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Exploring the Digital Landscape: An Overview
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/exploring-the-digital-landscape
<b>One component of the Digital Humanities mapping exercise was a series of six research projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore over November 2013-March 2014. These studies attempted to chart various aspects of the digital landscape in India today, with a focus on emerging forms of humanistic enquiry engendered by the Internet and new digital technologies. This blog post presents a broad overview of some of the key learnings from these projects. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The six research studies commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS as part of the collaborative exercise to map the Digital Humanities (DH) were formulated within a broad rubric of exploring changes at the intersection of youth, technology and higher education in India. Apart from existing questions about the digital divide, and the possibilities of increased connectivity and availability of new sources of information due to proliferation of digital tools and access to the Internet, the projects also tried to address in some way the problem of understanding and formulating a research enquiry about the ‘digital’ itself. The digital as a mode of existence or being, or a new ‘social’ or as discussed in the earlier blog-posts, is essentially a premise of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world. While the studies focus largely on youth and higher education and so are located with a certain context, they do attempt to address larger questions about understanding the digital landscape in India today, with reference to new and changing practices of interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Just to recapitulate from an earlier blog-post; the following were the studies commissioned:</p>
<ol> </ol><ol>
<li><b>Survey of Printed Digitised Materials in Bengali</b><b> – </b>an extensive survey and report of printed digitized materials in Bengali across a few selected themes. The objective of this exercise is to map the nature of available digitized materials and explore possibilities of their use in the higher education classroom.<b><br />Researcher: Saidul Haque, Jadavpur University, Kolkata</b></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Confessions in the Digital Age</b><b> – </b>looks at the rising trend of ‘confession pages’ on social media, most of which are located in an educational context, and explores the manner in which the digital space and its assumed anonymity has reconfigured this practice and the interaction between youth and technology.<b><br />Researcher: Rimi Nandy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata</b></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Queer Expression in the Online Space</b> – this study explores the concept of digital citizenship with a focus on how youth from the LGBTQ community engage with digital technologies such as social media, mobile phones and radio to negotiate questions of identity politics, activism and citizenship in cyberspace.<b><br />Researcher: Ditilekha Sharma, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai</b></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Creating Knowledge: Mapping the nature of Content and Processes on the English Wikipedia</b> - analyses the nature of content produced on Wikipedia, with a focus on the representation of women and gender-related topics to explore if online knowledge platforms contain and perpetuate a systemic gender-bias.<b><br />Researcher:</b> <b>Sohnee Harshey, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai</b></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>From the Streets to the Web: Feminist Activism on Social Media</b><b>– </b>an ethnographic exploration of social media platforms to explore how feminist activists have engaged with digital technology and if this has allowed for a redefinition of political organization and new forms of activism within the movement.<b><br />Researcher: Sujatha Subramanian, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai</b></li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This exercise was also an attempt to build on some of the learnings from a four-year programme undertaken by HEIRA-CSCS titled ‘Pathways to Higher Education (supported by the Ford Foundation), which looked at the problem of <i>quality of access</i> in higher education for students from disadvantaged sections of society, particularly with respect to the digital and linguistic divide. The emphasis therefore was on understanding how young people, who are known as digital natives, negotiate with these rapidly changing modes of communication and learning. The projects therefore are located in institutional spaces and primarily address the demographic of 18 – 35 years, although there are exceptions as in the case of the studies on Wikipedia and the Bengali archival materials. Most of the studies draw from conventional methods of humanities and social sciences research, largely consisting of ethnographic and textual analysis, interviews and surveys. Adapting these methods to the digital domain, or rather formulating new research questions and methodology that is adequate to understand the nuances of the digital sphere was one of the key challenges of this exercise. Some of the learning outcomes from these studies may be summarized under the following themes:</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">The Emergence of the (Digital) Public Sphere</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The advent of the internet and digital technologies has largely been considered enabling, in terms of what it allows you to do and be both in the real and virtual worlds. The growth of online activism in the last couple of years is indicative of this change to a large extent. This has been particularly true of traditional forms of activism that have now adopted the digital space, such as the LGBTQ or feminist movements. A majority of the respondents in the studies focussing on these two themes have endorsed the positive aspect of activism in the online space, in terms of organising people and connecting civil society and the community, and bringing these issues into the mainstream. Most felt that the internet offers a space, and a relatively safe one at that, to talk about issues related to sexuality and gender. Not only in terms of its potential to garner large numbers, disseminate information and create wider transnational networks, the online space can now also be seen as the space where the activism originates, rather than merely supplementing or facilitating traditional on-the-ground movements. As such, the digital has evolved into an alternate critical public sphere were the discourse around identity, citizenship, and socio-political participation has become more varied, even if not yet adequately nuanced.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While most of the studies endorse the democratising potential of the internet and digital technology, particularly that of mobile phones which have made these networks and resources accessible to a larger cross-section of people, many have also speak about the replication of several forms of systemic injustice and marginalisation that exist in the real world in the online space. The project on the gender-gap on Wikipedia cites examples of such a politics of exclusion in the knowledge-making process, not just with respect to content on Wikipedia, but also in the inclusion of women in the process of content-generation. Respondents in the other two projects on activism also spoke of instances of gendered violence and abuse, often a repercussion of being vocal online, thus highlighting the problematic duality of the condition of being visible and vulnerable. The imperative of creating safe online spaces to voice opinions, show solidarity or express dissent has been stressed by a majority of respondents in these studies.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Being Digital: Visibility and Accessibility</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Moving from the question of doing to being, a paradox about the online space has been the way in which it accords a certain hyper-visibility, and increasingly makes invisible people and discourses, many a time not by choice. The option of anonymity accorded by the online space has been important for many voices of dissent to find expression, and for non-normative discourse to become visible in mainstream debates. However, the problems of anonymity can be several, as seen in the case of the study on the Facebook confessions. ‘Performance’ is an important aspect of these confessions; whether it is in the nature of a comment on another person or a representation of the self. The creation and performance of identities has been a significant component of studies on digital and cyber culture studies. The internet as facilitating performance of a certain gendered identity, while also in some ways obscuring certain others – as in the case of the marginalisation of lesbian, bisexual or transsexual individuals within the queer community is a case in point. Further the visibility accorded to issues in the online space is also conditional, in terms of what gets viewed, discussed and acted upon. The Wikipedia study discusses this in terms of a ‘covert alliance-building’ of editors or consensus on what goes up online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another positive attribute of the online space as reiterated by most people in the projects was that of increased accessibility - to networks, people and resources. But as is evident from the earlier paragraph, such accessibility often comes with a caveat - the conditions of the access are also as important. In the case of the survey on Bengali materials, the availability of a large corpus of materials in various spaces and the efforts to digitse them is an insufficient measure given the poor accessibility to such digitised materials available online, due to issues of copyright, metadata, technological support and lack of subject expertise. Accessibility is an important aspect of being digital as understood in the project on mapping the digital classroom. While students in most undergraduate classrooms have access to digital devices in one form or the other, the use of these devices in learning is contingent upon several factors such as student and teacher competence and comfort, and the ease to adapt to changing teaching-learning environments given cultural and linguistic divides. More importantly, the perception of the internet or digital technologies as a tool to merely facilitate communication or learning, rather than a space of critical engagement is the predominant understanding, with few notable exceptions.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">New Knowledge-making Practices</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Combining the being and doing in the online space are the new modes of knowledge formation engendered by this medium. The Wikipedia is illustrative of the process of collaborative knowledge production, and the politics inherent therein. The problems and challenges of digitisation and archival practice as evident in the study of the Bengali digitised materials is also an example of this knowledge vs information conundrum. However the connect with higher education, as in the availability of scholarly materials in regional languages in the latter case, and the need to acknowledge non-traditional sources as scholarly as in the former, are some of the immediate challenges identified by these studies. The model of annotations and referencing, as made possible by collaborative and dynamic knowledge repositories is an important concern of the DH debate as well, in terms of questioning existing hierarchies of authorship and expertise.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The bringing in of non-normative discourse on sexuality and gender into the mainstream, and the emergence of new issues in some sense has also been facilitated by the online space to some extent, even if within certain exclusive communities or spaces. An example of this is in terms of narratives of pleasure in feminist discussions, which seem to have found a space online but not so much in debates otherwise seen in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Changes in learning and pedagogic practice are an important aspect of new knowledge-making practices, and as mentioned earlier this is apparent in classrooms today given that students and faculty recognise the potential of digital technologies. However, the primacy of textual material in most classrooms, and a certain reluctance to engage with digital media and texts on the part of faculty and students in a substantive way is an attribute of the classroom today. Indeed, ways of reading and writing have changed with the onslaught of technology; as the study on confessions demonstrates communication on social media and mobile phones have evolved a different linguistic forms, both in English and regional languages. This and the problem of an information clutter, or ‘excess’, without the option of verifiability in most cases, is one of the major concerns of faculty with regard to technology.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While the projects in themselves may have only indirectly contributed to our understanding of DH, the process of formulating these questions and trying to find some answers to them have been insightful, particularly with respect to the problems with understanding technology, the importance of form and process, and the growth of alternative spaces of learning, all which are relevant to the DH discourse. For some reflections on the individual projects, see the guest posts by the researchers on CIS-RAW; the complete research reports are available at <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira/irps/heira/documents">http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira/irps/heira/documents</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/exploring-the-digital-landscape'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/exploring-the-digital-landscape</a>
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No publishersnehaFeaturedDigital Humanities2014-04-14T15:48:30ZBlog EntryThe Machinistic Paradigm Collapse
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/the-machinistic-paradigm-collapse
<b>Looking at the example of the scientific practices surrounding protein folding study, this blog explores the modern relevance of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of a paradigm. This blog posits that because of the heavy reliance on computational technology and simulation, the philosophical basis of Kuhnian scientific paradigm has ceased to exist and hence science, along with the Digital Humanities has moved into a post structuralist age. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One of the great scientific challenges that have ridden along the furrowed brows of all three branches of natural science’s practitioners is of understanding protein folding. This, to the uninitiated as I am, is the process by which newly synthesized proteins or new born proteins, as random coils are given their biological destinies by their amino acid sequences through folding in three dimensional space into their secondary, tertiary or quaternary structures. <a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1] </a>It helps me to think of a paper rocket that is a plain sheet of paper, a trapped 2 dimensional figure, limp and physically impotent as if in Abbot’s Flatland until it is introduced to a 3-dimensional space and itself becomes a 3 dimensional entity which can then travel particular distances, velocities and directions based all on the precise folding. Proteins, straying from their destined path of structure, even by the slightest can become toxic, cause allergies and many neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and prion. <a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> This immediately places the uncovering of the precise folding pathways in the interest of the whole modern medical enterprise. Indeed, this old scientific problem dates back almost a century to the experiments of Anson and Mirsky in the 1930’s. <a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a>It is also quite possible that the story of protein folding, in which machine vision replaces theory and mathematics, unveils another story; the erosion of the scientific paradigm itself.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 book called the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, gave the word paradigm its contemporary meaning. At a mere definitional level, Kuhn describes the paradigms as “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.” <a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4]</a> In terms of methodology, a paradigm governs what is to be observed, what questions are asked, how they are asked, how the data is interpreted and how the experiments are conducted. However, Kuhn had a greater vision for a paradigm when he characterized it as an emergent system from a revolution which means it is a change in the world order itself. Or to camber the previous sentence, paradigms order the world around them. Commenting on the scientists world view, Kuhn says “in so far as their (scientists) only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution, scientists are responding to a different world…what were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">My previous blog on the collapse of the semiotic sphere of capture spoke about the substitution every epoch of the center of the sphere or transcendental signifier that lends meaning to the world upon which it reigned. It, however, (as a consequence of Derrida’s concentration on results more than process) did not lay down the steps that led to the replacement of the center of meaning with a different set of signifiers leading to a different vision of the world. Kuhn, on the other hand, adumbrates the exact process by which this paradigmatic transformation in scientific world order takes place. As a non scientist and a denizen of a post metaphysical age, I’m at a severe disadvantage when trying to comprehend what it must mean to have these seismic shifts in the way the mind is ordered and perceives the world so I tried to meditate De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (on the revolutions of the heavenly sphere) through the Renaissance Astronomer Copernicus to try to understand the process. <a name="fr5" href="#fn5">[5]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/protein.png/image_preview" alt="Paradigm Shift" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Paradigm Shift" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="fr6" href="#fn6">[6]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Ptolemaic earth centric model, his astronomical system, was first developed during the time of Christ. This system worked admirably in the prediction of changing positions of both stars and planets in the ancient world, far outstripping any other system. However, over the fifteen centuries leading upto Copernicus, many holes and problems, what Kuhn refers to as anomalies, started appearing in this system. It could not account for certain planetary positions, equinoxes and these problems kept compounding as astronomical observation became more sophisticated as the theoretical basis grew more antiquated. Almost the whole enterprise of astronomy was involved with the mitigation and reduction of minor discrepancies by adjustments and tweaks made to the Ptolemaic system of concentric circles. Kuhn explains this as a process of resilience where scientists play a game of Whac-a-mole and as the apparatus of discovery complicates the science much further than the accuracy allowed by the existing paradigm, the theoretical stereotypes within the paradigm are loosened to accommodate the discrepancies so much that they bring about their own collapse. As Karl Popper says in “Science as Falsification”, the strength of a scientific theory, or any theory, is its falsifiability or is directly proportional to its prohibition of certain observations. He warns that when a theory, or in this case, a paradigm, has been refuted, its adherents attempt ad hoc auxiliary modifications or reinterpretations of the theory to rescue it from refutation by what he calls a conventionalist twist.