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Studying Digital Creative Industries in India: Initial Questions
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions
<b>This brief overview of the discourse around creative industries is an attempt to explore some ways of identifying what could be digital creative industries in India, and the questions they raise and problematize for us in terms of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity and labour. The term ‘creative industries’ has been around for a while now, but with the advent of the digital, and with interest from different sectors, especially with a focus on policy and economic development, it would be essential to critically examine the discourse around the term, and see where it may be changing to open up new possibilities, particularly for the arts, humanities and design.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>The term ‘creative industries’ has been popular for more than two decades now, and continues to remain an important sector for research and development, as indicated by several shifts in policy and public discourse in the last few years. A significant move has been the foregrounding of creativity and knowledge as important resources for economic growth and social well–being. The term has a connection with the older and more specific term ‘cultural industries’, with its origins in the Frankfurt School <strong>[1]</strong> of theory, but has developed as part of a larger discourse around the creative economy/knowledge economy. First used in Australia in 1994 as part of a report titled Creative Nation <strong>[2]</strong>, it became more widely recognized in the following years with the setting up of the Creative Industries Task Force by the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 1997.The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) <strong>[3]</strong> was perhaps the most prominent global effort in recognizing and taking steps towards fostering the growth of creativity and cultural production as part of sustainable development.</p>
<p>Following this there have been several other initiatives across the world, most noticeably in the Anglo-American context, that have built upon this framework to ease and facilitate cross-cultural flows and diversity in the circulation of information, labour and goods. Increasingly, the attempt now is to understand the relevance of these efforts in the digital age, where several advancements in technology and the ubiquitous presence of the internet continue to determine the creation, circulation and consumption of cultural commodities. This blog post is an attempt to outline some initial thoughts on what could be the possibilities of studying ‘digital’ creative industries in India. The digital is an inherent aspect of much cultural and creative expression today, given the steady transition from analogue to digital and the increased presence of internet in almost every domain. What would constitute creative digital industries in the present moment, how do they determine the larger course of cultural production, and pose new questions for labour, commodities, creativity and technology more broadly are some of the questions explored here.</p>
<p>According to the UN Creative Economy Report 2010 <strong>[4]</strong> the creative industries:</p>
<ul>
<li>are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs;</li>
<li>constitute a set of knowledge-based activities, focused on but not limited to arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights;</li>
<li>comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives;</li>
<li>stand at the crossroads of the artisan, services and industrial sectors; and</li>
<li>constitute a new dynamic sector in world trade.</li></ul>
<p>As the report mentions, these are ‘evolving’ concepts and definitions, and just the number of areas that can come within the purview of the creative industries has increased greatly in the last decade. The report classifies creative industries under four different models as illustrated here:</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/CIS-RAW_CreativeIndustriesClassification_CER2010.png" alt="Classification of creative industries." />
<h6>Source: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">UN Creative Economy Report 2010</a>.</h6>
<p> </p>
<h3>Creative Industries in India</h3>
<p>In India, there has been a keen interest in the potential of creativity as a resource, although creative industries may not be a popularly used term. From a policy perspective it is largely in terms of opportunities for economic growth, and more recently the potential for innovation and entrepreneurship, as seen in the Niti Aayog report presented in 2015 <strong>[5]</strong>, which says that:</p>
<blockquote>the committee proposes using digital platforms to encourage innovation, reforming the educational system to encourage creativity and upskilling workers to make them more employable, improving the ease of doing business, and strengthening intellectual property rights. Finally, the committee also proposes a number of measures to change cultural biases and attitudes towards entrepreneurship in the long-term, including attaching entrepreneurship to large scale economic and social programs, promoting new high-potential sectors via the government’s “Make in India” campaign, fostering a culture of coordination and collaboration, attempting to redefine cultural notions of success, and tying entrepreneurship with the social inclusion agenda.</blockquote>
<p>The report therefore reflects an interest in harnessing creativity or creative labour as a significant factor in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and in some sense also expanding the scope of such entrepreneurship by tying it with social inclusion and encouraging collaboration. What this also has implications then is for educational reform, capacity-building and upskilling for increased employability and better livelihoods, something that requires a systemic and focused effort spread over time. The report also explicitly speaks of strengthening an existing intellectual property regime, which also has been a rather dominant framework for the creative industries discourse from a policy perspective. While there is a need to focus on growth and innovation, a perceived objective of IP, the easy conflation of the two is problematic. Further, the role of IPR in fostering innovation and socio-economic development, as reflected in the draft National IPR policy (2014) <strong>[6]</strong> is contentious, as responses to the draft have pointed out <strong>[7]</strong>. It would also be imperative to understand better the ‘cultural notions of success’ and how these would also impact the creative industries discourse in India.</p>
<p>As part of a large research initiative titled <em>Culture: Industries and Diversity in Asia</em> (CIDASIA) <strong>[8]</strong> spread over two years, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Bangalore worked on some of the pertinent questions that emerged out of the creative industries discourse in India and the sub-continent. In a report produced as part of this initiative creative industries are described as:</p>
<blockquote>[T]he vast sector that has emerged with the arrival of modern technologies (emphasis as in the original) and forms of mass reproduction since the colonial period. This sector has now become an important site of intervention for both governments such as in UK, Australia and India and international agencies such as the United Nations.</blockquote>
<p>Further, about the programme the report says:</p>
<blockquote>The initiative attempts to assess the viability of international and government policies for cultural and creative industries and thus lay the groundwork for a hitherto unprecedented intervention of philanthropic organizations in the domain. We specifically focus on culture industries through the node of ‘livelihoods’ that we see as inextricably tied to this sector.</blockquote>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>There were several learnings from these initiatives about the nature of creative industries (audio-visual media including film and television), the conflation and overlap with culture industries (including craft and legacy industries) and the complex relationship between the two, and how the latter benefits from the first. The question of livelihoods, particularly those of non-citizens, or the migrant is an important one, for it highlights the cultural visibility of these industries, and more importantly establishes the presence of an underground economy that produces goods of high economic value, using cheap labour. Policy reforms, especially with respect to IPR and any regulation of these industries would need to take into account these features. The convergence of difference forms of cultural production with the growth of new media technologies, in particular is a pertinent question. Along with growing concerns around piracy, growth of new kinds of content, exclusivity and distribution become important factors here. The availability of capital and technology, and a growing global presence has also changed dramatically the nature of several creative industries, such as media, entertainment and advertising, but also brought with it challenges of finding creative and sustainable business models <strong>[9]</strong>. The problem of cultural impenetrability, or the difficulty of certain commodities to find a market in certain countries was also brought up as part of a study on the Korean wave in India. The translation of cultural worth into economic value, here studied through an examination of the cinema as cultural object, produced interesting observations in addressing the commodification of these objects and understanding the problem of value in this context <strong>[10]</strong>. The role of technology in the growth of the creative industries was an inherent aspect of all these studies, with factors such as context, conditions and quality of access, and the need to understand the problem of the 'last mile' as a conceptual and cultural problem, rather than a technological one, being emphasized in these findings <strong>[11]</strong>.</p>
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<h3>Creative Labour?</h3>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study also critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>In the last decade alone, the internet and digital technologies have grown at an exponential pace in India. Creative industries have been driven greatly by advancements in technology, and the role of the digital here then becomes an important aspect of the discourse, in terms of either a space, object or context. The term itself has drawn different kinds of criticism, beginning with the juxtaposition of creativity and industry, or the ‘economisation of culture’, as another product of contemporary capitalism, a critique that stems from the Frankfurt School. The problems are several, as outlined here by Andrew Ross <strong>[12]</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>It may be too early to predict the ultimate fate of the paradigm. But sceptics have already prepared the way for its demise:: it will not generate jobs; it is a recipe for magnifying patterns of class polarisation; its function as a cover for the corporate intellectual property (IP) grab will become all too apparent; its urban development focus will price out the very creatives on whose labour it depends; its reliance on self-promoting rhetoric runs far in advance of its proven impact; its cookie-cutter approach to economic development does violence to regional specificity; its adoption of an instrumental value of creativity will cheapen the true worth of artistic creation.2 Still others are inclined simply to see the new policy rubric as ‘old wine in new bottles’ – a glib production of spin-happy New Labourites, hot for naked marketization but mindful of the need for socially acceptable dress. For those who take a longer, more orthodox Marxist view, the turn toward creative industries is surely a further symptom of an accumulation regime at the end of its effective rule, spent as a productive force, awash in financial speculation, and obsessed with imagery, rhetoric and display.</blockquote>
<p>Similar concerns may be highlighted in the Indian context as well, where the employability of many in creative fields of work, which often fall under the informal or unorganized sector, has always been fraught with uncertainty. The access to cultural and social capital also defines the discourse in a certain manner, as largely urban-centric and focused around a particular class. Education, training and capacity-building efforts in creative fields, and access to these are an important factor that requires further exploration. As reflected in the discussions above, the prevalent imagination of cultural and creative industries still focusses on IPR and socio-economic development of certain sectors of the knowledge economy, therefore making invisible other kinds of labour. The appropriation of the term itself to focus on innovation in certain sectors, at the cost of others, and streamlining and regulation of these in some way would be another aspect of concern. More importantly, the definition of creativity, as beyond skilling for certain kinds of work also needs to be emphasized in these discussions.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Key Questions</h3>
<p>Whether these are still pertinent criticisms now is a question, and more importantly, what would be new ways to frame the creative industries debate today would be a relevant starting point of engagement. The following are some questions that could be useful in mapping the creative industries discourse and how it could be thought about today, post the digital turn:</p>
<ol><li>What are digital creative industries? Is it possible to identify a smaller subset of industries that would come within the purview of this term, or is it another entry point into the creative industries discourse in India, where the digital is all pervasive? What are new kinds of creative industries that are heavily and/or purely reliant on the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Does the digital add a new perspective/dimension to how we theorise the notion of creative labour, because of the manner in which it affects, or determines creative expressions in the present, on the internet and more broadly in the digital? More importantly, do we need to critically think about a definition of creativity itself, today within the digital context? How do we then understand questions of precarity in working conditions, innovation and entrepreneurship in this space?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Who is the creative subject? Is it possible to understand such a subject outside of the very Eurocentric discourse around creativity and ‘creation’, which paints the creator as hegemonic in some sense? Another new way to reframe the livelihoods question is to understand the creative worker/knowledge worker, and how to think of these distinctions. What are the new ways to understand this debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>The discourse around creative industries has largely been framed within the context of the intellectual property rights, and as a method to ensure the stability of the IPR regime. Given the changes, and many nuances to the IPR debates in the last few years, and the growth of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement, it would be useful to understand the growth of creative digital industries in this context.<br /><br /></li>
<li>What does this tell us about a growing digital economy in India? Creative industries would raise interesting questions about the fostering of a digital economy in India, and the many ways in which it determines cultural production in the rest of the world.<br /><br /></li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,' 1944. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm">https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994">http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html">http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf">http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf">http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> For more on this see: 'Comments on the First Draft Of The National IPR Policy' submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society, 2015 <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf</a>, and 'SpicyIP Tidbit: New IPR Policy in 2 months' by Balaji Subramanian, SpicyIP, October 2015, <a href="http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html">http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1">http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> S. Ananth, 'Business of Culture in India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong>'When The Host Arrived: A Report on the Problems and Prospects for the Exchange of Popular Cultural Commodities with India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong>Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 'The Last Cultural Mile' (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011) <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old">http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Andrew Ross, 'Nice Work of You Can get it: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy,' in <em>MyCreativity Reader</em>. Eds. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital EconomyDigital KnowledgeResearchCreative IndustriesResearchers at Work2016-03-18T13:55:56ZBlog EntryRAW Lectures #02: Anil Menon on 'Speculative Fiction and Freedom' - Video
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon-video
<b>Anil Menon spoke on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom' at the second event of the RAW Lectures series in Bangalore on January 13, 2016. Here is the video recording of the talk and the discussion that followed.</b>
<p> </p>
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/CISRAWLectureSeriesIIAnilMenon" frameborder="0" height="480" width="640"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<h2>RAW Lectures</h2>
<p>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.</p>
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<h2>Lecture #02 - Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom</h2>
<p><a href="http://anilmenon.com/" target="_blank">Anil Menon</a>’s research work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as <em>Intl J. of Neural Networks</em>, <em>Neural Proc. Letters</em>, <em>IEEE Trans On Evolutionary Computation</em>, <em>Foundations of Genetic Algorithms</em>, <em>British J. of the History of Science</em>, and <em>Small Business Economics</em>. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including <em>Interzone</em>, <em>Interfictions</em>, <em>Strange Horizons</em>, <em>Jaggery Lit Review</em>, and <em>Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet</em>. His stories have been translated into German, French, Chinese, Romanian and Hebrew. His debut novel <em>The Beast With Nine Billion Feet</em> (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 <em>Breaking the Bow</em> (Zubaan Books 2012), an international anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana epic. His most recent work is the novel <em>Half Of What I Say</em> (Bloomsbury, 2015).</p>
<p><strong>More:</strong> <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Download</h2>
<p><strong>Video:</strong> <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIIAnilMenon/CIS%20RAW%20Lecture%20Series%20-%20II%20(Anil%20Menon).mp4" target="_blank">MP4</a>, <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIIAnilMenon/CIS%20RAW%20Lecture%20Series%20-%20II%20(Anil%20Menon).ogv" target="_blank">OGG</a>, and <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIIAnilMenon/CISRAWLectureSeriesIIAnilMenon_archive.torrent" target="_blank">Torrent</a>.</p>
