the Digital Humanities, Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text

Consultation on 'Digital Futures of Indian Languages'

sumandro — 2016-01-15T06:10:57Z

A consultation on 'digital futures of Indian languages' will be held at the CIS office in Bangalore on December 12, 2015, to generate ideas and structure the Indian languages focus area of the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF). It is being led by Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), and Tanveer Hasan, A2K programme at CIS; and is supported by CDIF.

A Consultation to Generate Ideas for the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)

We at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; and Access to Knowledge Programme, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, have between us more than a decade-long experience in the field of Indian languages for higher education and Indic language computing. Together we have, over the past ten years, produced new research and incubated innovative pilot projects to stimulate the use of Indian languages in higher education, especially in the context of a widening linguistic divide in that sphere.

As a new phase in this process, we would like to explore the possible digital futures of Indian languages. Already, there have been many interesting but sporadic attempts at digitization of Indian language text resources and development of software for translation between Indian languages and a host of Indian language support platforms for web-based services. While this momentum is impressive, a lot more remains to be done, when seen against the backdrop of the surging demand for Indian language computational tools, especially those with potential for knowledge-use, that is, tools which could be used by students, teachers, researchers, media analysts, self-learners, bibliographers, librarians, archivists, collectors and the public at large.

The CSCS Digital Innovation Fund is looking to help set up new platforms that aid in generating, processing and making available a wide range of born-digital content. Under the CDIF, the Indian Languages initiative will support the development of new technological aids, apps, software programmes, websites, DYI digitisation devices, and any other project which will enrich the digital use of Indian languages.

We are organising this national consultation with the intention of bringing together people who have been or would like to be involved in such initiatives. We expect each participant to make a short 10-15 minute presentation on an idea they would like to develop, to take part in the general discussions, and to offer feedback to other speakers. We hope to learn from these conversations so that our own research and initiative development will benefit from the inputs as also to contribute to the conversation in such a way that isolated practices, innovations and opportunities are given a platform for greater generalisation and scalability.

- Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar AP, and Tanveer Hasan

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-futures-of-indian-languages-2015

FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities

sumandro — 2015-12-02T07:54:26Z

For the second part of the Smart City podcast series, Sruthi Krishnan and Harsha K from Fields of View spoke with Sumandro Chattapadhyay on data, people, and smart cities. Here is the podcast. We are grateful to Fields of View for producing and sharing this recording.

Podcast

If the audio player is not visible above, please download the MP3 file.

Source: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/2015/11/1126/.

Smart Cities podcast series: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/category/smartcitiespodcast/.

Fields of View

Issues in urban systems and public safety and security are often referred to as ‘wicked problems’. Such problems require a diverse set of actors to come together and collaborate. We need government, academia, industry, and civil society to question, debate, discuss, and ideate together. In short, we need a dialogue in diversity. Our goal at Fields of View is to design spaces to enable such dialogues using games and simulations – tools based on research at the intersection of social sciences, art, and technology.

Website: http://fieldsofview.in/.

Twitter: @fovlabs.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/fov-podcast-data-people-and-smart-cities

RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video

sneha-pp — 2016-02-09T08:45:00Z

Dr. Nishant Shah spoke on the 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' at the first event of the RAW Lectures series in Bangalore on March 6, 2015. Here is the video recording of the talk and the discussion that followed.

RAW Lectures

The Researchers at Work programme initiated the RAW Lectures series to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes. The lectures also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

Lecture #01 - Stories and Histories of Internet in India

Dr. Nishant Shah is the Professor of Culture and Aesthetics of New Media at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Research Associate at COMMON MEDIA LAB, Affiliate at DIGITAL CULTURES RESEARCH LAB, and International Tandempartner at HYBRID PUBLISHING LAB. He is the co-founder and former-Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.

More: http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah.

Download

Video files: MP4, OGG, and Torrent.

The video is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video

Silicon Plateau Vol-1

sumandro — 2019-03-13T00:56:36Z

This book marks the beginning of an interdisciplinary artistic project, Silicon Plateau, the scope of which is to observe how the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Silicon Plateau is a collaboration between T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. Volume 1 has been developed in collaboration with or-bits.com.

For us this series has a two-fold core. One the one side, there is the city of Bangalore, the trigger for various reflections about the way in which technology (old or emerging, as a service or as infrastructure) informs the socio-cultural and political environment; a city that is fascinating to us not just because we are located here but also for its characteristic fast-paced development shaped by the IT-boom and related industries. On the other side, there are the arts and creative thinking, for us the languages, lenses and methods to be used for interpreting technological developments and discussing their role and impact in the present time.

Our hope is that of building a series based on tangible accounts revolving around the unresolved complexities inherent to the intermingling of the arts, technology and society, and in the context of local histories and occurrences rather than of global narratives and mass media constructs. Stories that for our audience, we hope, will be those of the encounters—fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient—that a wide variety of contributors will have had with this fascinating city.

— Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

High-resolution PDF: Download (31.8 MB)

Low-resolution PDF: Download (4.7 MB)

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: Website

or-bits.com: Website

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-vol-1

Launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1

sumandro — 2015-11-26T04:32:41Z

Please join us on Friday, November 27, 2015 at 6.30 pm for the book launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1.