<a name="fr7" href="#fn7">[7]</a> This rescuing is possible, but it comes at the price of destroying its scientific status and moving it into the metaphysical or mythical realm. By the time Alfonso X came about in the thirteenth century, looking upon the Ptolemaic model as a scandal, he was claiming that if God has consulted him when creating the universe, he would have received better advice. <a name="fr8" href="#fn8">[8]</a> Finally, in the 16th century the painful process of denial ended with Copernicus’s rejection of the Ptolemaic paradigm in favor of his own heliocentric paradigm as in the diagram above.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One could look to paradigm shifts in the humanities and social sciences and draw parallels to the scientific ones with the birth of deconstruction in the evolution of the text as explored in the previous blog but that would be across purposes as Kuhn himself prohibits this application. In the preface of his book, he explains that he concocted the concept of a paradigm precisely to distinguish the social from the natural sciences. Some like M.L Handa have attempted this concomitance but that sort of endeavor will be beyond the scope of this blog.<a name="fr9" href="#fn9">[9]</a> The windows of the laboratory will, for the most part, be shut out from the outside world in this blog. This argument was, perhaps easier to make under past paradigms as Bertrand Russell, when he sought to disprove the Natural Law argument in “Why I’m not a Christian” says “that (natural law) was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for any explanation of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the laws of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced…you no longer have the sort of Natural Law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion.”<a name="fr10" href="#fn10">[10]</a> Science may have inherited its ontology from philosophy which inherited its ontology from theology in the past but those dendrites in the past neurological connections seem to have been excised in the present.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Kuhn says that the striking feature of doing scientific research is the attempt to discover what is known in advance, hence identifying the scientific hypothesis as the locus of the human imagination in the scientific praxis. Popper, in “Science: Conjectures and Refutations”, says “At the same time I realized that such myths may be developed, and become testable; that historically speaking all--or very nearly all--scientific theories originate from myths, and that a myth may contain important anticipations of scientific theories. Examples are Empedocles' theory of evolution by trial and error, or Parmenides' myth of the unchanging block universe in which nothing ever happens and which, if we add another dimension, becomes Einstein's block universe (in which, too, nothing ever happens, since everything is, four-dimensionally speaking, determined and laid down from the beginning).”<a name="fr11" href="#fn11">[11]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If we do run the hypothesis through a philosophical treatment, then as C.S Pierce observed, it is a form of abductive reasoning unlike the deductive and inductive reasoning that may play a more dominant role in other stages of the scientific praxis. Abductive reasoning takes the form of a guess where the scientist looks at a particular phenomenon in nature like a parched, dead tree and ventures a hypothesis that there was no rainfall.<a name="fr12" href="#fn12">[12]</a> While β (the result; i.e the dried up tree) could have been due to a host of causes a (eg forest fire), the scientist decides to propose a cause, α, based on the economy or likelihood of explaining power which is also called the Occam’s razor principle. Pierce said that abductive reasoning is "very little hampered" by rules of logic…Oftenest even a well-prepared mind guesses wrong. But the modicum of success of our guesses far exceeds that of random luck, and seems born of attunement to nature by instincts developed or inherent, especially insofar as best guesses are optimally plausible and simple in the sense of the ‘facile and natural’, as by Galileo’s natural light of reason.”<a name="fr13" href="#fn13">[13]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It is precisely at this juncture that the scientific consciousness, ordered by the paradigm of an age escapes the laboratory and is subject to governance of the transcendental signifier potentates atop the Olympus of the outer world. The Occam’s razor principle of parsimony itself is premised on the theological notion of its time that the simplest explanation conceivable by man is likely the best one because man is made in the image of God. Popper further explicated on Pierce’s postulations in his hypothetico-deductive model in the twentieth century when he called the hypothesis just “a guess”.<a name="fr14" href="#fn14">[14]</a> The guess that the dead tree was brought about by a drought is then one that comes from the epoch of <em>Being</em> in which non-scientists live.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We must remember that a paradigm is a universal belief of scientists that permits the very selection process of the pursuit. The guess that eventually becomes the hypothesis is one that is made robust as many abductions are rejected and modified by better abductions. Although the eventual hypothesis could be one rising solely from the hermetically sealed paradigm, one cannot ignore this process happening behind the scientific consciousness. Methodologically distinct though the paradigm remains from cultural pursuits, its ontologies remain the same. Derrida, while analyzing Levi Strauss’s Elementary Structures: The Savage Minds says “On the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. More than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Minds faithfully echoes the text I have just quoted: “The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted on seems today to offer value which is above all methodological.” And this methodological value is not affected by its “ontological” non-value…: “It would not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a genera humanity; this first enterprise prepares the way for others ... which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemical conditions””<a name="fr15" href="#fn15">[15]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">If then there is this neurological connection that exists as a fast multiplying parasite that is a different species by the time it enters the laboratory then it must be true that the paradigm is vulnerable to extinction when that mutated parasite, the postmodern idea, comes from an alien world of no ontological or transcendental fixity. In other words, along with the collapse of Gebser’s integral sphere of semiotic capture, the structure of the scientific paradigm as Kuhn saw it should have also collapsed. Kuhn preempts this thought, unintentionally perhaps when he says “Once a first paradigm through which to view nature has been found, there is no such thing as research in the absence of any paradigm. To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” This is evocative of Heidegger when he laments that with the end of the metaphysical age where there are no more universal structures of consciousness, comes the death of real art. To test the validity of Kuhn’s challenge, we come back to our initial foray into the world of protein folding discovery.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Recently, there was a multi-player online game called Foldit where players have to collaborate and compete to create accurate protein structure models. Foldit player solutions started to create waves in the scientific community when player solutions began to outperform the most state-of-the-art methods including the other computational methods. Two particular “recipes” became particularly famous and a paper on this discovery called “Algorithm Discovery by Protein Folding Game Players” says “benchmark calculations show that the new algorithm independently discovered by scientists and by Foldit players outperforms previously published methods. Thus, online scientific game frameworks have the potential not only to solve hard scientific problems, but also to discover and formalize effective new strategies and algorithms.”<a name="fr16" href="#fn16">[16]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This is not a typical example of a state of affairs but an extreme example illustrative of a larger technological shift in the business of science. As Pierce said about the “attunement to nature by instincts” the computer game is a case of this instinctual visual acuity being harnessed by machine intelligence. This mode of scientific production, I would posit at a fundamental level, is completely incompatible with the Kuhnian conception of a paradigm.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The paradigm is not merely a set of rules and shared assumptions but a rigid system of inherited dogma that draws the horizon of exploration universally but is limited in scope and precision at its inception. Therefore normal science (science conducted at non-revolutionary times within paradigms) is a mop-up operation or “an attempt to force nature into the pre-formed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies”. Normal, non-revolutionary science is a relatively linear, cumulative process whose horizon is defined by the inherited beliefs, theories, methods and the mental labor of the mop-up crew. The moment when computer modeling began to provide the fineness of observation that it currently does, it replaced the physical, dynamical modus vivendi of mathematical science and started to determine the horizon of the scientific endeavor.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Dr. Bengt Nӧlting’s book, Protein Folding Kinetics: Biophysical Methods, begins with a quote from Faust, which in my opinion is innocent, if not naïve.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Then shall I see, with vision clear,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">How secret elements cohere,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And what the universe engirds,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And give up huckstering with words.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Johann Wolfgang von Goethe<br /><br /></em>He says, with the advent of computational modeling and experimental advances in technology, “the pathways and structures of early folding events and the transition state structures of fast folding proteins can now be studied in far more detail…which… allows fast processes that would normally be hidden in kinetic studies to be revealed.”<a name="fr17" href="#fn17">[17]</a> He is then able to see, with vision clear, how elements cohere on screen, he thinks. However, if we are to recall Kuhn, seeing in science is a sense given by the paradigm that allows the scientist to observe nature but truly see it in coherence with the paradigmatic ordering of her world view. Therefore, Nӧlting is not really seeing at all (unless he programmed the computer simulation which brings him a little closer). He merely has “the notion that the quantitation of kinetic rate constants and the visualization of protein structures along the folding pathway will lead to an understanding of function and mechanism and will aid the understanding of important biological processes and disease states through detailed mechanistic knowledge” (italics mine). “Beyond this, protein structures along the folding pathway can now be visualized at the level of individual amino acid residues in nearly any biologically relevant time scale. This detailed mechanistic knowledge will further aid the understanding of biological processes and disease states, and will eventually help us to find rational ways for re-designing biological processes, and to find cures for diseases.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In “Protein Folding, Misfolding and Aggregation Classical Themes and Novel Approaches”, Victor Muῆoz furthers the notion of science’s boundaries being drawn by technology when he says “prevailing views about the mechanisms of protein folding have closely followed the idiosyncrasies in the catalog of available proteins and experimental approaches.” Although computational simulation is distinct from experimental techniques, one can interpret this statement, based on the rest of book, that the approaches include predictive simulation. The history of the development of protein folding study has been a technologically determined one of serendipity. When new experimental data on folding and unfolding rates emerged, Muῆoz says that “theoreticians immediately saw this avalanche of new experimental results as an opportunity to test results from theory and computer simulations, leading to the first de facto connection between the worlds of experiment and theory in protein folding.”<a name="fr18" href="#fn18">[18]</a> Therefore, the world of experiment and theory, a process that was <strong>previously mediated by the paradigm is now mediated by computer simulations</strong>. The structure of scientific pursuits is now determined by the randomness of programming and computer engineering.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This phenomenon of computational capabilities exceeding the mathematical conception is not contained to the world of biophysics but extends to material sciences like nanotechnology, ecology and many others. As was postulated in my previous blog, this is probably another symptom of the techno-capitalistic regime that demands to be spoken to through images rather than the esoteric language of mathematics. When Fred Whipple’s wanted to test his “dirty snowball” theory, he proved it by pointing towards Haley’s Comet, when Einstein wanted to prove his theory he pointed again to a light dance in the heavens. When the cosmic magic shows can no longer enthrall the science funding entity, computer simulations are all that are left in the midden heap. Remember that the success of a paradigm rests in its propagation and its appeal to future generations of scientists. Therefore, even if the atypical scientist is still carrying out research under a dogmatic rubric, it cannot gain the fervor and universal sense of order when big pharmaceuticals fund only the technological science and the Intellectual Property regime spurs the individual scientists to work at breakneck speeds allowed only by computers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">According to David Berry in “Understanding Digital Humanities”, one of its main objectives is to use computational methods to answer existing questions or challenge theoretical paradigms to generate new questions.”<a name="fr19" href="#fn19">[19]</a> The emergence of the non-human computational methods in the business of natural sciences has certainly generated new questions around an observation; meaning in the sciences has eerily followed on the destructive path of the Digital Humanities, slaying the Kuhnian paradigm in a twin collapse with the integral sphere of semiotic capture.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<hr style="text-align: justify;" />
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>] Nolting, Bengt. Protein Folding Kinetics Biophysical Methods. Berlin: Springer, 1999. eBook.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]ibid</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>] Munoz, Victor. Protein Folding, Misfolding and Aggregation Classical Themes and Novel Approaches. The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2008. eBook.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>] Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962. Print.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn5" href="#fr5">5</a>] ibid</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn6" href="#fr6">6</a>]Picture taken from http://tofspot.blogspot.in/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-for.html</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn7" href="#fr7">7</a>] Popper, Karl. "Science as Falsification." Conjectures and Refutations. (1963): n. page. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn8" href="#fr8">8</a>] See citation 4</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn9" href="#fr9">9</a>] Handa, M. L. (1986) "Peace Paradigm: Transcending Liberal and Marxian Paradigms". Paper presented in "International Symposium on Science, Technology and Development, New Delhi, India, March 20–25, 1987, Mimeographed at O.I.S.E., University of Toronto, Canada (1986)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn10" href="#fr10">10</a>] Russel, Bertrand. "Why I am Not a Christian an Examination of the God‐Idea and Christianity." England. 06 03 1927. Address.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn11" href="#fr11">11</a>] See citation 7</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn12" href="#fr12">12</a>] Peirce, C. S. "On the Logic of drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies" (1901), Collected Papers v. 7</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn13" href="#fr13">13</a>] ibid</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn14" href="#fr14">14</a>] Popper, Karl (2002), Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London, UK: Routledge</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn15" href="#fr15">15</a>] Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, J Derrida, 1966.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn16" href="#fr16">16</a>] Khatiba, Firas, and Seth Cooper. "Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players." PNAS. (2011): n. page. Web. 13 Apr. 2014. .</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn17" href="#fr17">17</a>] See citation 1</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn18" href="#fr18">18</a>] See citation 3</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn19" href="#fr19">19</a>]Berry, David. Understanding Digital Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Web.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/the-machinistic-paradigm-collapse'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/the-machinistic-paradigm-collapse</a>
</p>
No publisheranirudhDigital Humanities2014-04-15T17:03:22ZBlog Entry‘Doing’ Digital Humanities: Reflections on a project on Online Feminism in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities
<b>A core concern of Digital Humanities research has been that of method. The existing discourse around the field of DH assumes a move away from traditional humanities and social sciences research methods to more open, collaborative and iterative forms of scholarship spanning some conventional and other not so conventional practices and spaces. In this guest blog post, Sujatha Subramanian reflects upon her experience of undertaking a research study on online feminist activism in India and its various challenges. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">When the chance to do a research project on Digital Humanities presented itself, I deliberated over the possible topics I could explore. As a student of Media and Cultural Studies, I have on previous occasions studied digital technology and online spaces. Those studies, however, were simply “social sciences” research. I had little understanding of what Digital Humanities as a discipline entailed. While I admit that I am still unable to come up with a concrete definition of the same, the process of conducting the research and the DH workshop organised at CIS led to some clarity about the field and methods of Digital Humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Before beginning the research I asked myself what could I, a feminist media scholar, learn from Digital Humanities and how could I contribute to the same. I wondered if the lack of familiarity with technological skills such as design, statistics and coding- knowledge that I saw as prerequisite to Digital Humanities- meant that I couldn’t really engage with the field of Digital Humanities. While grappling with this question, I chanced upon the #TransformDH project. At the heart of the project is the question- “How can digital humanities benefit from more diverse critical paradigms, including race/ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies?” <a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a></p>