<p>The video is shared under Creative Commons <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" target="_blank">Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</a> license.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon-video'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon-video</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppLearningRAW LecturesResearchers at WorkEventProtocols2016-02-09T08:38:19ZBlog EntryThe Zen of Pad.ma: 10 Lessons Learned from Running Open Access Online Video Archives in India and beyond
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma
<b>Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, the co-initiators of, and the artists/programmers behind the pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) project will deliver a lecture at CIS on Wednesday, February 03, 6 pm, on their experiences of learnings from running open access online video archives in Germany, India, and Turkey. Please join us for coffee and vada at 5:30 pm.</b>
<p> </p>
<img src="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-pad-ma-10-lessons-learned-from-running-open-access-online-video-archives-in-india-and-beyond/leadImage" alt="The Zen of Pad.ma - Lecture by Sebastian Lütgert and Jan Gerber, Feb 03, 6 pm" />
<p> </p>
<h2>The Zen of Pad.ma</h2>
<p>Eight years after the launch of Pad.ma and three years since the inception of Indiancine.ma, Sebastian Lütgert will take a closer look at some of the strategies -- decisions and decision making processes, foundational principles and accidental discoveries -- that may have helped make these projects sustainable. While most of the lessons begin with concrete questions related to software and technology, most of them will end up pointing beyond that: towards a general theory of collaboration, towards strategies against premature separation of labor, and towards a few practical proposals for successful self-organization on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Biographies</h2>
<p><strong>Sebastian Lütgert</strong>, media artist, programmer, filmmaker and writer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-founder of Bootlab, textz.com, Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Lecturer at the Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, various publications on cinema, copyright, radical subcultures and the politics of technology.</p>
<p><strong>Jan Gerber</strong>, video artist and softwate developer, lives and works in Berlin. Co-initiator of Pirate Cinema Berlin, Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, author of numerous Open Source software projects, most recently Open Media Library. Involved in a variety of open-access archive projects around the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-zen-of-padma</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppPracticeDigital HumanitiesDigital MediaOpen AccessResearchers at WorkEventArchives2016-01-28T08:25:18ZEventLiving in the Archival Moment
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fifth among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <strong>Living in the Archival Moment</strong></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, Walter Benjamin (1968: 59-67) dwells upon the many nuances of the art of collecting (books in this particular case), on everything from the sometimes impulsive acquisition to the processes of careful selection and classification which go into creating a library. "Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects" (67) he says, and this becomes important given the many ways in which we can acquire books today, as well as the problems of copyright, authorship and authority over meaning and knowledge that become a bone of contention in the digital age. The collector defines the nature of the object here, because he lives in and through them. While describing the personal process that is collecting, Benjamin is also aware that it may not be a process that will last as it is - a foreboding of the age when the impulse to collect, hoard and categorise has only grown tremendously due to increased access to books owing to the internet, but also where the figure of the collector seems to have been slowly effaced, thus presenting a ‘chaos of memories’ (60) in unarranged collections spread over several hard disks instead of book shelves. The figure of the collector, and the idea of ‘ownership’ emerge as an important trope in understanding the notion of order, or rather disorder of the art of collecting in the digital space.</p>
<p>This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in DH - the archive - particularly as it occupies a predominant space in the imagination of the field in India, and processes of knowledge production and the history of disciplines in general. The influx of digital technologies into the archival space in the last decade has been an impetus for the large scale digitisation of material, but it has also thrown up several challenges for traditional archival practice, including the preservation of analogue material, the problems of categorising and interpreting large volumes of data, and the gradual disappearance or re-definition of the traditional figure of the collector – a concern echoed across several spaces extending from private online archival efforts to large collaborative knowledge repositories like the Wikipedia. With the questions that DH seems to have posed to traditional notions of authorship or subject expertise, the 'digital humanist', when we imagine such a person, can be seen as a reinvention of this figure of the collector - a curator of materials and traces, here of course, digital traces.</p>
<p>The concept of the archive has been important to knowledge production and particularly the development of academic disciplines; whether driven by concerns of the state or the impulses of the market, there have been different ways of defining and understanding the archive, not only as a documentary record of history, but as a metaphor for collective memory and remembrance which includes technology in its very imagination. One of the most elaborate formulations of the archive has been in the work of Jacques Derrida, where apart from proposing the death and preservation drives as primary to the archival impulse, he also highlights the process of archivisation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory (1995). Michel Foucault in his concept of the archive looks at it as "a system of discursivity which establishes the possibility of what can be said," <strong>[1]</strong> thus pointing to the archive as a space not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of knowledge creation. There is today a consensus, at least in its academic understanding that archives cannot be relegated to being self-contained linear spaces of objective historical record, but that archival practice itself has political implications in terms of how collective memory and history, or as indicated by Foucault, histories are preserved and retold through a process of careful selection. Disciplines themselves may therefore be seen as archives of knowledge, and one may stretch this analogy to say that they may also appear as self-contained spaces with restrictions on entry for different ways of remembering and reading. More importantly, the question of what constitutes the archive and what objects or materials may be archived reflects a larger debate about problems with the definition of disciplines and shifting disciplinary boundaries <strong>[2]</strong>. With the shift to the digital archive, new questions about access, sharing and collaboration have emerged, as illustrated by the number of new archival spaces that have emerged, and growth of expansive archives such at the Walt Whitman, Rossetti and Blake archives in the West (Drucker 2011). However, as is apparent, the conditions of access to such archives and their interpretation have not been problematised enough, if at all, particularly with respect to how they contribute to generating new kinds of knowledge or scholarship.</p>
<p>While DH debates in the West have focussed quite significantly on archives and the possibilities that digital collections have now opened up research and creative practice involving archival material, in the Indian context it is the 'incompleteness of the archive' that still seems to be a bone of contention. Some of the scholars and practitioners interviewed as part of this study see archive creation as one of the key questions of DH as it has emerged in India, and the possibilities and challenges that this brings to the fore, (particularly in terms of access to rare materials and extending these debates to regional languages) as something that the field will need to contend with at some point. The role of digital technologies in fostering this activity of archive-building is stressed in these debates. In an earlier monograph titled Archives and Access produced as part of CIS-RAW, Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto trace a material history of archival practice in India, specifically looking at conflicts and debates surrounding state and colonial archives, and the politics of access, preservation and digitisation (2011). The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to the now within the reach of the individual, engendered by increased access to technology, and the ‘publicness’ that the visual nature of the internet fosters. However they also talk of the possibility of continuing forms of state or market control over the archive precisely through the internet and digital technologies, with the nature of individual access and use again being mediated through digitisation. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer with the archives at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata who was also part of the Archives and Access project, and has been part of some early conversations on DH in India, speaks about this change <strong>[3]</strong>. Even twenty years ago, it was difficult to define the archive, as it was considered the prerogative of the state, and this defined the nature of archival practice and management as well. From there it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved some issues of preserving content and the problems of physically accessing archives to a large extent, it may not always be the best option, as the archival or analogue material needs to be in good condition so as to make for good digitised copies, thus emphasising the need for more effective methods and better training in preservation practices. Also, as he point out, digitisation may be able to capture and preserve the content of an artifact, but not its form, which is equally important. He therefore rues the fact that even with technological advancements, there is still a lack of interest in archival practice, and often institutional mandates determine the archival agenda which may not be in the interest of generating more research and scholarship around material, as this is the only way to keep the archive alive.</p>
<p>The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, has been an important shift here, with their focus on archiving the personal and the everyday, he says, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. While on the subject of private collections and personal narratives, Dr. C S Lakshmi, writer and academic who is director of the Mumbai-based Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) <strong>[4]</strong>, has particular concerns about digitalisation making large amounts of information available for consumption online, particularly with respect to women. While digitisation is an effective tool for preservation and offers several possibilities for documentation, unmediated access is problematic and often a breach of privacy. There is so much information out there that the digital sphere makes available, sometimes this excessive communication also contributes to certain silences and obscures or makes invisible people and their stories. So very often its not a question of just making information available to people. What are you making available, how much are you making available and to whom, for what purpose - these are all important questions that contour the notion of access and need to be addressed according to Dr. Lakshmi. Curation therefore emerges as an important process. The publicness or hyper-visibility that the visual nature of the internet and digital technologies accords to the archive is seen tied to a narrative of loss here, and against the rhetoric of preservation which is still in many spaces deemed to be the primary function and imagination of the archive. What this sets up is also a conflict between the possibilities of open access and sharing of material, and concerns of privacy, and the need to find a space where both these seemingly contradictory ends meet.</p>
<p>The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies contributes to a 'problem of excess', and that is where curation and building new kinds of tools come in as a critical and creative exercise. Dr. Amlan Dasgupta reiterates this opinion. He talks about the internet as fostering an 'age of altruism', where the proliferation of technological gadgets has brought about a culture of voluntarily sharing materials online. This of course challenges notions of authority and brings forth the problems of the unarranged library which Benjamin’s essay also points towards, but the archive can be used as a metaphor to understand how notions of authorship and authority are being challenged as is apparent in the DH discourse. The theory-practice divide is also something that ails this particular domain like many others; not only is there an inadequate understanding of how to access and use the archive on the part of students and researchers alike, but there is a lack of standardisation of the practice of archive management and the science itself, in terms of metadata, problems of ownership and copyright, and most importantly inadequate infrastructure, training and expertise on preservation of analogue materials. While it may not be within the ambit of DH to address all of these questions, the renewed interest in archival practice and the diversification of its modes is something is that would continue to be an integral aspect of its practice. In fact what digitisation has also led to is diversity in the modes of documentation itself, and the larger process of archiving, which has important implications for the kinds of questions one may ask within certain disciplinary formations, history being an important example. The nature of material in the archive is never quite the same, so is the manner of working with and interpreting them. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, who has been engaged with archival practice herself, and is now working on setting up oral history archives through the Centre for Public History, speaks of the changes that digital technologies have produced in studying oral history, specifically in terms of recording and interpretation of interviews. The mode of documentation, particularly the digital, adds a new layer to the manner in which the voice, sounds or even silence is recorded or interpreted. She refers to Alessandro Portelli’s work on oral history, which talks about the nuances of the sound, such as tone, volume and speed of speaking which are all bearers of meaning and can tell you so much about what the person is trying to say, but can never be fully translated into the written word.(2006, 32-42) Although there are still some basic but crucial obstacles such as with transcription, the digital space may allow for tools that help with more nuanced interpretation of recorded material, and large volumes of it; a possibility that CPH is looking into at the moment. There are several institutions in India who want to set up their archives, most of their materials include many hours of interviews, with many people at a time and transcription is a problem, because it takes time, and there is still no software to aid or completely automate this process effectively. One of the approaches of DH may be to address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material using digital tools.</p>
<p>The digital archive is one space where many of these questions about the process of archive-creation and the separation between preservation and production that is often made in the existing discourse come into conflict, thus inflating the definition of the term much more. New technologies of publishing, the proliferation of electronic databases and growth of networks that in turn encourage production and the increasing amount of born-digital materials then present new questions for the concept of the archive and scholarship.</p>
<p>The role of technology has been significant in the development of the concept of the archive; in fact the archive, in its very nature would be a technological object, or a space where one can trace a history of the disciplines in relation to technology. The introduction of the digital has added yet another dimension to this question. Dr. Ravi Sundaram, Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and one of the co-initiators of the Sarai programme at the Centre for Developing Societies (CSDS) <strong>[5]</strong>, speaks of how the advent of the digital has brought about several shifts in the imagination of the archive, which he sees as two distinct phases. Sarai was one of the early models of a concept driven, networked archive, based on a culture of 'mailing lists' that built conversations around topics which in themselves constituted the archive. The shifts came with Web 2.0 with which archiving the everyday became a possibility, given the access to inexpensive gadgets and the pervasiveness of social media. While the model of the networked, curated and public archive still has valence today, a significant next step would be to see how one can extend these questions to thinking differently about the archive, by developing new protocols for entering, sharing and circulation of material, and producing new knowledge or concepts around these ideas. This would be crucial in terms of generating research and scholarship around the archive itself as a concept, and realising the full potential of network-generated information. Another pertinent question is that of information and technology infrastructure, which is a political question as well. The investment on infrastructure for the archive is determined by different kinds of interests and will play an important role in how archival efforts will ultimately develop. As Dr. Sundaram reiterates, the point to note is that new archival efforts are not only general repositories, but critical interventions in themselves. They foster new kinds of visibilities. The Pad.ma archive <strong>[6]</strong>, for example, works with existing footage and reinvents or adds new layers of meaning to it through annotations and citations. This also opens up possibilities for new kinds of questions to be asked about existing material. Private archival efforts, many initiated by individuals are also becoming more niche and specific, driven by a specific research agenda, public interest in conservation or as critical and creative interventions in a particular area. Some examples of this are the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma <strong>[7]</strong>, the Indian Memory Project <strong>[8]</strong>, and Osianama <strong>[9]</strong>. In some of these examples, the archive may be used as more of a metaphor rather than a description or classificatory term, because of the layers of meaning that they generate around an existing object or 'trace'.</p>