Born from a collaboration with or-bits.com and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Silicon Plateau is the first volume of a publishing series aimed at observing how the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Guided by our belief in the importance of understanding technologies in their specificity rather than their universality, Silicon Plateau presents observations emerging from the personal experiences and perspectives of a variety of contemporary artists, writers and researchers, national and international, who either live in or have spent a period of time in the city, or have just crossed paths with its communities.

Silicon Plateau Vol–1 features works by Abhishek Hazra, IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Achal Prabhala, Sunita Prasad, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Renuka Rajiv, Anja Gollor & Mirko Merkel, and Christoph Schäfer.

VENUE: T.A.J. Residency, No. 21 (New No. 53), 2nd Cross, Wheeler Road Extension, Cooke Town, Bangalore, 560084.

PLEASE NOTE: Coming from Pottery road up to Wheeler Road Extension there are three roads called 2nd Cross. Take the third one on the right-hand side, just after D'Costa Café. The road is also marked with a blue sign for CCBI. Also note that our building does not have parking.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/launch-of-silicon-plateau-vol-1

CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)

sumandro — 2018-05-14T07:25:49Z

The CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) has been set up by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) to encourage, host, and provide seed funding for the development of digital tools and infrastructure for arts, humanities, and social science research in India. The Fund’s priorities have been shaped by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Lawrence Liang, Nishant Shah, Sitharamam Kakarala, S.V. Srinivas, and Tejaswini Niranjana; and it is administered by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS.

A fundamental challenge has emerged in arts, humanities, and social science research with the coming of digital media. The challenge is of at least two kinds: 1) the ways in which we access our primary materials have changed, opening up the possibility of formulating new problems as well as conducting our research, and 2) additionally, the digital networks and objects that facilitate research are themselves becoming part of the phenomena we document and analyse. While the contexts under investigation are rich and diverse, the digital tools and methods by which to explore them are not readily available, especially in India.

CDIF uses the terms tools and infrastructure to respectively refer to autonomous software programmes and hardware devices, and platforms for collective use. A software to enable capturing of comments posted on a news website will be an example of the former, while an archive to be populated and annotated by a number of users will be an example of the latter.

The core mandate of CDIF is as follows:

Identifying digital tools and infrastructure needed by researchers and practitioners in arts, humanities, and social science fields. This is clearly not a one-time exercise, but a continuous one.
Promote, support, and fund the development of new digital tools and infrastructure, as well as revision and expansion of existing ones.
Creating focused conversations and materials around teaching of, and teaching through, digital tools and infrastructure across the arts, humanities, and social science disciplines.

During 2015-2017, CDIF has a specific interest in supporting efforts that engage with questions of the digital futures of Indian languages, needs and forms of archive-building, and tools and infrastructure of academic collaboration, among learners and among researchers.

CDIF will periodically announce open calls for project proposals related to development of digital tools and infrastructure for research. To receive these announcements, please subscribe to the cdif@cis-india.org mailing list. In exceptional cases, we may also consider directly supporting a project.

For any clarification, including sharing of project ideas, please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund

Centre for Internet and Society

The Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond

The Zen of Pad.ma

Biographies

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16) - Selected Sessions

Session Selection Process

Selected Sessions

Dates and Venue

Conference Programme

Pre-Conference Conversations

Accommodation

Travel Grants

Digital Futures of Indian Languages - Notes from the Consultation

Participants

RAW Lectures #02: Anil Menon on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom'

Update: The video recording of the lecture can be accessed here.

Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom

Anil Menon

December 2015 Bulletin

Highlights

A.I. Hype Cycles and Artistic Subversions

Mona Lisa restyled by Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Crab Nebula, and Google Maps. Style Transfer. Gene Kogan.

Gene Kogan

Living in the Archival Moment

Sections

Notes

References

The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

Sections

Notes

References

Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

Sections

Of Texts and Hypertextuality

Textual Criticism in the Digital

Notes

References

Consultation on 'Digital Futures of Indian Languages'

A Consultation to Generate Ideas for the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)

FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities

Podcast

Fields of View

RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video

RAW Lectures

Lecture #01 - Stories and Histories of Internet in India

Download

Silicon Plateau Vol-1

— Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

High-resolution PDF: Download (31.8 MB)

Low-resolution PDF: Download (4.7 MB)

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: Website

or-bits.com: Website

Launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1

Silicon Plateau Vol–1 features works by Abhishek Hazra, IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Achal Prabhala, Sunita Prasad, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Renuka Rajiv, Anja Gollor & Mirko Merkel, and Christoph Schäfer.

VENUE: T.A.J. Residency, No. 21 (New No. 53), 2nd Cross, Wheeler Road Extension, Cooke Town, Bangalore, 560084.

PLEASE NOTE: Coming from Pottery road up to Wheeler Road Extension there are three roads called 2nd Cross. Take the third one on the right-hand side, just after D'Costa Café. The road is also marked with a blue sign for CCBI. Also note that our building does not have parking.

CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)