<p>In a blogpost titled “Queer Studies and the Digital Humanities”,<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> the author states,</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify;" class="quoted">"...a lot of queer/critical ethnic studies/similar scholars also lack access to the resources that make it easier to combine digital and humanities work. That might not only mean physical access and training in technology, but also the time to add yet another interdisciplinary element to a project...my experience suggests that many, many politicized queers and people of color engaged in scholarly work in and out of the academy do use digital tools and think critically about them and even create them; they just don’t necessarily do so under the sign of the digital humanities."</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As someone who used the space of Facebook to initiate conversations around feminist issues and was actively engaged in fighting the sexism entrenched in social media spaces, was I then already “doing” digital humanities? I reflected that since feminist activism finds such little space in mainstream media, a worthwhile Digital Humanities project could be to document and archive the contemporary feminist movement and the ways in which it is transforming our understanding of the digital space. As part of the project, I explored how feminist activists have revolutionised digital spaces for the creation of alternative public spheres, constituted of not just women but also other marginalised communities. The project gave me the opportunity to study the inclusions and exclusions facilitated by the digital space, with questions of gender, sexuality, class, caste and disability as central to the enquiry. The project also raised questions regarding popular assumptions of digital space as a disembodied, liberatory space free of power relations by exploring gendered and sexualised violence that these feminist activists face.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the political vision of my project was clear, my methodological skills needed a little honing. The DH workshop organised at CIS was of great help in this regard. The feedback received at the workshop was instrumental in recognising the importance of “big data”. As a feminist researcher, life histories, personal narratives and stories remain important sources of knowledge for me. However, in studying social movements and their impact, the limitations of such methodological tools are revealed. Understanding how a feminist activist with 11,000 followers on Twitter offers important insight into public discourse is contingent on the ability to analyse such data. The workshop also helped me in realising that in my definition of activism, I had precluded many feminist engagements with digital technology, including the efforts of feminist Wikipedians, feminist gamers and feminist encounters with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). While these remain the shortcomings of my project, the workshop helped in foregrounding the scope for collaboration that lies at the heart of all our projects. A discussion of my project alongside Ditilekha’s project on LGBT Youth and Digital Citizenship brought to fore the intersections as well as the different activist strategies employed by the two movements in their use of social media. Sohnee’s project on the gender gap on Wikipedia underlines that an important aspect of working towards a feminist epistemology, and changing the relations of power that characterise technology, are issues of access and participation. Rimi’s use of a text mining tool to analyse the different patterns of language on confessions pages highlighted the value of such technological tools in socio-cultural analysis. The workshop which brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, helped in highlighting shared concerns of methodology, content and political visions and prompted discussions on innovative approaches to conducting research. This attempt at collaborative knowledge production- whether it is the constant communication between the research scholars through email, the workshop with the scholars and the mentors or even the dissemination of our reports on an open access site- has been the essence of my engagement with Digital Humanities. The ethos of collaboration as central to Digital Humanities is reflected in Joan Shaffer’s definition of Digital Humanities as “...a community interested in collaborative projects and sharing knowledge across disciplines." <a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3] </a>This ethos of learning from fellow researchers and working together to create accessible knowledge is something that I shall carry forward to my future research endeavours.</p>
<hr />
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. <a class="external-link" href="http://transformdh.org/2012/01/">http://transformdh.org/2012/01/</a></p>
<p>[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. <a class="external-link" href="http://www.queergeektheory.org/2011/10/conference-thoughts-queer-studies-and-the-digital-humanities/">http://www.queergeektheory.org/2011/10/conference-thoughts-queer-studies-and-the-digital-humanities/</a></p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. <a class="external-link" href="http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/members/echoln/profile/">http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/members/echoln/profile/</a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Sujatha Subramanian is an M.Phil. Scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research study was part of a series of six projects commissioned by </strong><a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira"><strong>HEIRA-CSCS,</strong></a><strong> Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See </strong><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-in-india-mapping-changes-at-intersection-of-youth-technology-higher-education"><strong>here</strong></a><strong> for more on this initiative.</strong></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities</a>
</p>
No publishersnehaResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaDigital Humanities2015-03-30T12:48:16ZBlog EntryAnimating the Archive – A Survey of Printed Digitized Materials in Bengali and their Use in Higher Education
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/animating-the-archive
<b>With the advent of digital technologies and the internet, archival practice has seen much change in its imagination and function, such as to extend its scope beyond preservation to a collaborative, open source model which facilitates new modes of knowledge production. In this blog post, Saidul Haque reflects upon his research project on a survey of digitized materials in Bengali, and some of the impediments to their use in higher education and research. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At present a large collection of printed Bengali materials in the form of books, journals, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, etc., is scattered in various public libraries, institutions, and private collections in India and abroad.These endangered and hidden cultural resources in vernacular languages need to be digitized and shared to a networked community using an online platform not only for the sake of preservation but also for wider dissemination. A comprehensive survey of printed digitized materials in the field of Arts and Culture, Education, Politics/Economy was executed as part of a collaborative project with HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore. The survey was carried out at School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University and Centre for the Study of Social Sciences (CSSS), Kolkata. These are the pioneering institutions in Bengal to introduce digital preservation of cultural materials and they have ongoing digitization initiatives. Online archives/ digital repositories available in the public domain [like West Bengal Public Library Network, Society for Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR), Digital Library of India, E-Gyankosh of Indira Gandhi National Open University(IGNOU), Rare Bengali Book section in Internet Archive, Digital South Asia Library, various public blogs] also came under this survey. Observations were gathered through interviews with resource persons involved in digitization. Discussion with students, researchers and faculty members concentrated on the use of Bengali digitized materials in higher education.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">School of Cultural Texts and Records(SCTR) has digitized popular street literature and a wide collection of rare and unique texts on Bengali drama of 19th century .The revolutionary Bichitra Project of the School provides a complete online resource of Rabindranath Tagore’s works in both English and Bengali. (<a class="external-link" href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php</a>). Centre for Studies in Social Science, on the other hand started preserving rare documents in microfilm format from 1993 but later shifted to digitization mode. In 2008 the CSSSC and Savifa (University of Heidelberg) through a collaborative programme made available the collection of CSSSC (the early printed literature in Bengali from 1800-1950) online. The centre has also retrieved two major and endangered Bengali newspapers: <i>Jugantar</i> and <i>Amrita Bazar Patrika</i> from colonial and post–colonial Bengal. <i>Amrita bazaar patrika</i> is available online through the World Newspaper Archive Collection.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Online repositories like West Bengal Public Library Network and Digital Library of India also holds a large number of Bengali books but in most cases Indian language full-text contents are available in TIFF image format only.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The issue of using digitized Bengali materials in higher education sheds light on various problems related to free access, copyright issue, technological adversity, and metadata. Most of the materials available in digital domain are popular story books and hence scarcity of scholarly materials in Bengali for higher education is evident. Most of the students do not know where to search and how to search and they prefer to visit libraries. There are almost 17,000 entries in the domain of Bengali Wikipedia. But either students are unaware of their existence or don’t rely on these materials as these are not updated. Most of them are even unaware of the fact that they can edit these pages. Recently a few scholars started uploading essays in Bengali on Academia.edu. But teachers are doubtful about the quality of these materials as anyone can upload papers here. E-thesis depository spaces like Shodhganga and Vidyanidhi contain materials in English and a few in regional languages like Hindi but not in Bengali. In the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), there are only two bi-lingual journals<ins cite="mailto:sheetal" datetime="2014-04-01T16:22"> </ins>( Barnolipi and Pratidhwani) which publish articles in Bengali. Teachers are unanimous in the belief that online publication of Bengali research articles will bring more research citations and also decrease the rate of duplicity of same research topic. But scarcity of open access Bengali materials (digitized and born digital) online is a great hindrance in doing research in Bengali.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Researchers in Bengali language and literature may also come forward to participate actively in digitizing rare materials. Of course funding and technical equipment are great hindrance but institutions like SCTR, Jadavpur University are eager to provide scanners and other support to those who want to digitize important cultural resources. Presently the concept of online Bengali bookshops has emerged. The numbers of online e-magazines and e-newspapers in Bengali is growing day by day. What we need is to make people aware of the existence of these resources. It is a positive step on the part of people who are using social networking sites in Bengali and often bringing out creative magazines online to reach a greater audience.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Metadata of Bengali digitized materials is mostly in transliterated form and not in Bengali. Hence searching in Bengali fonts often brings no result. People engaged in digitization should be experts in handling Bengali standard key board like Avro. It would also be good if people engaged in digitization of Indic languages join in workshops and build a common standard of Metadata. Rather than following Western forms like Dublin code it may be thought of an indigenous code of metadata in Bengali. Issue of Free Access and the question of copyright go hand in hand. A large bulk of digitized Bengali materials is available in the archive room of SCTR and CSSS. These cannot be uploaded online for free access due to copyright issues or the unwillingness of the contributors of original materials. Most donors are not willing to give their works to these institutions as often they think that it will diminish their own authority and researchers will go to the University directly and not to them. Often the donors can’t trust the institutes and ask to digitize materials in their own home and return the original materials as soon as possible before they are stolen or lost. Regarding problem of digitization it is observed that most materials are fragile and digitization tasks with scanners and other technological instruments often led to the destruction of the original material.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We also need to think of preserving the large terabytes of data on one hand and original copies on the other hand. Institutional collaboration can be one way of bringing all digital materials in one single platform. In this regard, the role of C-DAC, Kolkata and SNLTR in digitization of vernacular language materials is praiseworthy.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Saidul Haque is a student of the PG course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.</b><b> This research study was part of a series of projects commissioned by </b><a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira"><b>HEIRA-CSCS</b></a><b>, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See here for more on this initiative.</b></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/animating-the-archive'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/animating-the-archive</a>
</p>
No publishersnehaDigital Humanities2014-04-14T07:12:32ZBlog EntryConfession in the Digital Age
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/confession-in-digital-age
<b>The pervasive influence of digital technology, particularly the Internet in our lives today seems to have blurred the boundaries between the real and virtual, public and private. The perceived condition of anonymity made available by the digital sphere brings forth questions about identity and the self, and more importantly the conditions that have come together in creating a new notion of the private sphere. In this guest post Rimi Nandy reflects upon her research study on the trend of Facebook confessions in India, and its implications for questions of identity and self-representation. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The advent of the internet and the emergence of a new social sphere that is home to the present generation of digital natives has broadened the horizon of what we understand as being human. This space has been widened more with the introduction and proliferation of social networking sites, the most well known among them being Facebook. Facebook has changed the very way we perceive society, which in turn has led the present generation to act and react differently to the social conditions. The digital youth of the present generation create their self identity in synergy with the virtual platform provided by Facebook and other social networking sites. In this article I would like to focus on the recent trend of anonymous confessions made by various Indian college students on Facebook.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the pre-digital age, the confessions were either carried out to oneself in seclusion or on a one to one basis. It was never performed in front of a gathering of people as that would be responsible for instilling a greater amount of fear in the confessor. There is one exception to this in the form of courtroom confessions. The courtroom confessions were a public affair, but the confession is initially made behind closed doors in the presence of law enforcing officers. A major problem with such confessions is understanding whether the confession is true or coerced. The word ‘confession’ seems to have acquired a new meaning in the digital age of Facebook. The term has become very popular in the present time among the youth. What is surprising is the fact that the act of confession on Facebook is being considered a form of entertainment. The act of confession was earlier a means to purge oneself of hidden guilt burdening the soul. It was an act carried out in the privacy of one’s own room or in the confines of a confession box. Once a confession was made, the confessor felt a cathartic effect, thereby unburdening their soul. In the present day and age, however confession is no more a personal act. The confession pages on Facebook have become a meeting place for various confessors who confess. But do they really confess to unburden their soul? That is food for thought. The trend of the Confession pages started in the Western countries and has slowly found its way into the lives of the Indian youth.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The most important aspect of this virtual space is the fact that it easily crosses boundaries and makes the world a very small place by bringing people across continents together. Another important factor and probably the driving force behind its popularity is the fact that the confessor can easily hide his/her identity and just present the self as a confessor before other confessors. It is almost like an anonymous support group, only on a larger scale. The members of the Confession pages can sit behind their screens in the comfort of their surroundings without having to travel and face unknown people and looking at their faces wondering how they would react to the confession to be placed before them. The cyberspace due to its fluid nature provides a better sense of security than the real world. In the virtual world every word typed and the ensuing comments are born digital and stay locked within the digital sphere. It becomes nothing more than a combination of binary digits, which if not found to be palatable can be easily deleted with a few clicks of the mouse and the ‘backspace’ key. In the real world it is impossible to undo confessions and comments made. The arrival of the digital confession pages has randomised the act and its effect. Further it has also changed the very essence of confession. A plethora of topics are discussed in these confession pages starting from confession of love and crushes to sexual escapades, hostel life, college life and a very tiny amount of academic discussions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Confession pages have also become a conglomeration of various digital technologies. Most pages do not restrict themselves to plain writing of posts. They also include links to other web pages, mainly YouTube, which can be considered to be an archive of various videos and audios. Some pages also include links to e-books, or use memes to bring forth their ideas and emotions. The internet has successfully become an irreplaceable aspect of the youth’s life across the globe. It has broken all boundaries making the world a very small place where a post uploaded in India can be seen anywhere in the world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The language used in these confession pages refer to respective campus culture, thereby distinguishing themselves from other institutes. This in turn helps to create a specific identity through which the social networking world will know them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Studying the confession pages has left me with some unsolved questions. It appears that the students engaging with the activities of the various confession pages do not really try to question what urges them forward to confess online. To the readers of the confessions it is nothing more than a mode of entertainment which is availed in moments of boredom. In spite of all its negativity this has been able to create a platform for building a bridge of kinship of like minded students. What lies in future for the confession pages is still to be seen. Whether the advancement in digital technology furthers the mushrooming of such pages is something that also has to be studied. At present in order to counter the loopholes of anonymity, a mobile application called ‘Whispers’, has been developed and is slowly becoming popular. This might substitute Facebook Confessions or run as a parallel alternative to it. Some pages are already falling into disuse. How long this trend survives and what will be its long term effect is still to be seen.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rimi Nandy is Project Fellow, Social Networks, with the School of Media, Communication and Culture at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. This research study was part of a series of six projects commissioned by <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira">HEIRA-CSCS,</a> Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-in-india-mapping-changes-at-intersection-of-youth-technology-higher-education">here</a> for more on this initiative.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/confession-in-digital-age'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/confession-in-digital-age</a>