<p>They are also reflective of a different milieu that came about with the digital turn in India. Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker who set up the artist’s studio and collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[10]</strong>, and is also part of the team behind the Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma platforms, speaks of the various factors that contributed to the setting up these two online archival spaces. As artists for them the larger concern was the ever-changing electronic media or technological landscape, as seen in some of their earlier projects such as Russel TV, which involved creating content around media ecologies and intellectual property in a sort of pro-piracy, and access to knowledge framework. The focus for them was the ecology or the landscape, and within that the sharp point was where there were irregularities and inequalities and there was a need to redistribute things in a certain way. Pad.ma grew out of a larger idea of understanding this changing milieu around the early 2000s, where the digital had already become pervasive – filmmakers were editing on a laptop or desktop computer, they had access to the internet and DIY tools, resources were cheaper and more accessible as the internet was opening up a world of possibilities. Therefore, as the team realised, if there was to be an archive of the contemporary, it had to be digital or visual, or video specifically, and located online. This was also the time when the independent filmmaker had become a prominent figure and the challenges and advantages of sharing unused and raw footage became quite possible and apparent with a platform like Pad.ma. The archive was created as something contemporary, non-state and non-canonical, with a wide range of stakeholders and contributors ranging across NGOs, activists, independent filmmakers to individuals with an interest in film and video. There were however several difficulties as well, chiefly in getting people to share material, issues of privacy, and a resistance to the use of this platform as a pedagogic and academic resource, which over the years have come down with the people becoming more open to using material on the platform as primary texts, and the development of more tools for editing and annotations. Indiancine.ma that way is more of a traditional form of film studies, but with more possibilities now for working with the film text.</p>
<p>However, while entering the digital space may have enabled more sharing and dissemination of material, how much of these efforts also make their way into larger civil society and policy debates, scholarship and pedagogy is still a crucial question. Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been used by students, in media and film in particular but the efforts remain niche and restricted to certain disciplines only. Some part of this comes from a resistance to the film or a certain kind of text as academic, and therefore scholarly or relevant to a larger cross-section of research. This also stems from a predominant imagination of the archive as a static, linear repository. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha, film and cultural studies scholar, who was part of the team that created Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, points out, the distinction between the archive as a repository space and an interpretive space is one that needs to be made clearly, and archives are clearly a form of the later. In fact the idea of the digital as a permanent medium is false, and it should not be the solution to problems of storage and preservation. Further, in a lot of expansive archives, whether digital or physical, it is seen that only up to five percent of the material is used, and more often than not it is the same five percent! This is because most people do know about the existence of certain kinds of material which is buried deep within the archive, and therefore do not access it. The emphasis of archival practice, and particularly in the time of the digital archive where space is not seen as a constraint, yet, should be to enliven the archive to ensure that material from the 'dead space of the archive' is made more searchable and accessible for use.</p>
<p>Curation then comes back again as an important aspect of the archive, even in the time of the digital. Indira Chowdhury sees this as one of the main shifts from the traditional archive, where the curator or the archivist performed the role of a custodian or gatekeeper who grants restricted access to the archive only to researchers or scholars. Now with the advent of the internet and shift to the digital, it’s more about collaboration, and adding to the archive, and this has encouraged a diversity of users, and uses of the archive. This comes with its own problems however, such as with metadata standards for instance, and particularly questions of format which become important from the perspective of technological obsolescence (as discussed in the earlier chapter). The digital archive has made practitioners think about what they are archiving, for whom and what purpose, and in what formats, but these questions also go back to the traditional archive, and in fact are dependent on how we think about and defined the archive itself, then and now how we imagine the virtual archive. These are as she says, questions that may be routed through technology, but not necessarily about technology. Also, even with the traditional archive, making material accessible and usable was a concern, and this is where the archivist or custodian played an important role. She speaks about using pre-digital archives, where there are handwritten descriptions of material, all meticulously preserved, indexed and cross-referenced, and you know what material to look for because the archivist knew what was in the archive and how to find it. She speaks of her own experience of setting up the archives at TIFR, which was not digital then, but has been digitised now, and even though she has not been associated with them for a while now she still gets the occasional email requesting help to find something in the archive, because she knows the material. A lot of the new digital archives therefore, despite their huge collection which are also searchable, need archivists and assistants who oversee the organisation of material, because those cross-references and connections have just not been made (often it is not humanly possible because of the sheer volume of data), which is really what the historians will look for, and that is the challenge here.</p>
<p>Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the Centre for Public History, also sees this as a problem of not imagining the archive as a database, but as this legacy where content is being held together under this one overarching frame. She finds that there is a metanarrative that is created at the level of the database, because of the context in which the archive becomes a database – the historical / institutional questions, and what is being used to create the archive. A point of divergence however could be that it’s easier to lie with the archive, because with the database there is the empirical identifier, so the truth claim is better. This is something that Dr. Chowdhury agrees upon as well, as she finds that because archives have the potential of being multilayered, and are therefore complex, verification is difficult; it’s only another scholar who will check the materials referenced or used by one – and the interpretation would change, and this had implications for the way the archive generates scholarship. Another difference is pulling data from the archive in a way that it allows the making of computational hypotheses about other possibilities, which is the heart of DH – such as topic modelling and algorithmic shortcuts to crunch through data to posit some hypothetical claims. She feels that in India at the moment we are not doing in enough with the archive as database, which also restricts its many possibilities. Even in terms of access to the archive, which the digital archive is supposed to make easier, it comes with certain conditions, such as copyrights, privacy and even different kinds of Creative Commons licenses for open source content. It also depends on what Dr. Ray Murray describes as the ‘flavour of the archive’, something particularly relevant to a lot of new private archival spaces like the Indian Memory Project, or Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, which focussed on 'building the archive', as opposed to working with an existing archive of material. As such these are somewhat ephemeral archives, always in the making, and where the digital intersects clearly with the archival space is in terms of finding an audience for it; the internet creates these niche spaces of interest, so you find that people want to access such spaces, and do it differently from the traditional archive, as the varied nature and functionalities of these two examples demonstrate.</p>
<p>What the long discussion seems to illustrate then is the gradual shift of the archive to become something of a metaphor, as the way the archive has been previously imagined, and its functions have changed with the advent of the internet. As Wolfgang Ernst asks:</p>
<blockquote>Does the archive become metaphorical in multimedia space? This is a plea for archiving the term archive itself for the description of multimedia storage processes. Digital archaeology, though, is not a case for future generations but has to be performed in the present already. In the age of digitalizability, that is, when we have the option of storing all kinds of information, a paradoxical phenomenon appears: cyberspace has no memory. (Ernst 2013: 138)</blockquote>
<p>What Ernst suggests is that the Internet forms a different kind of multimedia archive, or anarchive, or is a phantasm, which differs from the printed of state archives because “the archive is a given, well-defined lot; the Internet, on the contrary, is a collection not just of unforeseen texts but of sound and images as well, an <em>anarchive</em> of sensory data for which no genuine archival culture has been developed so far in the occident” (139). The internet, in documenting the discontinuities and ‘disorder’ of the history of multimedia forms thus gives rise to a new memory culture, and this is important to the process of understanding how new archival spaces are being created, and theorised.</p>
<p>Archive-building has an impact on how knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated is a crucial aspect of meaning-making practices. Related to this is another issue in terms of the amount of data that is available in the archives by the sheer amount of material that it can now hold, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data; accessing or interpreting such large volumes of information would require critical tools and new kinds of architecture. These shifts also relocate the figure of the collector from traditional practices to new ways of visualising collections and the art of collecting itself, which are now beyond the scope of the human subject. As illustrated by practices such as distant reading, it is now humanly difficult to read, and process such large volumes of data that the digital archive now makes available to us. What this then throws up as questions for archival practice, and DH of course, is the new modes by which knowledge is produced through access to such corpora – for instance the impact such changes have on history, its reading and writing, the growth of public history and the role of the internet archive in fostering its growth. On a much broader level, it also points towards the implications of this shift for pedagogy and scholarship in the humanities, in the digital age, questions which will be discussed in the next chapter.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Michel Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004: 18).</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Ibid.</p>
<p><strong>[3] </strong>A session on 'Digital Humanities and the State of the Archives in South Asia' was conducted by Prof. Abhijit Bhattacharya and his team as part of a workshop on research methodology in Women's Studies, held at Tezpur University between April 6-7, 2010.See http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sparrowonline.org/" target="_blank">http://www.sparrowonline.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://sarai.net/" target="_blank">http://sarai.net/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/" target="_blank">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/" target="_blank">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/" target="_blank">http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://osianama.com/" target="_blank">http://osianama.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/" target="_blank">http://studio.camp/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p> </p>
<p>Balachandran, Aparna, and Rochelle Pinto.<em>Archives and Access. </em>Bangalore: The Centre for Internet and Society, 2011</p>
<p>Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" In<em> Illuminations</em>, edited by Hannah Arendt.Translated by Harry Zohn, 59-67.New York: Schoken Books, 1968</p>
<p>Derrida, Jacques.<em> Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.</em>Translated by Eric Prenowitz.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna. "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarshi<em>p" </em>In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, edited by M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.Accessed December 11, 2015.<a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a></p>
Ernst, Wolfgang. "Discontinuities:Does the Archive become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?" In <em>Digital Memory and the Archive, e</em>dited by Jussi Parikka, 113 - 140.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013
<p></p>
<p></p>
Manoff,
M. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” <em>Portal:
Libraries and the Academy, </em>Vol.4, No.1 (2005): 9-25.Accessed December 10,
2015. <a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687">http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687</a>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText">Portelli, Alessandro
"What makes oral history different?”. In <em>The Oral History Reader</em>, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair
Thomson, 32-42. London: Routledge, 2006.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:08:22ZBlog EntryThe Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fourth among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <strong>The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</strong></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In an article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly describing the emergence of the term cyberinfrastructure, Patrik Svensson speaks of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the humanities, pointing towards a seemingly new found interest and investment in resources and tools for humanities research, pedagogy and publication in many universities and other knowledge institutions (Svensson 2011). Though the term has not been significantly used otherwise, it is interesting to note the implications of such a statement in the context of other such important ‘turns’ in the history of ideas, such as the linguistic or cultural turn. Particularly in the predominant debates around digital humanities, which are largely Anglo-American, infrastructure is an important and inherent component of any thinking around this area, as it derives many of its theoretical and practical concerns from a history of humanities computing. A lot of early work in DH was done in in the area of digital archives and knowledge repositories, such as The Walt Whitman Archive, Rossetti and Blake archives (Gold and Groom 2011, Drucker 2011), where digitization and algorithmic querying were important developments in terms of imagining and opening up the archive. From there to seemingly complex projects on data mapping, visualization, distant reading and cultural analytics, which require parsing through a huge corpora of humanities data, the growth of infrastructure has been a key aspect of these developments, although this many not be emphasized in the early literature about the field. The use of computational methods and the move towards the use of big data in the humanities has been an important change in terms of objects of the enquiry and methodology, and infrastructure is an essential condition of both these changes.</p>
<p>Like with other disciplines the nature of infrastructure and resources available to the humanities – in the form of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and now online repositories, language laboratories, and bibliographic, writing and editing tools and software – have also in some manner influenced the nature or scope of questions that could be asked of an object or text. It is therefore useful to explore the influence of infrastructure at a very conceptual level, in terms of what new ways of enquiry have been made possible with digital technologies and the internet. Now with new tools that can parse many pages of text at a go, or an algorithm that can derive patterns from a data set of images, video or other cultural artifacts, the scope of the enquiry seems to have increased exponentially, as much literature around DH suggests (Berry 2011). Indeed this point is also a bone of contention for many traditional humanities scholars, as it not only seems to be a technologically deterministic notion, but also one that takes away from more conventional methods of humanities research, which are based on close reading and interpretation of texts. In the Indian context however, these possibilities still seem distant owing to several gaps in terms of requirements of infrastructure, resources and material. In many institutions, the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in the form of libraries, classroom teaching-learning resources and access to the internet and other digital tools for the humanities continues to remain a problem. Existing institutional infrastructure is lesser that what is required, and mostly outdated.</p>
<p>This conflict over whether new tools and resources for the humanities is taking away or adding to humanities research is better understood in the light of how the concept of infrastructure has been understood, and specifically in the context of communication and research. Brian Larkin (2008) describes infrastructures as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense”. He talks about both technical (such as transport, telecommunications, urban planning, energy and water) and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as the knowledge of a language, or cultural style and religious learnings. He therefore defines infrastructure as “this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” This definition opens out the understanding of the term a little more, for it brings within the ambit different kinds of goods – such as knowledge, and proposes that infrastructure has the power to bind people within collectivities, thus emphasizing both its limitations as well as potentialities.</p>
The notion of infrastructure as not being neutral to culture is further emphasized when Larkin talks about its mediating capacities, brought about by a layering of new technologies over old ones. "Infrastructures…mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of infrastructures themselves" (Ibid.: 6). Thus the understanding of infrastructures as merely a means of the execution of ideas is one of the obstacles in terms of imagining them as more central to the work of the humanities. Often, the notion of infrastructure has been understood in terms of the institutional infrastructure in place, and not in terms of the smaller networks, tools or resources that build it, which are often located at the level of individuals. Ownership is a key aspect of the problem here, because the ownership of such infrastructure is largely with the state or large corporate entities, and not something within the ambit of small and private institutions or even individuals, and this often mandates the manner of their use. Indeed in the case of DH, there are certain kinds of technologies and resources that cannot be replicated easily at all, as such it is something that needs investment from the state and large knowledge institutions such as the university. Another problem, as rightly identified by Svensson is that the imagination of research infrastructures has been primarily in terms of the needs of the natural sciences, as a result of which resources, tools and materials for the humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment. Thus not only is there a challenge in terms of the availability of infrastructure, but also with respect to the optimum utilization of what is available.