</p>
No publishersnehaDigital Humanities2014-04-14T07:06:11ZBlog EntryThe Digital Humanities Discourse: The Knowledge Question on the Wikipedia
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-discourse-knowledge-question-on-wikipedia
<b>The emergence of alternative modes and spaces of knowledge production has been a core concern of the Digital Humanities, particularly with respect to the collaborative or public archive. Wikipedia, as a collaborative knowledge repository indicates a shift in the ways of imagining knowledge as dynamic and ever-changing, thus bringing to the fore questions of authorship and authenticity, which are also questions for the Digital Humanities. In this guest blog post, Sohnee Harshey presents a reflection on her research study on the gender-gap on Wikipedia, and the politics of collaborative knowledge production. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The problems of Wikipedia are not entirely unknown. The Wikipedia Editors Survey Report, 2011 revealed that around 91% of the contributor base of Wikipedia is male and Wikipedia acknowledges the non-neutrality of its articles resulting from a ‘systemic bias’. Some would ask: what is the problem with negligible female participation on a volunteer-based online encyclopaedia?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wikipedia has come to be our point of reference for everyday queries. It has become a popular source even for those in the higher education system-for quick information and even as a starting point for academic writing. With the increased rate of distribution and access, it is necessary that the content on this platform must not get caught up in societal hierarchies and prejudices. Visibility on the Wikipedia inadvertently also confirms that a topic is something worth knowing. The converse is also true. The specific composition of the contributors is reflected in the topics on which more articles are written, often representing certain cultures and points of view more than others. The greater problem is ‘how’ certain topics are written about and the social prejudices that are ingrained therein.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Attempting to examine the resultant discourse of knowledge production, my plan was to look at content pertaining to women, in India, on the English Wikipedia. Alongside, I proposed to interview active Wikipedians to understand the process of deliberation while creating content and their opinion on the gender gap. For the content, I chose to pick three themes in which systemic sexism was likely to be most deep rooted- Violence against Women, Women and the Law and Women in the Public Sphere. I did so based on the following pointers:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">a) the commonplace understanding of and attitudes towards women and their roles,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">b) taking forward the discussion and debate around women’s rights especially with increased reporting of crimes against women in the national news, and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">c) the need to highlight contributions of women artists and performers, in the public sphere which has traditionally been a ‘male’ domain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the first theme, my intention was to get an idea of what issues are raised in the article, what is described and how and what is the intention of this description as obvious to the first time reader. In the second, I attempted to look at how the rights of women are communicated to a heterogeneous audience through entries on existing and/or prospective Acts and legislations. In the third, I selected entries on Indian female folk artists, female actors, classical dancers and television personalities to note the quality of articles, the presence or absence of information and perspectives on life stories. I also attempted to trace an editing history in some cases reflecting popular interest in these topics as well as drawing attention to the subtle creation of a discourse. In all of these, I also looked at the kind of references used to get an idea of the knowledge-network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While it would be unfair to make generalizations about the Wikipedia based on this small sample, I find it pertinent to make certain observations. Firstly, as Wikipedia continues to grow as a source of knowledge, one must raise critical questions about what its source of information is. The question of the ‘knowledge loop’ becomes important here-what information is used to constitute a Wikipedia entry, what is the ‘truth claim’ of the sources (especially newspapers, in the case of celebrities) and how does the Wikipedia entry in turn also inform these sources or even a research paper like mine?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia’s editing feature is one of its biggest strengths. Information is updated in real time, vandalism is contained and content is discussed at great lengths, if necessary (albeit after it has been put up). While the possibility of continuous editing may bring in various perspectives, the whole exercise remains one of attempting to get ‘closest to the truth’. Moreover, if a user accesses this online encyclopaedia at a certain point in its ongoing editing history and finds for example, that the introductory paragraph about a female artist has a statement on her failed marriage, does that not negatively inform that individual’s perspective on the artist and is that not a problem?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Though ostensibly Wikipedia Category Pages list topics in alphabetical order, eliminating any systemic hierarchies about which topics are more worth knowing, I see the links in the Wikipedia entries in the form of the ‘See Also’ headings as an example of the creation of a discourse. For example, what am I expected to want to read after reading an entry on a rape case? More rape cases, or legislations, or feminist theory? What an article links to therefore, is what is first-considered worthy enough to be known, second-remains in public memory and third-becomes the definition for knowledge on that subject.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Though the respondents in this study say that there is no covert alliance-building process while editing or creating entries, it seems obvious that the ‘consensus’ that they talk about becomes not so much a question of what is right and should be included as per a moral guideline, but more of how many editors’ support one gets on the viewpoint one is advocating for.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Keeping these issues in mind, it seems important to me to critically look at the educative function that Wikipedia has begun to play, especially in students’ lives. While the ‘information function’ is laudable, it must be remembered that the organization of content on Wikipedia, as it exists today needs reworking at multiple levels if one has to challenge hegemonic knowledge practices and bring in content sensitive to the needs of marginalised groups. The inclusion of more and more women editors on Wikipedia then is not THE solution, but a necessary starting point.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sohnee Harshey is an M.Phil Scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research study was part of a series of projects commissioned by <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira">HEIRA-CSCS</a>, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-in-india-mapping-changes-at-intersection-of-youth-technology-higher-education">here</a> for more on this initiative.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-discourse-knowledge-question-on-wikipedia'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-discourse-knowledge-question-on-wikipedia</a>
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No publishersnehaDigital Humanities2014-04-04T06:34:14ZBlog EntryA Queer Digital Humanities Experience
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-queer-digital-humanities-experience
<b>Questions of identity and citizenship have been an important aspect of understanding the digital realm, and what it means to be ‘human’ in this space. While one may still mull over the separation of the real and the virtual, the digital as a condition of existence has engendered new notions of the public sphere, and sought to redefine the methods of traditional humanistic enquiry. In this guest post, Ditilekha Sharma shares some reflections on her research on the queer community and the politics of identity on the Internet, within the perspective of the Digital Humanities. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the initial stage of this research I had no idea what the Digital Humanities entailed, not like I do so much now, but I have learnt that the beauty of doing interdisciplinary research is that I get to conceptualise the research in my own terms to a very large extent. However, today I feel doing Digital Humanities is not the same as doing Humanities. The digital has a character of its own which required me to engage with it in a more nuanced way.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The research thus began with a very vague idea of me wanting to understand how youth from the queer community negotiate their identity and engaged in politics in the online space. Coming from a social sciences discipline my ideas of the online space were very uni-dimensional at the beginning of the research. I looked at the online space as being separate from lives of individuals. I viewed it as a space people could get in and out of at will, very much like any other public space. Hence I conceptualised my research in similar terms. I understood online spaces as being outside of the individuals who used it. Having been born a digital native, the digital sphere I believed became an inevitable part of individuals where access or non access to it became a matter of externalities around the individual. With some of these assumptions in mind my research went about asking questions of exclusion, marginalisation, access, online activism, online safety to name a few. All this while since my research framework saw the virtual space as a non real space in a very unquestioning, uncomplicated way, that is how my research also emerged, separating the two domains. Very interestingly during the same time the Supreme Court Verdict of the IPC Section 377 bought the issues of the queer community of India into the online space in a major way. It was very interesting to observe these developments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the initial drafts of the research since my understanding of the digital was of it being unreal I saw the experience of individuals in the online space as being disembodied experience. Thus the Digital Humanities workshop became an eye opener for me. The workshop for the first time made me imagine what it would be like to put digital at the centre and understand life in it. It pushed me to read more and understand the historical emergence of the digital space. I was pushed to look at both queer politics and politics in the online space differently from what I had seen it before. What was it that made the online space a place where queer politics could emerge and be played out? I came to reflect and question the very ideas of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ and started seeing them as something not very separate after all. This gave a new meaning to embodiment and the experiences of individuals in the online space. Especially it helped me in understanding the experiences of individuals who identify as queer and engage in the queer politics. For a digital novice like me, reading up on MUDs and digital avatars was extremely exciting. I realised that we never reflect on how the online space while giving us limited less space to ‘perform’ our identities, nevertheless also does operate within certain constrains especially in the case of social media as a public sphere. One of my respondents helped me reflect on the difference between presence and existence and how the two of them can hold very different meanings and get played out differently, especially in the digital space. Crime in digital space took a very different meaning to me after having read A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell. I especially realised how the digital space is not so neutral after all. It is gendered, in several ways and at several levels.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A change in framework also meant that I had to rethink my research methods. Even though I stuck to my original methodology of conducting an online survey, in-depth interviews and observing online spaces used by the youth from the queer community; I had to ask different questions and read the answers differently. What especially changed was my observation of the online spaces. I tried to look at how the queer community used the cyber space differently from other people and how they negotiated and played out their identities within it. I tried to look at it by putting the digital world at the centre rather than the physical world. I tried to understand that the digital self is an entity in itself. Hence the end product of the research was that I no longer looked at the digital self as a disembodied entity. As a result I did not just look at how the individuals ‘used’ the digital space to do queer politics but tried to explore how the queerness of the digital space enables individuals to do politics itself.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Several questions still remain unanswered. There are several questions I would still like to explore more deeply; the idea of embodiment in the digital space being one of them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As a person identifying queer, I started looking at my own existence and negotiations in the cyberspace in a more complicated manner. Things I did unconsciously became a conscious and reflective process which I engaged in more actively. If our everyday life and existence is a performance, the digital can take this performance to another level all together. My experience of working on digital humanities made me rethink queer politics differently all together.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This short research study has indeed been one of the most intensive and thought provoking exercises. It has certainly redefined my idea of queer politics. And having gotten hooked to the field, as I reflect more on the process, new questions and new ways of thinking keep emerging. Bringing the world of the digital and the humanities together could perhaps even help us envisage the society we live in, in a very different way.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Ditilekha Sharma is an M.Phil Scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research study was part of a series of projects commissioned by <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/heira">HEIRA-CSCS</a>, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-in-india-mapping-changes-at-intersection-of-youth-technology-higher-education">here</a> for more on this initiative.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-queer-digital-humanities-experience'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-queer-digital-humanities-experience</a>
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No publishersnehaDigital Humanities2014-04-04T06:30:52ZBlog EntryFishing is the New Black: Contemporary Art Imitates the Digital
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/fishing-is-the-new-black
<b>Marshall Mcluhan once said, “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” Philosophers, on the other hand, think about things in retrospect and hence, as much as Derrida’s writings about the collapse of the semiotic structures of capture and meaning say about the Digital age, Mark Rothko’s art, a generation ahead of Derrida in depicting this collapse, can say about the future that it saw in visceral and energetic forms. To understand Rothko’s paintings we must sit through a short history of the different epochs of Being and their epistemological shifts before we get to the Digital Age about which Rothko had violent and destructive premonitions.</b>
<p>According to Heidegger, the metaphysical age is one that lasts from Plato, where we began to explore the fundamental nature of being through ultimate, transcendental forms that show us diaphanous glimpses of themselves through earthly, imperfect forms to Nietzsche or Heidegger himself.<a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hans Belting, in his book <i>Likeness and Presence</i> talks about the transcendental signifiers during the Medieval Age as being transferred to the West by the Byzantines. These signifiers existed as iconotypes such as the Last Supper, the Resurrection, the Cross and the decapitation of John the Baptist which are not just treated as “art” by European cultures that inherited them but as objects of veneration that held in them the Holy itself.</p>
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<p>A whole system of beliefs, superstitions, hopes and fears and, indeed, Being, is constructed by the people’s responses to this cathedral of a semiotic structure. While God creates primordial forms, the artist in this age is a cosmocrator who imitates God and creates ideal forms of these iconotypes that anchor meaning for everybody.<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2]</a></p>
<p>Ranging from Da Vinci’s perfect depiction of the Last Supper, the boundaries of the Byzantine dome of meaning is depicted through Michelangelo’s interior of the dome of the Sistine Chapel. While the curtains close on the Middle Ages, they drape with them, the iconotypes of Christianity.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the coming of the perspectable age of art, as Gebser puts it, three dimensional space is discovered through science and Copernicus where the world is shifted into a heliocentric system, the iconotypes permanently lose their centrality and as Derrida puts it, are substituted. While the sculptors like Brunelleschi were creating three dimensional art and the interiors of the Protestant Churches were vacant of iconotypes, artists like Bernini, by clinging on so deeply to the iconotypes that were dead, infused melancholy into their swansong.<a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3]</a></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to Heidegger, the aesthetic that follows is called “World Picture” which in art is similar to Oswald Spengler’s idea of infinite space. The transcendental signifier is that of infinity and the works of Dutch painters like Hobbema depict this metaphysical center of the age through their endless skies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Then the impressionists like Manet and Van Gogh break this three dimensional space further. During the modern age, Gebser’s integral sphere of consciousness is created through the paintings of Cezanne and Picasso who painted their archetypes on what he saw as its curved walls.<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4] </a>The archetypes, in a Jungian sense, are part of the universal subconscious and hence pervasive through all cultures unlike the Christian iconotypes of the Middle Ages.</p>
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<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Hobbema.png" title="Hobbema" height="271" width="356" alt="Hobbema" class="image-inline" /></th>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mark Rothko, however, in his 1946 multi-forms, was busy orchestrating the Skywalkerian collapse of this integral sphere and taking the Jungian archetypes-myths, Gods, heroes- with him. Peter Barry argues in <i>“Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural (1995)”</i> that in the twentieth century, through a complicated sequence of historical and political, technological and scientific events, <i>“these centers were destroyed or eroded”</i>. The Great War destroys the notion of steady material progress and the Holocaust destroys the notion of Europe as the epi-center of human civilization. As a second coming of Copernican destruction of being, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity destroys the idea of time and space as fixed and central absolutes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rothko stopped naming his paintings because they unnecessarily curtailed the horizon of meaning so we will call it the sequence of the next three paintings, which depict the melting down of the modernist archetypes into blurred, overlapping chunks of colour.<a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5]</a></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Rothko1.png" alt="Rothko 1" class="image-inline" title="Rothko 1" /></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Gradually, these amorphous blobs of color congeal into squares and rectangles of intense light. These gradually intensifying shapes of light depict the semiotic vacancy and the absence of transcendental signifiers.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rothko’s self-luminous squares and rectangles, however, perform an added function from dramatically enacting the past destruction which is to show premonitions of a future that will be dominated by the luminous screens of televisions, cell phones and digital constructions of meaning.<a href="#fn6" name="fr6">[6]</a></p>
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<td style="text-align: justify; ">In the famous Seagrams Murals like the <i>Black on Maroon, </i>the paintings are no longer emanating light, standing as Cassandra like, diaphanous premonitions of a distant future but consist of colored rectangles engulfed by a menacing black band that gravitate the viewer into this world of semiotic vacancy, into what will become the digital world.</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">By the time he is commissioned to do artwork for a Chapel in Houston that is dedicated to him (Rothko Chapel), all the transcendental signifiers that anchor any sort of meaning have been deconstructed and his canvases depict a triumph of the nothingness. When Hans Belting, in "The End of the History of Art?" ponders as to why "artists today often decline to participate in an ongoing history of art at all", it is precisely because of this rupture that Rothko and Derrida after him observed.</p>
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<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Rothko4.png" alt="Rothko Chapel" class="image-inline" title="Rothko Chapel" /></th>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">They almost set the stage for contemporary art, which is a private art of the particular artist who constructs her own meta-narrative by taking destroyed forms, dead batteries from the debris of previously ruptured spheres and attempts to stitch them together into a temporal Frankenstein’s monster of an art form.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Art now imitates the digital space as it isn’t an activity of vision and the artist isn’t a cosmocrator. In the Digital Humanities, knowledge isn’t practiced as in old academia which is a legatee of the Romantic conception of the genius as standing on the vanguard of society. Art in the contemporary age is simply anything that is taken out of its context of banality and knowledge in the digital age is simply any data set with commentary. Big data is the unacknowledged legislator of our time and not poets, as Heidegger would lament. John David Ebert likens the contemporary artist like Anselm Kiefer or Gerhard Richter to a fisherman of forms who has to hybridize old forms and discarded signifiers and re-territorialize them into new semiospheres. Nishant Shah, in a lecture on the ‘Histories of the Internet’, said that the best characterization of the Digital he knew was that of its etymology. The Latin <i>Digitus</i> signifies fingers, toes and perhaps the individual phalanges that, useless on their own, come together to make up the whole appendage like the functioning of Bit Torrent which takes apart a file into hundreds of pieces which it downloads individually from seeders around the world and stitches them back together. Indeed, it seems as if the ontology of the digital itself is imitated in the ontology of contemporary art which stitches together individually discarded and functionless, archaic forms. These radical vagaries of art forms caused by the collapse of the transcendental signifiers and the semiotic vacancy, seems to also be mirrored in the multi-forms that the Digital Humanities take in the mind of the Digital Humanists who have vastly differing conceptions of what the Digital Humanities really are/is. Just as art in the contemporary age is not anchored in a metaphysical center of meaning, Digital Humanists also lack an ontological fixity about their discipline which leads to the larger issue with digital humanities as a domain itself, wherein there is a concern about the rather diffused nature of the space, an invisible or missing locus; a critical or political standpoint.</p>
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<p>[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. Art after Metaphysics, John David Ebert, 2013</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>].Ibid.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>].Ibid.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>].Ibid.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>].Ibid.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr6" name="fn6">6</a>].Ibid.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/fishing-is-the-new-black'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/fishing-is-the-new-black</a>
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No publisheranirudhDigital Humanities2014-03-28T12:51:40ZBlog EntryStructure, Sign and Play in the Digital
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/structure-sign-play-in-digital
<b>I have come to realize, in my research, that I have been looking for and staring at the various entry points of the Digital Humanities by looking at the primordial lighting arrangements and formative forces that are in play in it. So far, there have been some clear emergent patterns like the fact that the Digital Humanities is the story of the University itself and a condition of the socio-political and economic forces shaping our education system.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-the-ecto-parasite">previous blog post</a>, we inferred from Derrida’s comparison of the University to a language act that the Digital Humanities are a mere reorganization of the Humanities faculty to curate more power in a self serving way.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I’m going to now push further in the direction of Derrida’s treatment of language and take it a few steps back to his ideas on semiotics (signs and meaning) itself in his Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (SSPDHS). In this paper, Derrida is just beginning to lay out his deconstructive ideas of play and sign in language. To understand this work one could turn to Terry Eagleton, who explains in <i>“Literary Theory: An Introduction (1996)”,</i> <i>“Western Philosophy…. has also been in a broader sense, ‘logocentric’, committed to a belief in some ultimate ‘word’, presence, essence, truth or reality which will act as the foundation for all our thought, language and experience. It has yearned for the sign which will give meaning to all others, – ‘the transcendental signifier’ – and for the anchoring, unquestioning meaning to which all our signs can be seen to point (the transcendental signified’).”</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many philosophers have attempted to explain the phenomena of changing epochs in humanity’s construction of meaning and given these structures of consciousness (as Jean Gebser calls it) or Beings (as Heidegger calls it) different names. Peter Sloterdalls this structure a macrosphere and Jean Gebser calls it an integral sphere where semiotic capture occurs. Derrida, in SS<span>ijk c</span><span>PDHS starts off by talking about a center that has always existed through the ages as eidos (essence), arche (first cause), telos (ultimate purpose), God, Family, Democracy, the World Spirit and so forth in these structure of consciousness that have been the transcendental signifiers of all the meaning that was signified. However, since each of these concepts founded whole systems of thought, language and consciousness, they were never themselves part of the matrix of meaning that its metaphysical presence engendered and remained untainted by the play of linguistic differences. These concepts alone were always indisputable so ultimately ended up limiting the amount of free play that could exist. We can think of the idea of the Resurrection as being an iconotype in the Middle Ages at the center which allowed many meanings of ascension and mythic stories to be constructed around the metaphor but the Resurrection itself was never something that was immutable, remaining the “point at which substitution of contents, elements and terms was no longer possible”. However, until now this center always got displaced at the end of an epoch to be replaced by a different center or set of transcendental signifiers. Derrida says "the entire history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center."<a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1]</a> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He, however, speaks of a rupture that happens in fin-de-siècle and early 20<sup>th</sup> century thought where there is a break in tradition.<i> He says "</i>From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center would not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non- locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification <i>ad infinitum</i>." This collapse of the previous structures of consciousness marked by the assimilation of all signifiers into the domain of what Derrida calls "play" essentially makes the word sign itself obsolete and thus begins to lay out the architecture for the digital (non) structure. When the digital humanities attempt to infuse meaning into the world, they do so in networks of information that don’t have one central source and travel freely, unfettered by coagulations of immutable signifiers. The digital space of meaning construction is essentially the <i>archetypal</i> domain of Derrida’s free play. Without authority, it is a domain where knowledge is created by the self, collaboratively and from peer to peer. In this semiotically vacant world, the walls of Gebser’s integral sphere have collapsed and even the virtual walls that once existed among archives and libraries are broken by the digitization of materials. Through the quantum quarks and leaps of the free play between the signifiers and the signified (which are constantly interchanging roles) there is a cluttering of the digital space of forms appearing through a mish mash of interdisciplinarity, multi-institutional, multi-stakeholder learning and teaching and openness which includes several age groups and socio-economic groups previously left out of these semiotic praxes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Derrida says in SSPDHS about new discourses in the human sciences that "since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics." This recent rupture, however, has produced new forms in the Digital that is disconnected with the whole of metaphysics through a process that he calls "supplementarity". "This movement of the free play, permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarily. One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements it, which takes its place in its absence-because this sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over and above, comes as a supplement." Basically, the absence of the center is compensated by infinite substitutions in the movement of play which do two mutually exclusive things:</p>
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<li><span>Replace the absent center</span></li>
<li><span>In doing so, add new things to the structure itself.</span></li>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Derrida says that the field, or lets supplant Digital Humanities where he is talking about ethnology, is a finite one, but because of the founding nature of the absent centre, it allows for infinite substitutions, leaving us with a "<i>superabundance </i>of the signifier, its <i>supplementary </i>character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be <i>supplemented</i>." Put differently, the interdisciplinarity, the blogosphere and the many headed countenance machines of the digital space leave us with a skewed ratio of signifiers. Wikipedia is a great example of this phenomenon where the lack of a semiotic centre that exists allows infinite substitutions by various signifying entities (editors, both man and machine) and things are added in the process to the structure itself making it a great example of supplementarity in a new discourse. Through the concept of hyper-links, it forms a sort of infinite structure of freeplay in a (non) structure that has no beginning or end. This is indeed only possible because of the vacancy at the centre of our consciousness. If we were to look at something like Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis in 1545<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2]</a>to contrast, it was only ever able to list all known books ever printed within the semiotic structure of the day and didn’t perform a supplementary act in quite the same way.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Another point of departure is in Derrida’s reading of Levi-Strauss’s analogy of the Bricoleur. Bricolage is a skill which involves taking bits and forms that exist and refashioning them to create something new. Derrida says, "the elements which the ‘bricoleur’ collects and uses are ‘pre-constrained’ like the constitutive units of myth, the possible combinations of which are restricted by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a sense which sets a limit on the freedom of manoeuvre… The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the <i>bricoleur</i>, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth." In the Digital Age, the myth of the engineer is resurrected, to borrow an iconotype. Using a programmatic language of her own, the engineer creates customized spaces of knowledge production and learning like MOOCs or Knowledge Commons that house discourses that are remotely connected to the other world and sometimes as Ian Bogost<a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3]</a>states, even find the connection undesirable.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although there has clearly been a rupture from the metaphysical age, there will exist a constant need to look back at our history for philosophical answers about the digital as we are still using the same tools (language, semiotics) of the past to explain a break with the past. Indeed, "the quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought."</p>
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<p>[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, J Derrida, 1966.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>]. Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought, Elizabeth Eisenstein, 1988.</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>].<a class="external-link" href="http://dhpoco.org/blog/2013/05/10/open-thread-the-digital-humanities-as-a-historical-refuge-from-raceclassgendersexualitydisability/">http://dhpoco.org/blog/2013/05/10/open-thread-the-digital-humanities-as-a-historical-refuge-from-raceclassgendersexualitydisability/</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/structure-sign-play-in-digital'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/structure-sign-play-in-digital</a>
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No publisheranirudhDigital Humanities2014-03-28T08:49:07ZBlog EntryDigital Gender: Theory, Methodology and Practice
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-gender-theory-methodology-practice
<b>Dr. Nishant Shah was a panelist at a workshop jointly organized by HUMlab and UCGS (Umeå Centre for Gender Studies) at Umeå University from March 12 to 14, 2014. He blogged about the conference.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Read the original published by HUMLAB Blog on March 20, 2014 <a class="external-link" href="http://blog.humlab.umu.se/?p=5147">here</a>. Details of the workshop on Digital Gender can be seen <a class="external-link" href="http://www.humlab.umu.se/digitalgender">here</a>.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">“When I was first invited to be a part of the Digital Gender conference curated by Anna Foka at the HUMlab in Umea, Sweden, there were many things that I had expected to find there: Historical approaches to understanding the relationship between digital technologies and practices and construction of gender, multi-modal and multi-disciplinary frameworks that examine the intersections of gender and the digital; Material and discursive descriptions of how we understand gender in contemporary realms. And indeed, I found it all there, and more, as a great collection of people, came together in dialogues of scholarly rigour, critical inquiry and political solidarity and empathy, to learn, to teach, to exchange research and scholarship. Given my past experiences of being at HUMlab and the incredible range of scholarship that was curated there, this came as no surprise.</p>