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<p>Some of the practitioners and scholars interviewed as part of this mapping have also repeatedly brought up a number of concerns about (or the lack of) infrastructure they have had to use, modify and develop as part of their projects and research. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore finds it rather ironic that a city like Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal has such little thinking in the humanities. There are of course several reasons for this, she says, and in many places infrastructure development is restricted for certain reasons, like for example in Kashmir, where the use of internet and mobile phones is regulated strictly due to security concerns. The key question of course is to have more of a dialogue between places to ensure that they are not functioning in isolation. She also emphasizes that the problems are also at a more basic level, like with transcription for example <strong>[1]</strong>. The advent of the digital has brought with it several new possibilities, but she also talks about the many misconceptions that seem to be prevalent with regard to the digital, particularly in terms of preservation and storage capacity. The question of format is of great importance and a determining factor in much of research that mobilizes digital technologies. As part of her work on archiving oral histories, she has often had to emphasize that there are specific formats for a digital oral archive. As she says:</p>
<blockquote>You should not switch to say MP3 just because it’s cheaper, more convenient and a lighter file. I often have people arguing that I just bought a recorder, it gives me a clear recording [in the MP3 format] etc. If you were to archive that file you would find that within a few years you begin to lose data on that file. The digital archive has also made people think a lot more about what they are preserving, in what format. These are things you then teach yourself, you do not archive in certain formats, or rely on an archive of MP3 files, because every time you copy them onto something it would have lost a little bit of its description. So these are things that make the historian more oriented, you think a lot more about what you are doing.</blockquote>
<p>She therefore warns against these presumptions that a digital archive will resolve completely problems of space and preservation, as a change in format can easily render your data inaccessible and essentially useless. The idea of ‘loss of data’ and lack of space is something easily missed, as there a notion of the digital being an endless space, but that too comes at a cost. As Jonathan Sterne (2013) explains in his work on the MP3 as a cultural artifactiv, it is a format that works through compression and elimination of excess sound, which eventually greatly affects the quality of the sound object itself. The notion of the digital rendering a certain quality of sound, and by implication generating a ‘better’ digital artifact itself, is therefore highly debatable.</p>
<p>There are other considerations to bear in mind as well. As Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the CPH points out, the context of such work in the global south is very different, and lack of good infrastructure is definitely one of the major problems. There are issues of bandwidth, problems such as surveillance, and issues with regulation of internet access, now the issue of network neutrality and so on, all of which have implications for possible digital humanities work and specifically work on digital archives. A significant challenge she sees is that we don't have mechanisms to translate between/ from Indian languages. She says that:</p>
<blockquote>It would be amazing to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages which at the moment is an impossibility. This is where a place like Bangalore comes into the picture... We need to pull on resources that are being pioneered in places like the IITs, or institutions here working with natural language processing...technologies that we cannot in a humanities context create, but pull those in to use them for humanities research. But the questions that we are asking are necessarily quite different, from what we have in the West.</blockquote>
<p>The problem with Indian languages brings out the problems that are specific to the global south and therefore the infrastructure needs of humanities research work. Padmini Murray mentions Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University as an effective illustration of the challenges faced by researchers working in languages other than English. She explains “The very level of creating the code for Bichitra was different, because it had to be done from scratch. Finding a set of reliable Bangla characters is difficult because the ligatures get mixed up, so they created a character set from scratch to create Bichitra, and for Prabhed [the collation software] which works within it.” The problem of a lack of standardization for Indic language inputs is therefore an immediate practical concern for archival work in different languages in India <strong>[2]</strong>.</p>
<p>Indiancine.ma <strong>[3]</strong>, an online archive of Indian film, has similarly been experimenting with different ways of reading and annotating film text, with a focus right now on films that are out of copyright. It uses an open-source platform named Pandor/a <strong>[4]</strong> for media archives, which helps to organise and manage large, decentralized collections of video, to collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations, and to archive as a desktop-class web application. The editing tool enables a user to pause, cut and annotate a particular scene or sequence in the film according to a time code, thus creating enormous new possibilities in terms of how we engage with the film text at several levels. The different ways of organising content through different filters also helps map content in unique ways and read them. According to Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert, who are part of the team that developed the archive and its predecessor Pad.ma <strong>[5]</strong>, Indiancine.ma is a work in progress, and it will always be, so as to allow new opportunities to present themselves with every change in the software and tools being used. They are particular about the archive being open to a variety of users and uses – that is, it is not only a tool or space of publication for humanities researchers, but is also a software project, a resource for a film fan club, and many other things as it is open to interpretation. It is meant for people to build together and have conversations across domains and disciplines. In their work with people from both the humanities and sciences, they do see a void or gap between domains, and reiterate that it is very difficult for people to have a conversation across their disciplinary moorings. Infrastructure development has also become divided across these lines, and suffers from a kind of tunnel vision which often prevents it from being developed in response to the needs of the communities it is meant to address. As Sebastian recollects the experience of creating Pad.ma, a similar online video archive using the same platform, Pandor/a, he speaks of collaborating with people from a non-technology background, at the artists collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[6]</strong>, and how the lack of a hierarchy between technologists and non-technologists only contributed to making these projects better. A lot of the early software projects in India suffered due to this distance between people from technology and non-technology backgrounds, and the lack of a common language for them to communicate. Both Sebastian and Jan themselves come with training and experience in diverse areas, ranging from philosophy and visual arts to software development, and believe that their contribution to this archive is more conceptual than technological. They also see the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) culture, then a rather incipient movement in India when they had just begun work on these projects, as one that can foster more conversations and collaborative work in technology and research in India. When they had started out of course, it was very difficult to convince people to use free and open source software, or even get filmmakers to release their footage for an open access platform like Pad.ma. CAMP was one of the few spaces then that had this open source culture, and it encouraged people to collaborate extensively, across areas of expertise. As Sebastian says “You deal with a relatively complex informatics system, but you are fully aware that you can modify and change things, and deal with them in a transparent way, which is great.” Both claim that nobody owns Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma, but everybody looks after it in a way, because they all use it differently depending on their interests, and this nurtures and builds the platform in different ways. The availability of this somewhat outside/alternate space for collaboration, and working within the open source context has been instrumental in the growth of these two online open access archives.</p>
<p>The computational aspects of Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and even Bichitra to some extent is may be something to look forward to for researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of such research with these platforms. Given that both are essentially large corpora of material, introducing new algorithmic tools to work with them is not a distant possibility, something that has also been the core of a lot of DH work in the Anglo-American context. Jan and Sebastian have tried this already with one of their earlier projects, 0xdb <strong>[7]</strong>, which is another online archive of cinema, by running a color recognition algorithm on it. There is an instance of face detection and speech recognition software that could be run on this platform, with interesting results. The existing filters on Indiacine.ma also make it possible to search for images or sequences based on colour and object recognition. For instance, an interesting experiment is to search for ‘telephone’ in the archive, which pulls up images containing telephones from across the entire corpus, outlining an interesting trajectory of the use of the instrument. While helpful in terms of querying and searching over a large corpus, they also emphasize the need to be able to make sense of it in a meaningful way. As Jan says “Most of this software is developed really as a means of control, in the area of surveillance etc., and not for exploring; it is more of a content identifying tool rather than to discover things. Clustering or referencing credits are other possibilities, but its more statistical analysis of the footage; are they really adding anything qualitative to cinema studies is still an open question”. Given this disjuncture in what these tools are developed for and how they are finally used, a point of concern is whether the research questions are also driven by the possibilities and limitations of the software itself. While that remains a broader question, Sebastian feels that more than a software, this is a new digital eco-system itself, and using these platforms in different ways, in fact even beyond what they were imagined for, will drive the technology in new directions. The limitation of computational tools as he sees now is really the speed, and given the expenses involved, they may not be feasible to implement and expect results anytime soon.</p>
<p>Both the above platforms demonstrate a certain ability to read texts both closely, as well as from a distance through the use of algorithmic tools, thus demonstrating the possibilities of analysis afforded by the infrastructure it has been built with. More importantly, they also highlight the limits of such tools and resources due to several challenges posed by the material itself. In the case of Bichitra, the problems of developing a code for Bengali characters has put forth a number of technological challenges; a pointer towards one among many problems for archiving materials in Indian languages. Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are more symptomatic of the context in which new technologies can develop today given the support and space for collaboration and conversations across domains of expertise. The problems of format and technological obsolescence brought up by scholars at CPH is an important one; while colluding with proprietary software is inevitable in some cases, as suggested by the practitioners and researchers behind these platforms, keeping back-ups of material and being able to migrate out of a digital platform at any given point is also extremely essential. Such flexibility of material, and immense interoperability – across domains, formats and social-cultural contexts including language is something that researchers in DH, or for that matter in any field that actively engages with the internet and digital technologies would look for in the infrastructure that they build for research, scholarship and pedagogy. Infrastructure continues to remain a critical aspect knowledge production and dissemination, and it is imperative now more than ever, that it is addressed at the conceptual level of any research intervention involving digital technologies and knowledge production.</p>
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<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See section on <em>Archives</em> for a more detailed discussion on this issue: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See the section on <em>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</em> for more on this: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="https://pan.do/ra">https://pan.do/ra</a></p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">http://pad.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/">http://studio.camp/</a></p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">https://0xdb.org/</a></p>
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<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2011. <a href="http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440">http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440</a>.</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a>.</p>
<p>Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5</a>.</p>
<p>Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In <em>Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria</em>. London: Duke University Press, 2008</p>
<p>Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' <em>New Media and Society</em>. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006</p>
<p>Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>
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No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:07:06ZBlog EntryReading from a Distance – Data as Text
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the third among seven sections.</b>
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<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <strong>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</strong></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
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The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on DH given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding <strong>[1]</strong> to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of social media such as Storify <strong>[2]</strong> or Scoop-it <strong>[3]</strong> have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm <strong>[4]</strong>. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation (Wieseltier 2013). But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts.
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<p>The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts '<em>massively addressable at different levels of scale</em>' as suggested by Michael Witmore (Witmore 2012: 324-327, emphasis as in the original). According to him: "[A]ddressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction" (Ibid. 325). This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, "textuality is addressability and further ... this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event" (Ibid. 326). What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book (Ibid. 327).</p>
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<h2>Of Texts and Hypertextuality</h2>
<p>An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of 'Bichitra' <strong>[5]</strong>, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore variorum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation. Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri <strong>[6]</strong>, Professor Emeritus, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata has been part of the process of setting up this variorum. According to him the most novel aspects of this platform, or as he calls it - 'integrated knowledge site' - are to do with these functions of cross-referencing and integration. The bibliography is a hyperlinked structure, which connects to all the different digital versions of a particular text (the most being 20 versions of a single poem). The notion of a bibliography has always evoked hypertextuality – the possibility to link and cross - reference texts, but with the advent of the digital, this possibility has been fully realized, as seen in the case of the hypertext <strong>[7]</strong>. For collation, the project team developed a unique software, titled 'Prabhed,' (meaning difference in Bengali) that helps to assemble text at three levels (a) chapter in novel, act/scene in drama, canto in poem; (b) para in novel or other prose, speech in drama, stanza in poem; (c) individual words.. For instance, you can choose a particular section of a book, poem or play - and compare its occurrences across different editions and versions of the work to note their matches and differences. If two paragraphs have been removed from one chapter, and put into another, that can be traced through the collation software. If a particular word has been omitted in a later edition, or if certain lines have been rearranged in a poem, these changes can be tracked <strong>[8]</strong>. What makes the search engine 'integrated' is not simply that it can search all Tagore's works in one go, but that it links up with the bibliography and thereby with the actual text of the works. It is interesting to note here the different changes that the text undergoes to become available for study on a digital platform, where it is amenable to intense searching and querying of this kind. It is now possible to search across a large corpus of texts, for minute changes in words or sentences, and ask questions of these in terms of their usage, instances and contexts of their occurrence, thus facilitating a kind of enquiry previously never undertaken in textual studies.</p>
<p>The project however is not without its challenges, as Prof. Chaudhuri further outlines. Working with Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India. In Bengali some work has been done in the form of a scientifically designed keyboard software called Avro, which stores all the conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics <strong>[9]</strong>. Developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned material in Indian languages remains a crucial issue for most digitization and archival initiatives in India. Other issues include the problem of vowel markers appearing before the consonants, even if phonetically they follow and are keyed in afterwards. To get the font and keyboard software to recognize this is a big challenge. The third challenge, especially in the case of works printed from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, is that there are vast differences in spelling; the same word can be spelt in different ways, and as there is no lexicon, one may not do any kind of general search. There is also the issue of a high degree of inflection in the language. A word may have a suffix (or, <em>vibhakti</em>) attached to it to indicate the case: one for the subject of the sentence, another for the object, another for the possessive case and so on. These are multiplied by the different forms of the verbs. The development of a lexicon in Bengali would be one of the ways to resolve many of these issues. However, as most people can only see and interact with the digital interface of Bichitra, and not really understand the process behind it, or the amount of work involved in making the platform work the way it does, funding for research and development, maintenance and sustainability is difficult to obtain. Backroom file management, which includes both paper and digital files remains a big but largely invisible task on such a platform. The total number of files generated from Bichitra is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, and many of these are offline files which would not even go on to the website. Hence while uploading the files, the basic groundwork for a retrieval system for different files serving different functions had already been laid, including the creation of a bibliography, which was a huge exercise in itself. The process of making text available as hypertext is labor that is invisibilized, and is rarely or never available to the end user.</p>
<p>Prof. Chaudhuri also speaks of ways in which the notion of textuality has been rendered differently through the use of the internet and digital technologies. Digital or electronic text has helped theorize better the notion of a fluid text - the fact that a text is never complete, but only bound between the covers of a book at a given point of several processes that are technological as well as social. The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change in the last several decades. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content and process seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the 'text' through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces.</p>
<p>Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker, further espouses this thought when she talks about the new possibilities of textual analysis of film that are now possible, particularly in terms of temporal control, first with the DVD, then the internet and now with online archival platforms like Indiancine.ma <strong>[10]</strong> and the Public Access Digital Media Archive, or Pad.ma <strong>[11]</strong>. The first is an online archive of Indian film from the pre-copyright era (so effectively before 1955), while the second is an archive of found and archival footage, images sound clips and unfinished films <strong>[12]</strong>. Both platforms allow the user to search through an array of material, view/listen to them download or embed them as links. They make available to users not just an online database for storage and retrieval but also a space to work with a range of materials in multiple video and audio formats and themes through annotations and referencing. The annotation tool is perhaps the most innovative aspect of these platforms, wherein a user can pause, isolate a section of a sequence and annotate it using a range of options and filters. The annotations are textual, in the form of comments, commentary and marginalia (in the case of Pad.ma) and can also link to other paraphernalia around the film object, such as posters, images, advertisements and other literature. Users can also contextualize material by adding transcripts, descriptions, events, keywords, and even locating the events in the video on a map. These have brought to the fore several questions on relevance, accessibility and ownership, as in the case of raw footage from films, and opened up possibilities for such materials to be re-contextualized by the reader in different ways. This layering of annotations around the film object also creates a new research object, or text that then necessitates new methods of studying it as well. As opposed to the earlier practice of the researcher/critic having to watch the film first and then comment or analyse it, and relying on memory to generate the scholarship, it is now possible to pause, analyse or read and come back to the film and annotate the text in several ways. What does this do to the film text - the process documenting the form is new, not cinema as a form itself – is a question that comes up quite prominently here. The computational aspect also is important here, given the vast amount of footage that is now available, which then requires better lexical indexing to compute and manage large data sets. This has been a constant endeavour with Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma as well.</p>