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<td>Above: Dr. Nishant Shah in HUMlab</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, the one thing that stood out for me was an incredible session on Game Making conducted by Carl-Eric Engqvist. When I first saw it in the programme, I was apprehensive. What can Game Making have to do with digital gender? What would we learn from trying to design a game? I have been in ‘doing workshops’ before where things don’t always go as planned. Especially with the new ‘maker culture’ movements and DIY hipster phases, I have often found myself disappointed with workshops that focus too much on the technological and the interface. And I was in two minds about this – surely, we could have spent the time in more traditional academic experiences – round tables, discussion groups, or even just increased time for the participants to present their work. And so when the workshop began, I was waiting for it to make sense – to see what the game making’ workshop could have in store for the motley group of people that had assembled there.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Engqvist started off by showing us three games that have inspired him the most and what he wanted us to take as our points of thought and from that moment on, I knew we were in safe hands. Engqvist was not interested in games for gaming. He was interested in games as artefacts, as ways of thinking, as modes of engagement into exploring, reifying and concretizing many of the questions around power and empathy. And more than anything else, he presented with us the idea that games can be pedagogic, they can be learning tools; and though they might be designed for young players, they can be ways by which we translate our academic knowledge and research into practice.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What emerged in the subsequent two hours, was a great exercise in feminist methods and knowledge meeting new pedagogy and discussions. The group divided into two teams and set out to make a game that would be suitable for 8-10 year olds, and questions ideas of power and imbalance in their lives. Here are some things that I learned from the conversations:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The nature of true power: One of the most interesting discussions that emerged was where the power resides. Scripted games often give us the illusion of power by making the power of the script writer invisible. While games are often open to creative interpretation and negotiation, these are only within the context of the constraints of the game. How do we design games that are then transparent about their own limitations? Can we think of a game that is about building the game rather than playing a game? Can we think of game outside of structures of competition and winning, closer to the designs of the Theatre of the Oppressed?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Collective Empathy: The most dramatic revelation in the game making exercise was the engineering of empathy. There were many different suggestions on how to build empathy. One of the ideas was to put the players in simulations of real-life crises, asking them to take up different roles as antagonists and protagonists within the conflict, along with by-standers who can choose to be allies. However, drawing from legal narratives of rape, that demand that the rape victim be not subjected to re-living the experience through testimonies in court, we decided that it might be not fruitful to make participants re-live real-life trauma in the course of the game. Eventually, we decided that the way to escape this would be to let the participants be in control of their own simulations, and offer them ways of establishing trust and empathy.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The power of narratives: In designing the narrative of the game, what came out was our own personal narratives of why we believe in the things that we do. How do we devise a game that has narratives of the everyday that can eventually transcend into becoming special? How does the playing of the game itself lead to repeated narratives, each customised to the situation? How do we create conditions and infrastructure that encourages users to iterate, repeat, remix and remediate ideas so that they become rich and layered narratives? And most importantly, how do we take something that is traumatic or troublesome, something that scares or angers us, and get the help of our fellow players, to reappropriate it, diffuse its hostile edge, and make it more amenable and something that we can cope with?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">DIY experiences: We recognised as a group, that we were more interested in a game that was about crafting experiences rather than designing learning goals. Or in other words, we wanted something so simple that it triggers something at the most visceral level, allowing the players to dig deeper into their own selves and come up with ideas that could resonate with the others. The ambition also was to have the gamers be in control of the intensity and thus define the parameters of their own gaming experience rather than be put into conditions or situations that might lead to further trauma.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Teaching versus Learning: The largest chunk of our discussions pivoted around these two concepts. When designing a pedagogic game, how do we locate ourselves and the players? Do we assume the role of pedagogues who have specific messages to deliver, or do we assume the role of co-learners who will build a set of rules that create new conditions of playing every time? How do we further ensure that the games will have a feminist pedagogy of recursive and self-reflexive criticality along with a clear message of empathy, collaboration and togetherness?</li>
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<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Presentation.png" alt="Presentation" class="image-inline" title="Presentation" /></th>
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<td>Presentation of the game ‘Drawing It Out’</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">What emerged through these five learning principles was a simple game that we called ‘Drawing It Out’. Here are the rules of the game, followed by some pictures that emerged as we played the game ourselves in the group.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Game: Drawing It Out.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Players: 3-6.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Age: 8 and above</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Materials: A number dice, a dice with different emotion words written on it: Shame, Anger, Frustration, Love, Fear, Hope. A tea-timer of 3 minutes. Sheets of blank paper, different coloured pens and pencils.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Instructions:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Each member in the group rolls the number dice. The person with the highest roll gets to roll the emotion dice.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The emotion dice lands on any one of the emotions. For example: Fear.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The tea-timer is turned, and each player, sitting in a circle, gets three minutes to draw the one thing that they are afraid of.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">When the time is over, each player gets to talk about the thing that they are afraid of.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Once everybody has explained their fear, they pass their sheet of paper to the person on the right. The tea-timer is turned. The next person draws something else on the sheet of paper – adding, remixing, morphing, changing the original drawing – to show how they can help in overcoming the particular fear. In the case of hopeful words like Love and Hope, the players add how they would increase and share in the feeling.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Each time the tea-timer runs out, the paper moves on to the next person in the circle. The process is repeated till the sheet of paper reaches the person who had first drawn on it.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">At the end, each person looks at the sheet of paper they had begun with and the others talk about the ways in which they have added to the original drawing.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The participants roll the number dice again and repeat the process. Participants are not allowed to draw the same thing if the emotion is repeated. The game can be played till there is interest or time to play it.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The players get to take the sheets of remixed papers home with them as artefacts and signs of the trust established within the game.”</li>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dr. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He is also an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany and a Knowledge Partner with the <a href="http://www.hivos.net/" target="_blank">Hivos Knowledge Programme</a>, The Netherlands. Recently Dr. Nishant Shah visited HUMlab to participate in the conference “Digital gender: Theory, Methodology and Practice” (<a href="http://www.humlab.umu.se/digitalgender" target="_blank">http://www.humlab.umu.se/digitalgender).</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-gender-theory-methodology-practice'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-gender-theory-methodology-practice</a>
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No publishernishantGenderDigital Humanities2014-04-07T04:07:27ZBlog EntryA Question of Digital Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities
<b>The emergence of digital humanities as a new field of interdisciplinary research enquiry has also seen growth in literature around the problem of its definition. This blog-post lays out some of the conceptual frameworks for the mapping exercise taken up by CIS to look at digital humanities in India. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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. The digital humanities have emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technology and the human 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 digital humanities discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. However, digital humanities 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 style="text-align: justify;">The question of what is digital humanities has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of digital humanities – 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. 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. David 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.’<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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 a series of posts over the next couple of weeks. 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 frameworks, which we hope will inform also larger concerns of the digital humanities programme at CIS:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">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 ‘Nature of the book’, ‘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”<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a>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 the digital humanities therefore be an attempt to bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with digital humanities practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core digital humanities 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 digital humanities – 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 digital humanities research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in digital humanities – 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<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3] </a> as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and digital humanities. This comes with the perception of digital humanities being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities to reinvent themselves by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. Digital humanities has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may 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 digital humanities 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 digital humanities 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 the digital humanities works with or tries to address this particular formulation of the digital humanities.</li></ol>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Locating these concerns in India, where the field of digital humanities 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 digital humanities 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.”<a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4] </a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The digital humanities 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 digital humanities 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 digital humanities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of these thoughts a little further and with a focus on the Indian context. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and digital humanities. 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>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. Dave Parry “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 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 style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp.3</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. 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, Web, March 7, 2014.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>]. Latour, Bruno . "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means." Trans. Couze Venn <em>Theory Culture Society</em> . (2002): 247-260. Sage<em>. </em>Web, March 4, 2014 URL> <a href="http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf">http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a>
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No publishersnehaResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaDigital Humanities2015-03-30T12:47:27ZBlog Entry Digital Humanities: The Ecto-Parasite
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-the-ecto-parasite
<b>This blog entry, exploring Jacques Derrida's Mochlos can be read in three ways. The numbers below refer to the cells which should be read in the specified order.
A.) 1-3-4: This essay views knowledge and the University as a technology and asks whether the Digital Humanities under this framework is unnecessary and elitist. We analyze the elitism through Kants attempts to distinguish the University's duties of truth and action and then find out why Derrida thinks this distinction is impossible to make because of the nature language.
B.) 1-2-4: This essay starts off the same way but goes into the devouring margins of the University, whether its possible to safeguard against intrusion if the University is viewed as a language act and flips the question to see if the University is a parasite on the outside world and uses the Digital Humanities in this negotiation of power. It goes further to see if this parasitism is inevitable where there is language.
C.) 2-4: This is a subset of the previous essay but stands alone as a commentary on a different kind of effect of capitalism on the University from the one explored in the previous blog. </b>
<p style="text-align: center; "><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy2_of_copy_of_davidprowseasdarthvaderinstarwars.jpg/image_preview" alt="Scene from The Empire Strikes Back" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Scene from The Empire Strikes Back" /></p>
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<p>1.) As the breathing pod opens to show us a scarred skull being covered by a black helmet, we are for the first time in Star Wars reminded that Darth Vader is both human and machine, sick flesh and well metal, temporal visage and permanent facade. Now assume this melancholic disposition as a condition of the University and you immediately have many entry points into Jacques Derrida’s Mochlos which is his meditation on the remains of the University since Kant wrote his Conflict of the Faculties.</p>
<p>If we were to begin at the beginning, then Kant’s pre-inaugural vantage point suggests a natural birth of the University. In the very opening of the Conflict of the Faculties, Kant says of the University,”this is not a bad idea”. Commenting on this seemingly flippant remark, Derrida says “And, with his well-known humor, abridging a more laborious and tortuous story, he pretends to treat this idea as a find, as a happy solution that would have passed through the head of a very imaginative person, as the invention, in sum, of a fairly rational device that some ingenious operator would have sent to the state for a patent”. Just as with Vader, though, there is nothing natural about the nature or origin of the university or its internal structures, which seem to be based on principles, but are actually the effect of non-university agencies, be it the Prussian bureaucracies in the time of Kant or the hyper capitalized society today. The nature of the synthetic origin story, however, goes to a more fundamental level than any social influences, to the technological birth of knowledge and the technology that runs on and runs for knowledge; the University. It is a permanent façade like a screen that has always been invisible to the movie-goer even when it was silver.</p>
<p>On the essence and destination of the Western University, Derrida says it “tries to ponder its essence and its destination in terms of responsibility, with a stable reference to the one idea of knowledge, technology, the state and the nation, up to the very limit at which a memorial gathering of thought makes a sudden sign toward the entirely-other of a terrifying future.” This synthetic vision of the University is essential to achieve a resistant reading of Kant who viewed the University as a largely analytic and non-synthetic (in the chemical and the Kantian sense) entity in its essence and destination. The creation stories of knowledge, from the cave paintings to the printing press to the University are not just incomplete without technology but self-effacing. What do I mean by this? We look to one of Derrida’s modern University responsibilities for the answer. “In the ties of the university to society, in the production, structure, archivization and transmission of knowledges and technology (<b>of knowledge as technologies</b>), in the political stakes of knowledge, in the very idea of knowledge and truth, lies the advent of something entirely other.” (bold mine) We have to now begin to think of knowledge itself as a technology, as a tool to transmit thought efficiently by bundling it, chronologising it and indeed as a technology that re-organizes itself through other technology, sometimes in the form of a University, in order to make its transmission more efficient. Derrida, however, mistakenly proceeds to characterize the techno-political structure of knowledge as a modern condition as having evolved out of the industrial age and evolved past political and juridical ethics. “Given a certain techno-political structure of knowledge, the status, function and destination of the university would no longer stem from the juridical or ethico-political language of responsibility.” Here he makes the case for an observed change in the state-of-affairs so fundamental that the ‘what’ and the ‘to who’ of the University’s responsibility changes.</p>
<p>When the archivization and the transmission of knowledge uniquely and radically changes as a result of a techno-politico-capital agency then the exigent pre-matter in the University attempts to form a discipline to countenance this, not unlike Digital Humanities. If our previous understanding of technology and knowledge remains true, then a discipline called Digital Humanities (which can only be formed by pre-supposing the latter proposition) remains pre-mature, if not misguided. This is a second entry point for the Digital Humanities after the one hypothesized in the last blog entry which involved a propitiation of the humanities to capitalism.</p>
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<p>2.) The <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-conflict-of-konigsberg">Conflict of Konigsberg</a> explored the extent to which the modern university is plagued by the influence of capitalism. Although Kant’s writing is animated by external threats he perceives to the University, he refrains from referring to the industrial influences on the University as slurs or view them as a complete disaster. He did not, for instance, fear the influence of competing institutions, social structures, ideas of knowledge and education within the University. Today, however, “there can be very serious competition and border-conflicts between non-university centers of research and university faculties claiming at once to be doing research and transmitting knowledge, to be producing and reproducing knowledge.” These non-academic entities are often placed in the university because certain research styles and practices or even types of research are deemed by the politico-capitalist regime to escape the academic elements of the university. The regime calculates that data banks maybe the best forms of storage and non-scholars, albeit trained in the universities, that become government agents, diplomatic aides and other instruments of power are better users of the data. Suddenly, the scholar is no longer the ideal university researcher, the library is no longer the ideal type of archive and the university loses its centrality. “It feels menaced in certain places around its own body; menaced by the development of the sciences, or, a fortiori, by questions <i>from </i>science and <i>on </i>science; menaced by what it sees as a devouring margin. A singular and unjust menace, it being the constitutive faith of the university that the idea of science is at the basis itself of the university.”</p>
<p>The scene in the breathing pod above is the first time we see Darth Vader in a position of vulnerability as the framing of the shot suggests a murky margin between a normal human and what he has become. He is a host to parasites on his body that perform functions of survival better than he, allowing the world to believe that he is the parasite and the machine is the soul.</p>
<p>Kant, on the other hand, did not accept this and wanted the legitimate and legal power to exclude parasiting. To this, Derrida responds, “Now the possibility of such parasiting appears wherever there is language, which is also to say a public domain, publication, and publicity. Wishing to control parasiting, if not to exclude it, is to misunderstand, at a certain point, the structure of language acts. (If, therefore, as I note in passing, analyses of a deconstructive type have so often had the style of theories of ‘parasitism,’ it is that they too, directly or indirectly, involve university legitimation.)” Here, the University <i>is </i>a language act when he runs it through a hermeneutic treatment and renders it as a system of infinite negotiation and interpretation where the language exists in service of itself. When translated to the University, he explains the inevitability of parasitism by viewing the University itself as a self-serving system that is parasitical on the exteriority which it sanctimoniously claims to resolve. It is interested in self-organization and the curation of power similar to the behavior of language and knowledge itself, meaning that the University, at a philosophical level, occupies the same space as elements it saw as parasitic to it.</p>
<p>This is applicable to the faculties and disciplines as well since they are also language acts. If faculties also acquire the same properties as language, then the Digital Humanities can be seen as merely a form of survivalist self-organization of faculties like the humanities whose margins are threatened in the techno-capitalist regime. It is also the digital curation of power that seeks to re-emerge as the ideal type of archive and, indeed, the ideal technology of knowledge.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">3.) Prematurity and being misguided, even if excusable in a tradition that has phrenology and eugenics in its history, are followed by the elitism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Elitism is observable at an empirical a posteriori level in Kant’s lower faculties<span style="text-align: justify; ">[</span><a href="#fr1" name="fn1" style="text-align: justify; ">1</a><span style="text-align: justify; ">], especially of the humanities and philosophy, because of the commercial untranslatability and resulting class difference in enrollment. The digital humanities under this lens is therefore a discipline that sustains an even smaller cross-section of society not based on privilege of intellect which celebrates the ability to employ both hemispheres of the brain but the privilege of means. However, it travels deeper than that to a deontological level. The elitism is a necessary and even intentional part of the lower faculties based on Kant’s logic of the University’s duty. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To understand this, you will have to recollect from the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-conflict-of-konigsberg">previous blog post</a> that Kant thought that the lower faculties should act as opposition parties from the left side of the parliament of learning. In other words, “One would have to imagine today a control exercised by university competence (and, in the last instance, by philosophical competence) over every declaration coming from bureaucrats or subjects representing power directly or indirectly, the dominating forces of the country as well as the forces dominated, insofar as they aspire to power and contribute to political or ideological debate. Nothing would escape it — not a single position adopted in a newspaper or book, on radio or television, in the public pursuit of a career, in the technical administration of knowledge…” You will have to imagine a hypothetical world in which every usage of public knowledge will be subject to the ‘censorship of the faculties’ as Kant puts it. Though this conjures up the image of an almost celestial tyranny, the University in this world remains a force for good because the power of judging is in the ultimate service of truth and the University is stripped of all executive power and means of coercion. “In effect,” Derrida says, “its power is confined to a power-to-think-and-judge, a power-to-say, though not necessarily to say <i>in public</i>, since this would involve an <i>action</i>, an executive power denied the university.” Therefore, the contradiction in existing as the left side of the parliament of learning and not acting is resolved through elitism, through passing judgment in “a reserved, intra-university and quasi-private language, the discourse, precisely, of universal value which is that of philosophy.” When the lower faculties exist, in both a theoretical and consequential silo, in an exclusive and separated condition from the rest, I for one would be very cautious before further inductions.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">4.) This brings us to a discussion of the second diagram in this blog, which is the written language itself. It is demonstrative of Derrida’s statement that Kant, in the Conflict of the Faculties, speaks only of language. Kant thinks of a language of “truth and one of action, between one of theoretical statements and one of performatives”. According to speech-act theory, there is an opposition of “performative” and “constative” language. While constatives describe the world, performatives do something in the world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The first aspect of the diagram is in the final sentence of the third cell which ends in a veiled warning about the Digital Humanities through the example of a performative utterance. The second aspect of the diagram is the last sentence of the second cell, which describes the Digital Humanities in a constative utterance. Although Kant needs these statements to be separate for the boundary between truth and action, power and reason to be clearly demarcated , Derrida is thoroughly unconvinced that this is the case. This takes us back to Saussure’s linguistic signifiers and the signified. Saussure was very influential on Derrida and expounded the theory that every word and sentence has a shape and an ideational element regardless of the structure. If we go back to examine the last sentence of the second stream, then even though it is merely explaining a state-of-affairs, it sends across a clear message that makes us think of the Digital Humanities in a certain way, making it as much a performative statement as the first.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While Kant strenuously explains the distinction between truth and action by arguing for knowledge against the publication of knowledge, Derrida sweeps it aside and asks where the publication really begins. He says, “Language is an element common to both spheres of responsibility, and one that deprives us of any rigorous distinction between the two spaces that Kant at all costs wanted to dissociate. It is an element that opens a passage to all parasiting and simulacra.” Indeed, the Digital Humanities continue to be parasitic and unnecessary since the University is a language act and a technology.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<hr />
<p>[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>] According to Kant, the lower faculties were split among historical knowledge (history, geography, philology, the humanities and the empirical knowledge of the natural sciences) and pure rational knowledge (pure mathematics, pure philosophy and the sciences)</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-the-ecto-parasite'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-the-ecto-parasite</a>
</p>
No publisheranirudhDigital Humanities2014-03-12T13:04:28ZBlog EntryFebruary 2014 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2014-bulletin
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the second issue of its newsletter (February) for the year 2014: </b>
<p>-------------------------------<br />Highlights<br />-------------------------------</p>
<ul>
<li>We published revised chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, as part of our National Resource Kit project.</li>
<li>In the concluding blog post of a three-part study Ananth Padmanabhan looks at the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act, and concludes that both those laws restrain courts and private companies from ordering an ISP to block a website for copyright infringement.</li>
<li>Telugu Wikipedia celebrated its 10<sup>th</sup> anniversary. An event was co-organized in Vijaywada to celebrate the same.</li>
<li>The second Institute on Internet and Society was held in Pune from February 11 to 17. The proceedings from the workshop are captured in a blog post. </li>
<li>CIS announced an Open Call for Comments for the latest draft of the Privacy Bill, 2013 prepared by Bhairav Acharya.</li>
<li>Forbes India published its “30 Under 30 List”. Pranesh Prakash is featured in the list.</li>
<li>As part of the Making Change Project, Denisse Albornoz wrote a blog post that compares the production behind a performance with the process of storytelling.</li>
<li>Beli gives an introduction to spectrum sharing. The post looks at GSM and CDMA, and touches upon LTE, and how they might share spectrum.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">-----------------------------------------------<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs"><br />Jobs<br /></a>-----------------------------------------------<br />CIS is seeking applications for the post of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge): <a href="http://bit.ly/1fnydB0">http://bit.ly/1fnydB0</a>. There are two vacancies for this post and it is full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (<a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a>), Nirmita Narasimhan (<a href="mailto:nirmita@cis-india.org">nirmita@cis-india.org</a>) and Pranesh Prakash (<a href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a>) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">----------------------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility and Inclusion<br /></a>----------------------------------------------<br />As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 35 states.</p>
<p><i>Based upon discussion with the office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) the following chapters were revised</i>:</p>
<p>► National Resource Kit Chapter</p>
<ul>
<li>The Mizoram Chapter (by CLPR, February 5, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1eUSvxW">http://bit.ly/1eUSvxW</a> </li>
<li>The Dadra & Nagar Haveli Chapter (by CLPR, February 6, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1mv3YhJ">http://bit.ly/1mv3YhJ</a> </li>
<li>The Haryana Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 10, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1dVOiKI">http://bit.ly/1dVOiKI</a> </li>
<li>The Himachal Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 12, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1jSk03x">http://bit.ly/1jSk03x</a> </li>
</ul>
<p>► Other</p>
<p># Participation in Events</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">National Consultation on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Development Process (organized by CBM India in collaboration with United Nations Solution Exchange for Gender Community, WHO Regional office for South-East Asia, New Delhi, February 12, 2014). Anandhi Viswanathan participated in a panel discussion. She made a presentation on the National Resource Kit project: <a href="http://bit.ly/OlkHVq">http://bit.ly/OlkHVq</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Zero Project Conference on Accessibility: Innovative Policies and Practices for Persons with Disabilities (organized by Essl Foundation, the World Future Council and the European Foundation Centre, United Nations Office, Vienna, February 27 and 28, 2014). Pranesh Prakash spoke on Affordable Text-to-Speech Software from India: <a href="http://bit.ly/1czo32s">http://bit.ly/1czo32s</a>. Nominations on e-speak were recognised as examples of innovative practices and policies from India. Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker on Copyright Exception for Accessible Formats: <a href="http://bit.ly/1l8HRth">http://bit.ly/1l8HRth</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">-----------------------------------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a><br />-----------------------------------------------------------<br />The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software.</p>
<p># Analyses</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 2) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1cddoKm">http://bit.ly/1cddoKm</a>. Analyses the law laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court on secondary and contributory copyright infringement.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 3) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1g35mDg">http://bit.ly/1g35mDg</a>. Analyses the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act. </li>
</ul>
<p># Participation in Events</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">2nd International Conference on Managing Intellectual Property Rights and Strategy (MIPS 2014) (organized by Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay with support from the Ministry of Human Resources Development IPR Chair Project, Government of India): <a href="http://bit.ly/PsPEbq">http://bit.ly/PsPEbq</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Consultation on Institutional Arrangements for IP management under MHRD (organized by the Planning Commission and Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi, February 21, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this consultation: <a href="http://bit.ly/1fTCoar">http://bit.ly/1fTCoar</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">National Conference on Use of Technology in Higher Education (organized by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development and Planning Commission in partnership with Microsoft Research and British Council, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, February 25, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/P6u78i">http://bit.ly/P6u78i</a>. Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event as a panelist in the session on "Future of Content Creation". </li>
</ul>
<p align="left"># Media Coverage</p>
<ul>
<li>Pranesh Prakash: Influencing India's IP Laws (by Samar Srivastava, Forbes India, February 15, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1kBzLMq">http://bit.ly/1kBzLMq</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (<a href="http://bit.ly/SPqFOl">http://bit.ly/SPqFOl</a>). As part this project (<a href="http://bit.ly/X80ELd">http://bit.ly/X80ELd</a>), we organised 4 workshops in the month of January, published an article in DNA, and signed a memorandum of understanding with KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to further the development of Odia Wikipedia:</p>
<p>►Wikipedia</p>
<p># Articles / Blog Entries</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Odia Language's Presence in Digital Media and Wikipedia's Role (by Subhashish Panigrahi, The Samaja, March 2, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1ieF3sC">http://bit.ly/1ieF3sC</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Indian Wikimedia community coordinates Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain and Jeph Paul, Wikimedia Foundation, March 6, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1cyRfqf">http://bit.ly/1cyRfqf</a>,</li>
</ul>
<p># Events Co-organized</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Cinemathon2014 Bangalore (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CIS, Bangalore, February 8-9, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/MRRkZz">http://bit.ly/MRRkZz</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Tewiki 10th Anniversary (organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, February 15, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1iI2Pxs">http://bit.ly/1iI2Pxs</a>. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaikh were speakers at the event.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Cinemathon2014 Mumbai (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CAMP Studio, Mumbai, February 15-16, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/P5YGL8">http://bit.ly/P5YGL8</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (organized by Roshini Nilaya and CIS-A2K, Mangalore, February 26, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave a presentation on Wikipedia with a special focus on students and women.</li>
</ul>
<p>CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<p># Media Coverage</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Father-son duo promote Punjabi online (by Jatinder Preet, Sunday Guardian, February 1, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1l87b2h">http://bit.ly/1l87b2h</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">୧୦ ବର୍ଷରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ୱିକିପିଡିଆ (Rabibara Sambad (Sunday supplement of Odia newspaper The Sambad), February 9, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1igMynn">http://bit.ly/1igMynn</a>. This is a feature about Odia Wikipedia's 10th anniversary and the story of a dead volunteer community reviving after 8 years.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (Prajavani, February 27, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1gVMG6f">http://bit.ly/1gVMG6f</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p># Participation in Event</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Dynamics of Education to Employment Journey: Opportunities and Challenges (organized by KIIT School of Management, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, February 21-22, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk: <a href="http://bit.ly/1ePwqHc">http://bit.ly/1ePwqHc</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p>Event Organized</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Wiki Women's Workshop (ICG – Dona Paula, Goa, March 9, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/MRRJLy">http://bit.ly/MRRJLy</a>. The event is being organized as part of the commemoration of the International Women's Day. </li>
</ul>
<p>Openness</p>
<p># Event Organised</p>
<ul>
<li>Bitcoin & Open Source with Aaron Koenig (CIS, Bangalore, February 7, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1fbN6mP">http://bit.ly/1fbN6mP</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">-----------------------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a><br />-----------------------------------------------<br />CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. Gautam Bhatia gives an analysis of the right to privacy from a constitutional perspective. Bhairav Acharya prepared an updated version of the Privacy Protection Bill which was published for comments.</p>