<p>As in the case of film, what becomes prominent here is the move to a digital text of some sort. One such example of a digital text perhaps is the hypertext. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited as the 'ideal text' by Barthes (Landow 2006: 2). Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the possibilities of multilinearity of a text that can be realised in the digital, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture. As such it is only the narrative, and not the form itself that is multi-linear in hypertext fiction.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Textual Criticism in the Digital</h2>
<p>But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the 'text' is manifested through practices of reading and writing (Barthes 1977). So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, in his book <em>Graphs, Maps and Trees</em> talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an 'abstract model of literary history' (Moretti 2005: 1). He describes this approach as "within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study." He further says, "Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a <em>specific kind of knowledge</em>: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005: 1, emphasis as in original). The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can 'facilitate' this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods of reading.</p>
<p>As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as not just a reference to volume but also its other aspects of data such as velocity, scope, and granularity among others significantly increases the ambit of what the term covers, with implications for new epistemologies and modes of research (Kitchin 2014). But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text – and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a certain form of cultural and literary production (Wilkens 2012). Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by working with corpora as opposed to select texts, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper (Fitzpatrik 2011). Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc. acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content (Ibid.). More importantly, it also points towards a change and diversity in the disciplinary method. Where close reading was once the only method by which a text became completely accessible to the reader, it is now possible to approach it through a set of processes, thus urging us to rethink the method of enquiry itself.</p>
<p>Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question we may still need to ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading (quoted earlier in this chapter) suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions (Kirschenbaum XXXX: 3). The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if DH can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located. The digital text, owing to the possibilities of ‘massive addressability,’ mentioned earlier is now more fluid and socialized. The renewed focus on the textual is most apparent in this manner of imagining the text, using the metaphor of a highly interlinked, networked and shared text. It also puts forth important questions then of how we understand technology a certain way, especially in the context of language and representation as an important factor of understanding new textual objects. Is technology a tool for textual analysis, or is it in inherent to our understanding of the nature of the text? Is the development of these methods of enquiry shaped by certain disciplinary requirements, and do they also challenge or create new conflicts for traditional methods of enquiry? The growth in the study of different media objects, such as video and cinema, and the advent of areas such as media studies, oral history, media archaeologies has further prompted concerns regarding the study of the digital object in these disciplines, and a rethinking of how we understand the notion of the text.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation." See: <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/">http://www.tei-c.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://storify.com/">https://storify.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.scoop.it/">http://www.scoop.it/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more on text mining see Lisa Guernsey in 'Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom,' in The New York Times, October 16, 2003 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print</a>. For more on data mining, distant reading, and the changing nature of reading practices see Matthew Kirschenbaum in 'The Remaking of Reading,' <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Interview with author, July 30, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as "a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." As quoted in George Landow, <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 2-12.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Bichitra, 'Collation Guide,' accessed on September 17, 2015, <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Omicron Lab, accessed September 17, 2015. <a href="https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html">https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> For more on these platforms see the section on DH institutions in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text". In <em>Image, Music, Text</em>. London: Fontana Press, 1977.</p>
<p>Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Texts" in <em>Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy</em>. New York: New York University Press, 2011.</p>
<p>Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "The Remaking of Reading". <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/%7Ehillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob. 'Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,' <em>Big Data & Society</em>, 2014, April–June, pp. 1–12, DOI: 10.1177/2053951714528481.</p>
<p>Landow, George. <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Moretti, Franco. <em>Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History</em>, Verso, 2005.</p>
<p>Wieseltier, Leon, 'Crimes Against Humanities,' The New Republic, September 3, 2013, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism">http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism</a>.</p>
<p>Wilkens, Mathew. "Canons, Close Reading and the Evolution of Method". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities </em> Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.</p>
<p>Witmore, Michael. "Text: A Massively Addressable Object". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:58ZBlog EntryRAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video
<b>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. </b>
<p> </p>
<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah" frameborder="0" height="480" width="640"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<h2>RAW Lectures</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Lecture #01 - Stories and Histories of Internet in India</h2>
<p><a href="http://cdc.leuphana.com/people/#nishant-shah" target="_blank"><strong>Dr. Nishant Shah</strong></a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>More:</strong> <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Download</h2>
<p><strong>Video files:</strong> <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah/CIS%20RAW%20Lecture%20Series%20-%20I%20(Dr.%20Nishant%20Shah).mp4" target="_blank">MP4</a>, <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah/CIS%20RAW%20Lecture%20Series%20-%20I%20(Dr.%20Nishant%20Shah).ogv" target="_blank">OGG</a>, and <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah_archive.torrent" target="_blank">Torrent</a>.</p>
<p>The video is shared under Creative Commons <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" target="_blank">Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</a> license.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkInternet HistoriesLearningRAW Lectures2016-02-09T08:45:00ZBlog EntryA Question of Digital Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the second among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <strong>A Question of Digital Humanities</strong></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>The 'digital turn' has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. DH has emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technologies and the human being or subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. It has been variously called a phenomenon, field, discipline and a set of convergent practices – all of which are located at and/or try to understand the interaction between digital technologies and humanities practice and scholarship. DH in the Anglo-American context has seen several changes – from an early phase of vast archival initiatives and digitisation projects, to now exploring the role of big data and cultural analytics in literary criticism. Some of the early scholarship in the field illustrate the problems with defining and locating it within specific disciplinary formations, as the research objects, methods and locations of DH work cut across everything from the archive to the laboratory and social networking platforms. Largely interpreted as a way to explore the intersection of information technology and humanities, DH is grown to become an interdisciplinary field of research and practice today. However, DH is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Problem of Definition</h2>
<p>The question of what is DH has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of DH – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the 'digital' itself as integral to humanistic enquiry <strong>[1]</strong>. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions <em>for</em> the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s <em>of</em> digital humanities. Dave Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that "what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities." (Parry 2012)</p>
<p>Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in this report. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested threads or modes of thought, which will also inform larger concerns of the DH work at CIS:</p>
<ol>
<li>The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the <em>Nature of the book</em>, "any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another" (Johns 1998:3). The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this 'technologised history' of the humanities. Can DH therefore be an attempt to uncover such a history and bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here?<br />
<br /></li>
<li>The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with DH practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core DH concerns, they are not all 'digital humanists' or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not DH – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most DH research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in DH– where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno-social subject <strong>[2]</strong> as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.<br />
<br /></li>
<li>Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and DH. This comes with the perception of DH being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities disciplines to reinvent themselves to remain relevant in the present context, and one way to do this is by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. DH has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not or even need not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching DH as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of DH in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying DH works with and tries to address this particular formulation of the field.</li></ol>
<p>Locating these concerns in India, where the field of DH is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on DH still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says "Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others." (Latour 2002)</p>
<p>DH then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates DH from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of DH.
There are several questions therefore for DH - in terms of what it means and what it could do for our understanding of the humanities and technology. However the questions of DH still need to be made explicit. This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of the above thoughts a little further. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and DH. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Problem of the Discipline</h2>
<p>Much has been said and written about DH as an emergent field or domain of enquiry; the plethora of departments being set up all across the world, well mostly the developed world is testimony to the claimed innovative and generative potential of the field. However as outlined in the introduction the problem of definition still persists and poses much difficulty in any attempts to engage with the field. While the predominant narrative seems to be in terms of defining what DH or to take it a step back, what the ‘digital’ allows you to do, with respect to enabling or facilitating certain kinds of research and pedagogy, a pertinent question still is that of what it allows you to ‘be’. DH has been alternatively called a method, practice and field of enquiry, but scholars and practitioners in many instances have stopped short of fully embracing it as a discipline. This is an interesting development given the rapid pace of its institutionalisation - from being located in existing Humanities or Computational Sciences and Media Studies departments it has now claimed functional institutional spaces of its own, with not just interdisciplinary research and teaching but also other creative and innovative knowledge-making practices. The field is slowly gaining credence in India as well, with several institutions pursuing research around core questions within the fold of DH.</p>
<p>So is the disciplinary lens inadequate to understand this phenomenon, or is it too early for a field still considered in some ways rather incipient. The growth of the academic discipline itself is something of a fraught endeavour; as debates around the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thought have established. To put it in a very simple manner, the story of academic disciplines is that of training in reason <strong>[3]</strong>. Andrew Cutrofello says "In academia, a discipline is defined by its methodological rigor and the clear boundaries of its field of inquiry. Methods or fields are criticized as being 'fuzzy' when they are suspected of lacking a discipline. In a more straightforwardly Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary power of academic disciplines can be located in their methods for producing docile bodies of different sorts" (Cutrofello 1994). The problem with defining DH may lie in it not conforming to precisely this notion of the academic discipline, and changing ideas of the function of critique when mediated by the digital, which is of primary concern for the humanities. DH has in many spaces also emerged as a manifestation of increasing interdisciplinarity and the blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplinary concerns.</p>
<p>However a prevalent mode of understanding DH has been in terms of the disciplinary concerns it raises for the humanities themselves; this works with the assumption that it is in fact a newer, improved version or extension of the humanities. The present mapping exercise too began with the disciplinary lens, but instead of enquiring about what DH is, it tried to explore what the ‘digital’ has brought to, changed or appropriated in terms of existing disciplinary concerns within the humanities and more broadly spaces and process of knowledge-making and dissemination. This thought stems from the premise that if we have to posit the digital itself as a state of being or existence, then we need to understand this new techno-social paradigm much better. Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University in Kolkata sees this as useful way of going about the problem of trying to arrive at a definition of the field – one is to understand the history of the term, from its inherited definition in the Anglo-American context, and distinguish it from what he calls the current state of ‘digitality’ – where all cultural objects are being now being conceived of as ‘digital’ objects. In the Indian context, the question of digitality also becomes important from the perspective of technological obsolescence - where there is a great resistance to discontinuing or phasing out the use of certain kinds of technology; either for lack of access to better ones or simply because one finds other uses for it. Prof. Dasgupta interestingly terms this a ‘culture of reuse’, one example of this being the typewriter which for all practical purposes has been displaced by the computer, but still finds favour with several people in their everyday lives. The question of livelihood is still connected to some of these technologies, so much so that they are very much a part of channels of cultural production and circulation, and even when they cease to become useful they have value as cultural artefacts. We therefore inhabit at the same time, different worlds, that of the analogue and digital, or as he calls it 'a multi-layered technological sphere'. The notion of the 'digital' is also multi-layered, with some objects being 'weakly digital', and others being so in a more pronounced manner. The variedness of this space, and the complexities or ‘degrees of use’ of certain technologies or technological objects is what further determines the nature of this space and makes it all the more difficult to define. DH itself has seen several phases in the West, but has seen no such movement or gradual evolution in India, where these phases exist simultaneously.</p>
<p>This is also true of most technology in underdeveloped world. This further complicates the questions of access to technology or the 'digital divide' which have been and still are some of the primary approaches concerning the pervasiveness of technology, particularly in the Global South. The need of the hour therefore is to be able to distinguish between this current state of digitality that we are in, and what is meant by the ‘Digital Humanities’. It may after all be a set of methodologies rather than a subject or discipline in itself– the question is how it would help us understand the ‘digital’ itself much better, and more critically, and the new kinds of enquiries it may then facilitate about this space we now inhabit. This, Prof. Dasgupta feels would go a long way in arriving at some definition of the field.</p>
<p>One of the important points of departure, from the traditional humanities and later humanities computing as mentioned earlier, has been the blurring of boundaries between content, method and object/s of enquiry. The ‘process’ has become important, as illustrated by the iterative nature of most DH projects and the discourse itself which emphasises the 'making' and 'doing' aspects of the research as much as the content itself. Tool-building as a critical activity rather than as mere facilitation is an important part of the knowledge-making process in the field (Ramsay 2010). In conjunction with this, Dr. Moinak Biswas, at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, thinks that the biggest changes have been in terms of the collaborative nature of knowledge production, based on voluntarily sharing or creating new content through digital platforms and archives, and crucially the possibility of now imagining creative and analytical work as not separate practices, but located within a single space and time. He cites an example from film, where now with digital platforms and processes ‘image’ making and critical practice can both be combined on one platform, like the online archive Indiancine.ma <strong>[4]</strong> or the Vectors journal <strong>[5]</strong> for example, to produce new layers of meaning around existing texts. The aspect of critique is important here, given that the consistent criticism about the field has been the ambiguity of its social undertaking; its critical or political standpoint or challenge to existing theoretical paradigms. Most of the interest around the term has been in very instrumental terms, as a facilitator or enabler of certain kinds of digital practice. While the move away from computational analysis as a technique to facilitate humanities research is apparent, the disciplinary concerns here still seem to be latched onto those of the traditional humanities. Questions about the epistemological concerns of DH itself therefore remain unanswered.</p>
<p>While reiterating some of these core questions within DH, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee at the Department of English, Presidency University and Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, at the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, speak of the problem of locating the field in India, where work is presently only being done in a few small pockets. The lack of a precise definition, or location within an established disciplinary context are some reasons why a lot of work that could come within the ambit of DH is not being acknowledged as such; conversely it also leads to the problem of projects on digitisation or studies of digital cultures/cyber cultures being easily conflated with DH . Related to this is the absence of self-claimed ‘digital humanists’, which makes it all the more difficult to identify the boundaries of their research and practice. More importantly, the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise around questions of the digital is also an obstacle to understanding what the field entails and the many possibilities it may offer in the Indian context. This they feel is a problem not just of DH, but in general for modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities that have adopted Western theoretical constructs. One could also locate in some sense the present crisis in disciplines within this problem. Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru explicate this issue when they talk about the absence of 'experience as an important category of the act of theorising' because of the privileging of ideas in Western constructs of experience (Guru and Sarukkai 2012). This is also reflective of the bifurcation between theory and praxis in traditional social sciences or humanities epistemological frameworks which borrow heavily from the West. DH while still to arrive at a core disciplinary concern seems to point towards the problem of this very demarcation by addressing the aspect of practice as a very focal point of its discourse.</p>
<p>Dr. Indira Chowdhury, oral historian and director of the Centre for Public History, who is also a faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore sees this as a favourable way of understanding how the field as such has emerged and what its various possibilities could be in terms of different disciplinary perspectives. She is uncertain that of its emergence as a response to a ‘crisis’ in the humanities as such. She recalls an instance of one of her students who went on to work on hypertext in Canada, several years ago, which for her seemed to be the first instance of something close to DH. The IT revolution in the early 2000s was a significant change, and there were several things that it enabled people to do, in terms of concordance, cross-referencing and getting around texts in certain ways. However, whether key questions in the humanities really changed, whether they were taken any further, is something yet to be explored because it is still such a new field, and one can only be speculative about it, she feels. It perhaps pushes for a new level of interdisciplinarity, and a different kind of collaborative space that the digital enables. What is significant and exciting for her as a historian, however, is that if history has to survive as a discipline, in schools but in terms of public spaces and discourse, it should actively engage with the digital. This not only presents significant challenges, in terms how to represent the past in the digital space, (in short problems with method) but also opens up new possibilities, for example with oral history and the advent of digital sound. The definition of the field will also evolve, as people define it from different spaces of practice and research, which Dr. Chowdhury feels is crucial to keeping it open and accessible by all.</p>
<p>Even from diverse disciplinary perspectives, at present the understanding of DH is that it facilitates new modes of humanistic enquiry, or enables one to ask questions that could not be asked earlier. As Prof. Dasgupta reiterates, it is no longer possible to imagine humanities scholarship outside of the ‘digital’ as such, as that is the world we inhabit. However, while some of the key conceptual questions for the humanities may remain the same, it is the mode of questioning that has undergone a change – we need to re-learn questioning or question-making within this new digital sphere, which is in some sense also a critical and disciplinary challenge. While this does not resolve the problem of definition, it does provide a useful route into thinking of what would be questions of DH, particularly in the Indian context.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> For a more detailed overview of the different phases of DH, see Patrik Svensson in 'Landscape of Digital Humanities,' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Volume 4 Number 1, 2010, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, <em>The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace</em>, Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET, <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558">http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> This is rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see <em>Conflict of the Faculties</em> (1798) by Immanuel Kant and <em>Discipline and Punish</em> (1975) by Michel Foucault.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php">http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Cutrofello, Andrew, <em>Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance</em>, State University of New York Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, <em>The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory</em>, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012.</p>
<p>Johns, Adrian, <em>The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making</em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Latour, Bruno, 'Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,' Trans. Couze Venn, <em>Theory Culture Society</em>, 247-260, 2002.</p>
<p>Parry, Dave, 'The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism', <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a>.</p>
<p>Ramsay, Stephen, 'On Building,' 2010, <a href="http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html">http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:46ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities in India?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the first among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <strong>Digital Humanities in India?</strong></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>It has only been a couple of years since I began hearing the term Digital Humanities (henceforth, DH) being uttered quite prominently, though mostly in academic circles. For the uninitiated, it almost sounds like an oxymoron. After all, for most practical purposes the digital and humanities have always been seen almost as contradictory terms, existing in distinct silos. A couple of workshops and conferences, one national-level consultation, three new centres, and two academic courses later the term still needs a definition in India, if not also in other parts of the world. But what was by then, and even now, is interesting is the emergence of pockets of work in India either claiming to be DH or even remotely related to it, and the interest in the term, either as one full of a seemingly diverse, innovative, and generative potential for interdisciplinary work in academia and practice, or as something that is just a reinvention of old questions that have been the focus of humanistic enquiry for several decades now.</p>
<p>The enquiry for this mapping began with the term itself, as a 'found' name for which I needed to excavate some meaning, context and location in India at the present moment. A consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education organised in Bangalore in July 2013 <strong>[1]</strong> and a proposed short course in ‘Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics’ <strong>[2]</strong> at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, were some of the early prominent instances of the use of the term. I later learnt from one of the people interviewed for this study that DH was already discussed in academic workshops as early as 2010 <strong>[3]</strong>. The general interest in the term has steadily picked up in the last couple of years however, albeit in specific pockets of the country, and it would be safe to say that it has been approached in markedly different ways by several institutions.</p>
<p>The source of the term itself is the history and body of literature around humanities computing in the UK and US, which essentially explores the use of computational methods in humanities research and practice. Roberto A. Busa (2010) describes it as “… precisely the automation of every possible analysis of human expression (therefore, it is exquisitely a "humanistic" activity), in the widest sense of the word, from music to the theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts”. However, locating such a history in India seems not only to be a difficult project, but largely a futile one. It seemed irrelevant to import a concept or discourse that in itself was (and still is to some extent) relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context, and then try to locate it here. Instead, what I chose to do was to take a few steps back - firstly to outline a couple of questions/conflicts that seemed to be troubling about this concept to begin with:</p>
<ol>
<li>Are ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’ really two contradictory terms that are being bridged together? Is this a reiteration of the ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1990) debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the changes in the object(s) of enquiry in humanities disciplines due to the advent of the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects? How are these affecting the traditional methods of the humanities?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Is DH a fringe academic phenomena, and can it be related to academic disciplines only? With several groups of practitioners engaging with questions and methods akin to DH outside universities, how do we define its institutional boundaries?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the new skills and tools emerging with, and in turn defining, DH practices in India?</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>An immediate context for the growth of DH has been the steady debate around a ‘crisis’ of the disciplines, the humanities in particular, and how DH in a strange paradox, seemed to be both the phenomenon posing this question and offering an answer to it. Particularly in the Anglo-American context, while there has been a sustained decline in funding for the arts, especially post the global recession in the late 1990s, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and other disciplines in natural sciences still seem to be on a steady footing. The ‘crisis’ here exists here at several levels - budgetary cuts across universities for liberal arts and humanities programmes, a steep fall in gainful employment for graduates (whose numbers are much more than the jobs available in the market, the adjunct system that has become popular in the US, which has resulted in reduced full-time employment and poor compensation for faculty, and in general a lack of opportunities and resources for research in the arts and humanities. The problem however, of which these are only the symptoms, lies much deeper, at the heart of what is seen as the lack of interest due to the diminishing practical value of the humanities, which further makes them seem most dispensable in a moment of economic crisis. Martha Nussbaum calls this a ‘silent crisis’, spurred by the growth of a profit-driven model of education, which has led to an increased focus on science and technology programmes, and emphasized the fostering of certain specific skills in these domains much to the detriment of arts and humanities programmes at every level of formal education, thus also doing away with “cultivated capacities of critical thinking and reflection, which are crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake.”</p>
<p>Gary Gutting on the other hand sees this definition of crisis in terms of numbers itself as misleading, but proposes that this decline also as a result of a cultural and economic system that is inhospitable to the humanities in general, and the ‘cultural middle class’ in particular. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>Our economic system works well for those who find meaning in economic competition and the material rewards it brings. To a lesser but still significant extent, our system provides meaningful work in service professions (like health and social work) for those fulfilled by helping people in great need. But for those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer. Or rather, it has a great deal to offer but only for a privileged elite (the cultural parallel to our economic upper class) who have had the ability and luck to reach the highest levels of humanistic achievement. If you have (in Pierre Bourdieu’s useful term) the “cultural capital” to gain a tenured professorship at a university, play regularly in a major symphony orchestra or write mega bestsellers, you can earn an excellent living doing what you love. Short of that, you must pursue your passion on the side. (Gutting 2013)</blockquote>
<p>Paul Jay and Gerald Graff locate the problem within the notion of the humanities as being inherently averse to a market-driven, utilitarian form of education, which emphasises only credentials, thus rendering the field esoteric and lacking when it comes to solving problems in the ‘real world’. Instead they favour the approach of humanities students developing diverse skill sets, in addition to traditional skills of their disciplines, and being open to engage with opportunities in the larger marketplace outside of academy as well. As the essay states:</p>
<blockquote>We believe it is time to stop the ritualized lamentation over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of making them relevant in the 21st century. Such lamentation only reveals the inability of many humanists to break free of a 19th-century vision of education that sees the humanities as an escape from the world of business and science. As Cathy Davidson has forcefully argued in her new book, Now You See It, this outmoded way of thinking about the humanities as a realm of high-minded cultivation and pleasure in which students contemplate the meaning of life is a relic of the industrial revolution with its crude dualism of lofty spiritual art vs. mechanized smoking factories, a way of thinking that will serve students poorly in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. (Jay and Duff 2002)</blockquote>
<p>While many of the traditional humanities scholars may still look at this as the result of a certain techno capitalistic impulse - wherein a new research regime based on knowledge creation to fulfil corporate interests emerges – it is prudent to examine how and why fields like the digital humanities have now emerged around the time of such a crisis, as they seemingly fit well within this nebulous space, and what are their implications for the humanities, education and research at large.</p>
<p>In the India, the context is a rather chequered one – with most conversations around the internet and digital technologies located within the domain of the development of Information and Communication technologies for Development (ICT4D), in sectors ranging from education to governance. The introduction to the digital has been in multifarious ways for countries in the global south, largely through rhetoric about its potential to address and even resolve social and economic problems, so much so that, as several of the people interviewed in this study also mentioned, now anything digital automatically translates to ‘good’ and ‘beneficial’. Addressing the digital divide has been a mandate of all stakeholders, whether the state and policy-makers, private organisations, NGOs or academia. With around 300 million internet users and counting, India has the second largest internet user base in the world. However, the conditions and quality of access to the internet and other digital technologies, and who is using these and for what purposes continue to remain a bone of contention. The ambitious Digital India initiative of the current government is the latest in a slew of measures undertaken to address some of these concerns in the last several years, and it proposes to do so by tackling three key areas – digital infrastructure, governance and services on demand, and empowerment of citizens through increased digital literacy <strong>[4]</strong>. As such it seeks to resolve some of the challenges of last mile connectivity that have forever been an issue with many ICT4D initiatives, particularly with countries in the Global South. The advent of a techno-democracy or a model of governance that successfully integrates technology within a framework of rights and social development seems to be larger vision of these proposed initiatives.</p>
<p>The ICT-fication of education has been a major objective and challenge within this larger vision, specifically with respect to the problem of access, and more importantly quality of access which stands out as pertinent, again a problem attributed to the lack of last mile connectivity. In 2009, the MHRD launched the ambitious National Mission in Education and Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT) programme <strong>[5]</strong>, which along with the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill <strong>[6]</strong> and the recommendations of the Yashpal Committee report <strong>[7]</strong>, was expected to address some long-standing concerns in making higher education more accessible and hospitable to students, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2011) argues that the last-mile problem is a more of a conceptual or cultural problem than merely a technological one. This is illustrated in the manner of implementation of several projects under the NMEICT, particularly in the imagination, as Rajadhyaksha says, of technology as neutral and therefore capable of addressing issues of democratisation within higher education.</p>
<p>Following the NMEICT, several initiatives such as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) <strong>[8]</strong> programme, and the use of low-cost devices such as the Aakash tablets <strong>[9]</strong> were also field tested to get a better understanding of how digital technologies could be integrated seamlessly into classroom instruction. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) <strong>[10]</strong> and Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) <strong>[11]</strong>, and more recently the National Knowledge Network (NKN) <strong>[12]</strong> are some of the more established efforts in distance education and open courseware. Digitisation initiatives were also launched on a large scale in the last decade, some notable ones being National Mission for Manuscripts <strong>[13]</strong>, Digital Library of India <strong>[14]</strong>, and National Library of India <strong>[15]</strong>, among many others. There is also a growing number of closed/commercial archives, some examples being the South Asia Archive <strong>[16]</strong> and Asia Art Archive <strong>[17]</strong>. Digitisation, while being taken up in the interest of preservation and record, also brought with it a number of challenges, particularly with respect to the manner in which the projects were implemented. Whether with regard to preservation of the original material, problems with copyright or defining metadata standards, digitisation has never been an easy process. The Google Books library project is an example of this, where many books were damaged and had to be discarded in the process of digitisation, and the project itself came under criticism for several copyright violations, errors produced due to conversion of scanned texts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and incorrect or unavailable metadata.</p>
<p>The move towards digitisation also provided the much needed impetus for archival practice to make a transition to the digital space, this has been an inevitable but rather fraught endeavour to begin with, as some of the observations made in the later chapters will illustrate. The emergence of independent, private online archives, often seen as a fallout of the hegemony of state-funded archives is an important development of this time. An influx of funding from government and private donors, has led to a lot of work in media and communication technologies getting concentrated in so-called ‘alternative’ spaces outside the university. The growth of these in between spaces has been an interesting phenomenon, particularly with respect to the possibilities offered for different kinds of research and other creative practices that are often unable to find a space within the confines of a university or other large, established knowledge institutions.</p>
<p>In the last decade or so, DH seems to have become one of the most highly funded areas in humanities research and practice. While this has seemingly helped to either save and/or reinvent some the humanities programmes, a lot of traditional humanists also view the field and the term with scepticism – as a threat to more traditional forms of humanities pedagogy and practice. Whether such a context exists in India and is still a matter of question, and hinges largely on how we understand the digital itself - as an object, concept or space. For that seems to be where the questions about the field, its emergence and its epistemological concerns lie.</p>
<p>This report, therefore, takes a slightly broader look, somewhat like a scoping exercise to see what some present concerns are and what could be the possibilities of DH in India. The areas of focus are few – the notion of crisis, and disciplines, the archive and so forth which form the crux of the debate in India. It also looks at changes that have come about, and are imminent with the ‘digital turn’, from the perspective of selected disciplines, and practices of knowledge-making. More importantly, it tries to extrapolate, from the common issues and conflicts traced across several conversations, larger questions of a conflict of authority that disciplines in the humanities have come to undergo, and whether the digital has amplified of tried to resolve the same. The conflict is tied to questions of ownership/authorship and authenticity that emerge with new collaborative modes of knowledge production, and the politics of circulation. It is reflected in the shift from more traditional spaces of knowledge-making to newer methods, objects, figures and processes in the online world, which seem to at one level replace older ones. This perceived threat of irrelevance or obsolescence is one of the manifestations of this conflict of authority. The Wikipedia is one example of this conflict, wherein the authenticity and authority of its content and recognition as scholarship has been intensely debated owing to, among other things, the fact that it cannot be attributed to any single author. In the ways in which the digital now mediates such activities, what has become the space and understanding of the digital in our lives, in the ways we consume and produce information and knowledge, and increasingly become uneven stakeholders in a dynamic knowledge economy, are some of the questions explored therein.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Methodology</h2>
<p>With few 'digital humanists' (a term many DH scholars in India have consciously chosen to stay away from) and DH centres around, and the discourse being far from stable in India, the best way to explore this supposedly new phenomenon then seemed to be to understand some of the immediate problems and questions with the notion of the ‘digital’ itself. This approach was not just the result of constraints of the immediate context, but also turned out to be a productive methodological gesture, as it widened the scope of this mapping exercise to include several proto/perhaps-DH initiatives that have come up around the same time, or been in existence for a while and have been trying to work around similar questions. The mapping did not begin with an assumption of a field called DH as being extant in India, and therefore as an examination of its challenges and possibilities, but rather to understand how DH-like practices have evolved and converged at the moment under what appears to be like a place-holder term, and the implications of this for research and learning. Being located in India, it also provided a good vantage point to reflect on some of the literature and discourse around the term being produced in the Anglo-American context.
The consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education held in July 2013 was helpful in bringing together a number of people and key questions of what was then understood as something of a field. It is largely from the discussions at this consultation that this report approaches the term and what it may offer for humanities and related interdisciplinary research in India; somewhere it also hopes to serve as a point of departure. A major concern then was the lack of a proper definition of the field, and its instability, which continued to be a recurrent topic in my discussions with people as part of this exercise. However, the merits of embarking upon an exercise to ‘define DH in India’ were highly contentious, so the mapping took a more descriptive route, and did a discursive analysis of work in DH and allied fields and what people were saying about it in India. What I found were a range of views, some informed by practice and scholarship, others based on conjecture and some purely non-committal. As one of the people interviewed for this mapping pointed out, there is something provisional about which, if I may add, also inhibits us from saying anything definitive about it, just yet.</p>
<p>Given that the lack of a definition of the field remained one of the main issues, I went into conducting the mapping with a working definition/assumption that DH ‘is an interdisciplinary area of research, practice and pedagogy that looks at the interaction of digital tools, methods and spaces with core concerns of humanistic enquiry’. This definition was developed based on a review of existing literature in the Anglo-American context on DH, and deliberately made expansive enough to include within its fold, the different kinds of practices that had already chosen to adopt the term, and others which seemed to be inclined towards similar theoretical and practical concerns. Another useful definition, from the Digital Humanities Quarterly useful was the following:</p>
<blockquote>Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. (Digital Humanities Quarterly 2010)</blockquote>
<p>Deliberating on the interaction between humanities and technology, Susan Schreibman, in one the earliest books on DH describes the 'field' as follows:</p>
<blockquote>The digital humanities, then, and their interdisciplinary core found in the field of humanities computing, have a long and dynamic history best illustrated by examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with computation. (Schreibman et al 2004)</blockquote>
<p>One of the popular and most quoted definitions, however, is an early one that appeared in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Institute for the Future of the Book 2009). This describes DH as <em>an array of convergent practices</em>, and is also reproduced in the book <em>Digital Humanities</em> (Burdick et al 2012):</p>
<blockquote>Digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication. Digital Humanities is less a unified field than an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. (Ibid., 122)</blockquote>
<p>The notion that DH is a “less a unified field than an array of convergent practices” seems to be the most useful way to describe the observations and more so the conditions that led to this mapping exercise, which also seeks to outline some kind of a trajectory of practices that converge at this contemporary moment to engender new meanings of and around the digital, rather than produce a conceptual history of the term in the Indian context or even imagine an extant field of some sort. This notion of a convergence, as stated in the last definition, although not apparent or expressed by anyone in India, seems to be the best possible way to describe the manner in which certain practices and a discourse has grown around the intersection of humanities and digital technologies in India. This rather organic growth of DH projects, practices and coursework in the absence of a meta-theory that would drive its epistemological concerns is an important conceptual question for the field itself, and a challenge for the study. Thus while the broader conversation around DH spans everything from instructional technology, new media and art practices, integrated science education to cultural analytics, the core concerns often remain the same, that of the intersection of previously separate domains of knowledge that are now coming together, and the crucial role played by the internet and digital technologies in bringing them together.</p>
<p>Further, three immediate experiences in engaging with digital technologies and questions of knowledge production in India shaped the intellectual concerns of this study. The first of these is the series of monographs produced as part of the ‘Histories of Internets in India’ project at the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in CIS, during 2008-2011. A key point foregrounded in these monographs was the critical need to approach the internet, as a plural technology, available in and actualised through different forms, practices, and experiences. The second one was the collaborative project on the quality of access to higher education in undergraduate educational institutions at the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.The project was conducted in nine undergraduate institutions across three states in India, and included interaction with students and teachers through workshops and campus projects.The experience of working with students – who ranged from those who could barely use a computer to students proficient with the latest software, multimedia tools and internet applications – led to many insightful learnings about the teaching-learning environment, and prevalence of digital technologies and the internet in these spaces. The third one, of course, is the consultation on DH held in Bangalore, which provided an immediate set of questions and a network of people to begin the mapping with.</p>
<p>In this study, the fieldwork consisted of in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key people involved in the DH-like initiatives in India, and allied areas such as media, archives, art, and higher education. The sample size being small, the conversations were by no means exhaustive, but they were insightful in terms of the present nature of practice and the questions that they further pointed towards. The interviews were largely open-ended conversations focussing on, where possible, questions about DH: its emergence, theory, practice and pedagogy, but emphasising the notion of the ‘digital’ and is diverse perception and formulations. With respondents who were not from an academic space or not involved with DH directly, the questions were more related to the nature of changes that the digital has brought about in their practice, specifically the shifts in content and method. The crisis of disciplines and the move away from more traditional concerns of humanistic enquiry were also discussed. Issues of access, exclusivity and the move towards collaborative spaces of knowledge production and the democratic potential of the internet and digital technologies also came up quite prominently as points of discussion.</p>
<p>The fieldwork tried to cover not just a range of people from different disciplines and areas of practice, but also institutions: Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Purbasha Auddy, (School of Cultural Texts and Records and Dept. of English), Dr. Moinak Biswas and Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee (Media lab and Dept. of Film Studies); Dr. Abhijit Roy (School of Communication and Culture) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata; Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (Dept. of English) and Dr. Milinda Banerjee (Dept. of History) at Presidency University, Kolkata; Abhijit Bhattacharya (Media Archives) at Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; Dr. Ravi Sundaram (the Sarai Programme) at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Dr. Indira Chowdhury and Dr. Padmini Ray-Murray (Centre for Public History) at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore; Dr. C. S Lakshmi at the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women, Mumbai; Shaina Anand, Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lutgert and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who have all worked with CAMP, Mumbai and are part of the team behind Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma; Vikram Vincent at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and S.V. Srinivas, Azim Premji University, who was previously associated with the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. The individuals and institutions mentioned here have been engaged with these concerns within their respective fields of research and practice. Three institutions - Jadavpur University, Presidency University and the Centre for Public History – have actively adopted the term DH for some of the work they have been doing, whereas the remaining have been working with digital technologies as part of research, pedagogy, and practice. The report presents some part of these conversations and in doing so provides a snapshot of the operational context of the term ‘DH’ in India as well. The attempt was to understand the nature of existing and possible institutional investment in the term, as well as digital technologies (beyond tools, platforms and processes) and their stake in taking these questions further.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> This one-day event was organized by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, and other institutions. See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf">http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/">http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nmeict.ac.in/">http://www.nmeict.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See <a href="http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf">http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf">http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf</a></p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://nptel.ac.in/">http://nptel.ac.in/</a></p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578">http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.ignou.ac.in/">http://www.ignou.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/">http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="http://nkn.in/">http://nkn.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.namami.org/">http://www.namami.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.dli.ernet.in/">http://www.dli.ernet.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/">http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.southasiaarchive.com/">http://www.southasiaarchive.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.aaa.org.hk/">http://www.aaa.org.hk/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunefeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities">https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities</a>.</p>
<p>Digital Humanities Quarterly, "About DHQ," 2010, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html</a></p>
<p>Gutting, Gary. "The Real Humanities Crisis," The New York Times, November 30, 2013, accessed July 14, 2015. <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/
">http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/</a>.</p>
<p>Institute for the Future of the Book, "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0," 2009, <a href="http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/">http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/</a></p>
<p>Jay, Paul, and Gerald Duff, "The Fear of Being Useful," Inside Higher Ed. January 5. 2012. Accessed September 22, 2015. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities">https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities</a>.</p>
<p>Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, "The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction," A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/</a>.</p>
<p>Snow, C.P. "The Two Cultures," Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s. 1990. Pp. 169-173.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:05:29ZBlog EntryCIS Featured in 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report
<b>This report, authored by Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne, sheds light on the expertise required to support a robust and sustainable digital scholarship (DS) program. It focuses first on defining and describing the key domain knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets at some of the world’s most prominent digital scholarship programs. It then identifies the main strategies used to build this expertise, both formally and informally. The work is set in a global context, examining leading digital scholarship organizations in China, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The report team visited and spoke to us last year, as part of the study. Here are the Executive Summary and link to the final report.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Access the 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' report <a href="http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>As new production, researchers scholarship analysis, pursue using digital or digital publishing scholarship or computational and dissemination (the creation, techniques), of they are often challenged to develop new skill sets. What skills, competencies, knowledge, and mindsets should digital scholars possess? How are such attributes—which we group under the term expertise—best cultivated? Does the shape of expertise vary around the world? Such questions are being asked by institutions establishing or reshaping digital scholarship organizations (DSOs), instructors developing educational and training programs in digital scholarship, experienced and aspiring digital scholars defining what expertise they need to acquire, and researchers exploring the global nature of digital scholarship.</p>
<p>Through our pilot study, we sought to answer these questions with the broader aims of identifying the workforce-related factors important to the success of digital scholarship, helping training and educational programs define key goals, and contributing to the conversation about the global dimensions of digital scholarship. We focused on “best in class” DSOs, highlighting the human dimensions behind their success in areas such as research output, winning grants, international reputation, and innovative teaching or training programs. We conducted interviews with a range of people involved with leading DSOs, including directors, research staff, faculty, librarians, graduate students, and university administrators. We conducted site visits with all but one of the 16 institutions
participating in our study, which enabled us to get a richer sense of the facilities, organizational context, and local culture. While most of our interviews focused on digital humanities, we also included several digital social science organizations to identify areas of commonality and contrast. We explored a variety of organizational
structures, including research centers and institutes, an academic department, labs, a network, a nonprofit organization, and a company; these organizations were sponsored by academic schools, libraries, and information technology departments. To understand the global dimensions of digital scholarship, we examined organizations from Mexico, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Since digital scholarship projects often require specific technical skills (such as expertise in text analysis or geographic information systems [GIS]), it was difficult to generalize about what particular skill sets organizations should offer; in many ways that depends on the goals and focus of the organization. In addition, different skill sets were expected depending on one’s position and degree of experience. However, our interviews revealed in particular the importance of collaborative competencies, reflecting the ways in which digital scholarship typically takes place in teams dependent on diverse expertise. Since digital scholarship often involves
developing new methods, tools, and theoretical approaches, successful digital scholars usually exhibit creativity, curiosity, and an enthusiasm for learning, which we term learning mindsets. Some level of general domain knowledge is useful so that team members can understand the research questions they are pursuing, while researchers draw upon methodological competencies (such as data science and GIS) and technical skills (such as database design and programming) to carry out their research. Finally, managerial skills—particularly project management—are needed to ensure that projects are completed.</p>
<p>While self-education and learning by doing are the predominant ways that digital scholars have traditionally acquired expertise, they also appreciate being part of a community of practice, so that they can turn to colleagues for help solving a problem and learning something new. Many organizations host workshops and visiting speakers and enable faculty and staff to attend conferences, although it can be challenging for staff to secure travel funding. A couple of organizations provide dedicated research time to staff, so that they can experiment, stay abreast of the state of the art, and contribute their own research. Along with formal support for professional development, we noted the importance of a “learning culture” in fostering continuous learning. Organizations most successful at
building expertise among faculty, students, and staff tended to share characteristics such as <em>an open and collaborative interdisciplinary culture</em> in which each team member contributes expertise and is respected for it; <em>global engagement</em>, which includes participating in multi-institutional research projects; an <em>entrepreneurial culture</em> in which experimentation is valued; and a <em>focus on teaching and learning</em> as well as research. We noted variation in the kind of <em>facilities</em> these organizations occupied; collaborative space seemed to be more important than top-notch hardware.</p>
<p>Since we were able to visit only a small number of organizations in each country or region included in the study, we don’t feel comfortable making broad generalizations about the state of digital scholarship around the world. However, we did note some common factors that influenced the shape of digital scholarship expertise. These
factors included <em>a tradition of digital scholarship</em>, as more established organizations could both build on existing structures and could be limited by them; <em>funding</em>; the degree of <em>involvement of the institution’s library</em>; and variations in <em>academic career structures</em>, such as paths to promotion and the recognition of alternative academic careers.</p>
<p>Digital scholarship organizations face a number of challenges, particularly in securing adequate funding for their work. We want to draw particular attention to the challenge of recruitment and retention. Typically, DSOs cannot compete with the private sector in offering high salaries or extensive opportunities for advancement; rather, they provide more flexible environments and an academic or intellectual atmosphere in which staff are encouraged to experiment and learn. Unfortunately, some staff at many organizations are hired on temporary contracts because of limited funding, so they often leave for more stable positions. We also noted a tension
between research and service at some organizations, wherein these organizations viewed producing new knowledge as central to their mission but may also be expected to provide services to local researchers or to maintain existing projects. At a few organizations, we observed status differences between faculty and staff, particularly in the ability to be principal investigators on grants or to receive travel funding. Researchers whose first language is not English must often choose between reaching a smaller audience with work published in their native language and devoting significant time to translating their work into English.</p>
<p>We provide an extensive list of recommendations aimed at digital scholars, leaders of DSOs, universities and host organizations, funders, and the broader digital scholarship community. To highlight some of the most salient: We recommend that digital scholars take responsibility for their own learning, nurture their own curiosity, and actively pursue learning opportunities, including by participating in communities of practice and team projects.
We advise the leaders of DSOs to encourage both structured and unstructured opportunities for learning by including dedicated staff research time in job descriptions, enabling staff to train and mentor, and hosting workshops, outside speakers, and other events. Host institutions such as universities should create more stable staff positions with paths to promotion and facilitate more stable funding for DSOs, while funders should support global digital scholarship exchanges. As for the digital scholarship community, we recommend heightening awareness of digital scholarship around the world through conference programs, funding initiatives, publications, and communities of practice, and promoting greater linguistic diversity. We hope that this report helps raise awareness of the range of expertise required for digital scholarship, the importance of a learning culture and active communities of practice in nurturing it, the challenges digital scholarship staff often face in finding stable careers, and the diversity of models for digital scholarship around the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital ScholarshipResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Humanities2015-10-16T07:43:18ZBlog EntryMaking in the Humanities – Some Questions and Conflicts
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-in-the-humanities-2013-some-questions-and-conflicts
<b>The following is an abstract for a proposed chapter on 'making' in the humanities, which has been accepted for publication in a volume titled 'Making Humanities Matter'. This is part of a new book series titled 'Debates in the Digital Humanities 2015' to be published by University of Minnesota Press (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/cfps/cfp_2015_mhm). The first draft of the chapter will be shared by mid-August 2015.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>The object of enquiry in the humanities has traditionally been defined in the form of text, audio-visual or other kinds of ‘objects’ or cultural artifacts. With the growth of information and communication technologies, and the advent of the digital, the emergence of a ‘digital object’, as ambiguous as the term may sound, in the last couple of decades, has led to a rethinking of the conventional notion of research objects as well as modes of questioning, with larger consequences for the production and dissemination of knowledge. The rise of fields like ‘humanities computing’, ‘digital humanities’ and ‘cultural analytics’, suggest a combining of two separate domains, or polarized binaries (such as old and new media), and point to the availability of new objects of study, and therefore the need for new methods to study them. A large part of the discourse around these objects however, in trying to read them closely, obfuscates the processes by which they are constituted, which are often as novel and innovative as the artifacts themselves.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This paper will attempt to explore the processes of ‘making’ of these digital objects in the context of several sites of recent humanities scholarship in India that mobilise digital techniques as key methods. These will include two online video archival initiatives (Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma), a digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore's literary works (Bichitra) developed at the University of Jadavpur, Kolkata, and curatorial work undertaken by the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru. Film, text and archival objects acquire several nuances as they are ‘made’ into digital objects, which are also reflected in the methods of working with and studying them. At the same time, problems of authorship, authenticity, accessibility, and a lack of adequate methods to study these objects are some challenges faced across disciplines. The objective of the study is to outline some of the questions related to form and methods that emerge with the digital object, and in the process undertake a critical reading of the politics of making in the humanities. What is the role of ‘making’ in the humanities? Where does humanities research using digital technologies intersect with art and creative practices? How is this research manifested in new forms or objects and methods, and to what effects on the humanities? The paper will aim to respond to some of these questions through a discussion of the initiatives mentioned above.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-in-the-humanities-2013-some-questions-and-conflicts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/making-in-the-humanities-2013-some-questions-and-conflicts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:46:32ZBlog EntryFigures of Learning: The Reader
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-reader
<b>As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of ‘bodies of knowledge’ which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by P.P Sneha examines the figure of the reader, and the manner in which it is redefined in as text and practices of reading are reconstituted in the digital context.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Reader</h2>
<h3>P.P. Sneha</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>The reader is a common figure of learning; we are all readers of one kind or another in an abstract sense. But practices of reading and writing have changed with the advent and proliferation of the internet and digital technologies. Be it your Kindle or updates on your Twitter feed or FB page, reading and writing have both been rendered as extremely technologised processes, more so than they already were, because of the mediation of the machine at different levels. At one level it is the encounter with the screen in our daily lives, the changing materiality of the text and how that determines the practices of meaning-making. At another, we can also connect this to larger questions of textuality itself, and the nature of the ‘digital text’. So is there a new kind of reader being constructed through these changing technologies of reading and writing? Within the varied and multi-layered space that is the ‘digital’, we can revisit the understanding of reading and writing as technologised processes through an exploration of the reader as a figure of learning. This brief sketch will examine the reader as a figure of learning, and her transition to the machine reader in the digital context.</p>
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<p>Particularly in the age of big data and excess information, and with the introduction of methods such as speed reading, machine reading, distant reading, and not reading, we are in essence being taught or forced to read a certain way. An immediate concern for a lot of traditional humanists is the loss of criticality, as they see the sudden influx of new technologies as taking away from more accepted and conventional methods of reading, such as close reading for example. But what are the practices of reading engendered by the digital? The little variations in text, tagging, marginalia, errata or the glitch that now take precedence in the way one interprets or reads a text; do they add on, fundamentally change or produce a shift in the process of meaning-making is a question to contend with. Reading as a social or collective process is one prominent aspect of this change. The sociality of reading is more pronounced in the digital context; but at the same time it also strangely obscures this with the increasing portability and customisation of devices to suit different kinds of reading needs. The role of affect in the process of reading then becomes prominent.</p>
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<p>Questions about authorship and authority over meaning would be more than relevant in this instance too, as the individual reader slowly gets replaced by more collective methods of reading and knowledge production. Online knowledge repositories such as the Wikipedia and a several dynamic archives have fostered and actively encouraged processes of collaborative knowledge production. In a reiteration of the classic debate on the death of the author, one now finds the role of reader in the traditional sense becoming more diminished, as the text itself takes precedence in the determination of meaning, and calls for a different kind of competence from the reader. Most importantly, it also suggests a change in the understanding of text and textuality in the digital space, with the possibility of innumerable readings with the help of algorithms emerging as a new textual practice. The possibility of reading data as text also hints towards a new kind of ‘machine reader’, or reading practice completely mediated by or reliant on the machine and unverifiable by the human subject. The emergence of new fields of scholarship such as the Digital Humanities also suggest these changes, and it may be worthwhile to examine how the text and practices of reading are constituted or reconstituted in such a space.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-reader'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-reader</a>
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No publishersneha-ppResearchResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeFigures of Learning2015-11-13T05:48:57ZBlog EntryDigital Activism in Asia Reader: Announcement
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader-announcement
<b>The CIS-RAW programme organized an editorial workshop on March 6-7, 2015, as part of its project on a Digital Activism in Asia Reader. The project is a collaborative effort of the Centre for Internet and Society and the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany, which aims to bring together local knowledge, debates and conversations around Digital Activism in Asia.</b>
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<p>The proposed reader on Digital Activism in Asia will combine stories in multiple forms, including academic essays, case-studies to grey literature from public discourse that reveals and points to the debates around digital activism that have emerged in this particular context. Most of the audience will consist of academics, practitioners and policy actors internationally.</p>
<p>One of the main goals of this reader will be to challenge the prevalent notion in the discourse of Digital Activism of universality and uniformity across contexts and cultures. The focus is on new actors (like digital natives), processes, movements, and networks that such digital activism has engendered.</p>
<p>The editorial workshop was conducted towards completion of the Reader, to better contextualize the material through peer annotations and supporting information. Over the course of two days, a total of six participants worked on two articles each, which had been circulated beforehand, to annotate those using different kinds of material and close reading the texts.</p>
<p>The workshop was structured in the form of presentations and discussion sessions in the morning, followed by a writing sprint in the afternoon. Apart from a larger discussion around digital activism itself, its modes, approaches and forms, the materials were also categorized along four axes – activists using digital tools, activism around the digital, digital shaping activism and activism shaping the digital – which helped structure the discussions and the process of writing. The suggested annotations took different forms – from introductory paragraphs to references for further reading. Participants were also expected to bring in and build on their own practices, experiences and contexts in discussing the articles.</p>
<p>The Digital Activism in Asia Reader is expected to be published by the <a href="http://cdc.leuphana.com/structure/hybrid-publishing-lab/" target="_blank">Hybrid Publishing Lab</a> in mid-2015.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader-announcement'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader-announcement</a>
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No publishersneha-ppDigital ActivismDigital Activism in Asia ReaderResearchNet CulturesResearchers at Work2015-10-24T14:22:39ZBlog EntryFigures of Learning: The Visual Designer
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-visual-designer
<b>As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of ‘bodies of knowledge’ which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by Tejas Pande examines the figure of the visual designer, and emerging practices of mapmaking. </b>
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<p>Making Methods for Digital Humanities (2M4DH) project seeks to make specific interventions around methods in the larger debates and practices of Digital Humanities, which includes producing content within the field, building a living repository of knowledge content by developing methods as well as interfaces, platforms and knowledge infrastructure, and bringing together a range of practitioners, performers and researchers from different disciplines who are not necessarily only working on the digital. As part of this project two consultations were held in Bangalore, around <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/consultation-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context"> figures of learning in the digital context.</a> The following is a series of abstracts for a proposed journal issue, that perform multi-media writing, bringing in artistic practice, video, sound and theoretical concepts to describe a particular practice of learning and knowledge in India and focus on a specific body, figure or person that is at the centre of that knowledge practice.</p>
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<h2>The Visual Designer</h2>
<h3>Tejas Pande</h3>
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<p>Mapping is the visual articulation of a living complex system, and locates itself at the nodes that allow for exchanges of knowledge from diverse disciplines. Over the course of history, it has come to represent exchanges of information of a very diverse nature. Commonly associated with representations of physical spaces, maps have since accommodated a growing need to chalk out relationships between spaces (physical, or temporal), ideologies, and institutions. This expanded notion of mapping has affected the way creators of maps regard the practice of mapmaking itself. Armed with a growing arsenal of tools (offline and web-based) to map such networks with, mapmaking has opened up to a host of professionals, amateurs, and anyone else with a desire to express spatial-temporal relationships.</p>
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<p>In such contexts, it is worthwhile to ask ourselves what is the role of traditional scientists, cartographers, and visual designers, who have been responsible for assimilating knowledge and making it visually palatable for wider audiences. The role of such mapmakers is further complicated by the expanded view of the craft of designing itself. For instance, graphic designer Aris Venetikidis began appearing on social media feeds in 2012 after his contribution to TEDx Dublin as the mapmaker genius behind the redesigned prototype of the Dublin Bus system. The new visualisation was met with critical praise, but interestingly his design process had steered the original mapmaking effort into that of quasi-transportation planning. Traditional mapmakers are being forced to intimately understand flows that constitute systems they wish to represent for others. Visual studies have historically emphasized decoding information embedded in collectively-generated syntax. Increasingly, multi-disciplinary practices have forced traditional designers to refashion their role in larger processes of production. What if their role was framed in the context of not only the rules of design process and problem definition, but the institutions within whom they operate, as well?</p>
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<p>In my opinion, these figures have come to serve as facilitators in a process of knowledge creation and sharing, and use mapmaking as their primary visual tool to form networks of exchanges. Examples drawn from emerging planning practices, especially in the urban sphere, will be used to examine the role of a mapmaker, too.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-visual-designer'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/figures-of-learning-the-visual-designer</a>
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No publishersneha-ppResearchResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeFigures of Learning2015-11-13T05:33:30ZBlog EntryThe Spaces of Digital
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-spaces-of-digital
<b>'The Spaces of Digital’ continues from the work done on the CIS-RAW monograph on the Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar at Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad. The premise of this monograph was the debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of internet technologies. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The Spaces of Digital begins from here to further explore the city as a unit of global development. The rise of digital technologies and the ways in which they produce new metaphors for the domains of life, labour and language, result in the city being reconfigured, reimagined and remapped through the techno-spatial narratives produced by information and network webs. The project will explore this in four stages, namely:</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Stage 1: Knowledge Maps</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The first phase of the project seeks to build a knowledge network that maps the different actors interested in questions of techno-social cities, generating a dialogue between them and building a knowledge repository that brings in different modes, formats and forms of knowledge to intersect with each other.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Stage 2: Spatial Patterns - Digital Project</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The monograph “Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities” refers to the spatial reconfiguration of many Indian cities that has occurred in the past two decades. An exercise to extract the key spatial patterns will be carried out in form of graphical representation using existing information from the monograph.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Stage 3: Knowledge Networking Building</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The mapping and demonstration project will be followed by a curated workshop that invites a dialogue between the identified knowledge partners.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Stage 4: Knowledge Exhibition / Publication</h3>
<p>The Knowledge Exhibition will be a hybrid space of online and offline curation and knowledge consolidation, and will be the final product of the project.</p>
<p>Some of the updates on this project may be <a class="external-link" href="http://spacesofdigital.wordpress.com/">accessed here</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-spaces-of-digital'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-spaces-of-digital</a>
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No publishersneha-ppThe Spaces of DigitalNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:41:25ZBlog Entry