<p># Call for Comments</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 (by Bhairav Acharya, February 25, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1g3TwIX">http://bit.ly/1g3TwIX</a>. CIS announced an Open Call for Comments to the latest version of the bill.</li>
</ul>
<p># Articles</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Internet Way (by Nishant Shah, Biblio Vol. 19 No.8 (1&2), January – February 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1kBp9gJ">http://bit.ly/1kBp9gJ</a>. Dr. Nishant Shah's review of the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Bantam Press/Random House Group, London can be found on page 16.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 3: The Public/Private Distinction and the Supreme Court’s Wrong Turn (by Gautam Bhatia, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog, February 25, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1kBosnw">http://bit.ly/1kBosnw</a>. This was originally published on Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Big Democracy, Big Surveillance: India's Surveillance State (by Maria Xynou, Open Democracy, February 28, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1nkg8Ho">http://bit.ly/1nkg8Ho</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Will You be Paid to Post a Picture? (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, February 18, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/P65d8L">http://bit.ly/P65d8L</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p># Blog Entries</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">February 11: The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance (by Divij Joshi, February 14, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1e7drCV">http://bit.ly/1e7drCV</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Calcutta High Court Strengthens Whistle Blower Protection (by Divij Joshi, February 24, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1cG8v7t">http://bit.ly/1cG8v7t</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">CIS Welcomes 52nd Report on Cyber Crime, Cyber Security, and Right to Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok, February 24, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1oviMJ4">http://bit.ly/1oviMJ4</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">UIDAI Practices and the Information Technology Act, Section 43A and Subsequent Rules (by Elonnai Hickok, February 25, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1fbSfep">http://bit.ly/1fbSfep</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p align="left"># Events Organized</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: <a href="http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I">http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Counter Surveillance Panel: DiscoTech & Hackathon (co-organized by CIS, MIT Centre for Civic Media Co-Design Lab, Tactical Technology Collective, Hackteria.org, and Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, March 1, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/NCGMyH">http://bit.ly/NCGMyH</a> </li>
</ul>
<p># Participation in Events</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">First Meeting of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group for India Internet Governance Forum (organized by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, New Delhi, February 10, 2014). Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting: <a href="http://bit.ly/1fKu5xz">http://bit.ly/1fKu5xz</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Internet Intermediary Liability: Towards Evidence-based Policy and Regulatory Reform to Secure Human Rights on the internet (organized by Association for Progressive Communications, The Wedgewood, Melville, Johannesburg, February 10-11, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1fMAEK2">http://bit.ly/1fMAEK2</a>. Elonnai Hickok was a speaker. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Towards an Equitable and Just Internet (organized by IT for Change, New Delhi, February 14-15, 2014). Bhairav Acharya was a speaker: <a href="http://bit.ly/1cz9EDt">http://bit.ly/1cz9EDt</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Workshop on Media Law & Policy Curriculum Development (organized by the Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi and University of Oxford in support with the International Higher Education-Knowledge Economy Partnerships Programme of the British Council, February 16, 2014, National Law University, Delhi): <a href="http://bit.ly/1ovoT00">http://bit.ly/1ovoT00</a>. Bhairav Acharya was a speaker. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Changing Role of the Media in India: Constitutional Perspectives (organized by School of Law, Christ University, February 28, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1lB2nTO">http://bit.ly/1lB2nTO</a>. Snehashish Ghosh moderated a session at this conference. </li>
</ul>
<p>--------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news">News & Media Coverage</a><br />--------------------------------<br />CIS gave its inputs to the following recent media coverage:</p>
<ul>
<li>The Dangers of Birdsong (by Namrata Joshi, Outlook, January 25, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1kB8J7L">http://bit.ly/1kB8J7L</a>. </li>
<li>A Tale of Two Internet Campaigns (by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, February 11, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1lDdRZy">http://bit.ly/1lDdRZy</a>. </li>
<li>Dark days for the creative class in India: Siddiqui (by Haroon Siddiqui, thestar.com, February 16, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1gdtgbC">http://bit.ly/1gdtgbC</a>. </li>
<li>The Forbes India 30 Under 30 List (by Abhilasha Khaitan, Forbes India, February 21, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1ovnvKM">http://bit.ly/1ovnvKM</a>. Pranesh Prakash features in the list. </li>
<li>India ‘tea parties’ enable politicians to woo urban youth with technology (by Avantika Chilkoti, Financial Times, February 26, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1cGfOMm">http://bit.ly/1cGfOMm</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">--------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities">Digital Humanities</a><br />--------------------------------<br />CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:</p>
<p># Blog Entries</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Defending the Humanities in the Digital Age (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, February 24, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1czdZqg">http://bit.ly/1czdZqg</a>. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Humanities in India- Mapping Changes at the Intersection of Youth, Technology and Higher Education (by Sneha PP, February 21, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1qd6xo4">http://bit.ly/1qd6xo4</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">--------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives">Digital Natives</a><br />--------------------------------<br />CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia:</p>
<p>►Making Change Project</p>
<p># Blog Entries</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 1 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 24, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1jX4qBb">http://bit.ly/1jX4qBb</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 2 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 27, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1fKwQil">http://bit.ly/1fKwQil</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">--------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom">Telecom</a><br />--------------------------------<br />Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:</p>
<p># Newspaper Column</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Centre- or State-Driven Development? (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, February 5, 2014, Observer India Blogspot, February 7, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1ceuWFS">http://bit.ly/1ceuWFS</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p># Blog Entry</p>
<ul>
<li>An Introduction to Spectrum Sharing (by Beli, February 24, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/NZlknd">http://bit.ly/NZlknd</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">----------------------------------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access">Knowledge Repository on Internet Access</a><br />----------------------------------------------------------<br />CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: <a href="http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB">http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB</a>.</p>
<p>►Event Organized</p>
<ul>
<li>Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): <a href="http://bit.ly/1fpTdDS">http://bit.ly/1fpTdDS</a>. Bishakha Datta, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Kingsley John, Prof. G. Nagarjuna, Nisha Thompson, Prashant Naik, Nehaa Chaudhari, Bhairav Acharya, Manu Srivastav, Dr. Abhijeet Safai, Payal Malik, Nishant Shah, Laura Stein, Sunil Abraham, Madan Muthu and Chinmayi Arun taught at the institute. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">-----------------------------------------------------<br /><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/">About CIS</a><br />-----------------------------------------------------<br />The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.</p>
<p>► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<ul>
<li>Twitter:<a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K"> </a><a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K">https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a></li>
<li>Facebook group: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k">https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a></li>
<li>Visit us at:<a href="https://cis-india.org/"> </a><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge</a></li>
<li>E-mail: <a href="mailto:a2k@cis-india.org">a2k@cis-india.org</a></li>
</ul>
<p>► Support Us</p>
<p>Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.</p>
<p>► Request for Collaboration:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at <a href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a>. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at <a href="mailto:vishnu@cis-india.org">vishnu@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, IDRC and the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects</i>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2014-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2014-bulletin</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceDigital HumanitiesOpenness2014-04-07T07:27:46ZPageQuestions to Nishant Shah
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/questions-to-nishant-shah
<b>Dr. Nishant Shah had a text interview with the Hybrid Publishing Lab around questions on Digital Humanities. </b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.leuphana.de/konferenzwoche-2014/konferenzgezwitscher/konferenzgeswitscher/dritter-tag/questions-to-nishant-shah.html">The interview was published on the website of Leuphana University in February 2014</a>.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He researches at Leuphana and in The Netherlands. His topics are cyborgs and cyberspaces.</p>
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<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Why do you think we are all cyborgs?</b><br />Shah: Generally, when we think of cyborgs we think of futuristic beings – things that we want to become. But that imagination pretends that we don't have an intimate and intricate relationship with different technologies. When we look at the world that we live in, we can immediately recognize that we continually live with technologies that help us live and to live together. These technologies are so natural a part of our life that we have forgotten to think of them as technologies – like electricity or think of technological products – like clothes. It is good to remind ourselves, when we think of ourselves as 'already cyborgs', that our lives are intertwined with technologies of different kinds, and that we need to think of our human, social and political conditions as mediated by the technological.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>What does this knowledge mean to our society?</b><br />Shah: Thinking of ourselves as cyborgs living in cyborg societies helps us look at the role of technologies differently. We come to realize that technologies are not just something that we use in order to achieve a task. Our usage of technologies changes who we are, individually and as a society. So we need to take the politics of technology infrastructure and regulation seriously. For example, the privatization of knowledge industries, closed and proprietary publishing of research that is produced through public funding, produces societies where only a privileged elite can access this knowledge. We will have to look at questions of open access, open source, open knowledge, etc. as a part of our larger social problems instead of thinking of them as 'technology' questions. Similarly, technologies of access define how different identities and groups are shaped and consumed and we need to now start looking at intersections of technology and society rather than imagining them as separated domains.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Does the Digital Change bring about advantages or disadvantages for our society?</b><br />Shah: I feel that this is a wrong question to ask. It presumes that we actually have only these two options, and that there is a normative, universal truth that determines what the advantages and disadvantages are. Every shift in technological development comes with a bunch of possibilities. Some of these possibilities might offer us the promise of a just, open, inclusive and fair society. Some of them might portent a compromise of our basic human and social rights. The processes used for both are the same. In that case, the questions of power, or ownership, of accountability and transparency will need to be built into the conversations around digital. So the question is not to ask whether the digital in itself is good or bad. However, the digital does provide us with alternatives to some of the most endemic problems around power imbalance, abuse and discrimination. And it remains for us to see, how we are going to shape our societies to fulfill these promises. If we don't take these questions seriously, we might end up amplifying our problems through the very technologies that can otherwise be used to achieve these dreams.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Which advantages do you see, especially for students?</b><br />Students, for me, are the people who are going to live the science fiction futures that we imagine in the present. So while we can make a list of all the different tools and practices that students can use right now, for education, for collaboration, for sharing and for research, what is more important is to realize what these technologies help students in thinking about their futures. One of the biggest things that the digital produces for students, or any young people, is that it makes them think of themselves as agents of change. With the digital, with the ability to mobilize and connect resources and people together, the young are often able to make strategic interventions to correct problems in their immediate environments. And that is the future of our societies – to build an active civil society that is going to contribute to sustainable, relevant and nuanced solutions for the worlds that we want to live in.</li>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/questions-to-nishant-shah'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/questions-to-nishant-shah</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Humanities2014-03-06T08:54:21ZNews ItemDefending the Humanities in the Digital Age
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/dmlcentral-nishant-shah-february-24-2014-defending-the-humanities-in-the-digital-age
<b>The author says that he is trying to take the formulation of digital humanities as a history-in-making where we might still be able to salvage the humanities from being soft-skills and our pedagogies from becoming reduced to MOOCs.</b>
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<p style="text-align: center; ">Dr. Nishant Shah's <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/defending-humanities-digital-age">column was published in DML Central</a> on February 24, 2014.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Taking Care of Things: Reclaiming What is Lost in Our Defence of Humanities</b><a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1]</a><br />If this were a book, this section would be the preface. If it were an academic paper, a footnote. If an art piece, a curator’s note. But, in this mixed multi-media semi-strange space of the research blog, this is just the space where I tell you what is going to follow. And perhaps, explain (though not to justify) why I need to tell you what is going to follow. For a while now, I have been trying to work through some of the questions that have emerged around (and sometimes, because of) digital humanities as a concept and as a practice. A lot of my thought has been about addressing the concerns around infrastructure, human skill, resources, pedagogy and the need to disprivilege the digital as the only point of focus in a majority of the discourse.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As I write about these questions in the different spaces that I write in, I’m trying to take the formulation of digital humanities as a history-in-making where we might still be able to salvage the humanities from being soft-skills and our pedagogies from becoming reduced to MOOCs. In doing so, I started experiencing a strange discomfort with my own writing. This is not new. Every time I glance retrospectively at my older writing, I cringe, and despair and work hard at resisting the impulse to apologise to my readers. It could have been better, sharper, more precise.<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2]</a>But, the discomfort that I am experiencing now, looking at the last couple of years of writing about digital humanities, is different. It is a discomfort that emerges from the fact that in trying to defend and protect the domain of the humanities, the register of my writing has changed considerably.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I try to be accessible and write in prosaic forms that are easily understood and not prone to ambiguity. I try to talk to multiple stakeholders, especially those who are ringing the death knell of traditional humanities, speaking in a language of relevance, significance, impact and efficacy. I try to build infrastructure, engaging with funding agencies, carefully extrapolating the ideas of pilot innovations, mainscaling, upstreaming and integrating everyday practices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In all these attempts, which have been successful in varying degrees, I have let go of the very things that my English literature and humanities training had equipped me to do — to write with passion, to explore the creativity of linguistic and textual expression, to mix form, function and format to generate new relationships between disparate objects that might have otherwise been kept in their self-contained silos — and to pursue, not through empirical evidence, but through creative association, through cross-cultural and inter-textual referencing, a persuasive politics of passionate dialogue. Or, to not make such a song and dance (and a possible meme) out of it, I am slowly realising that very few of us, doing digital humanities, are exploring the very tools that humanities studies have offered us, to question and contest the status quo so that we can envision and dream alternate realities and futures.<a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3]</a> So caught have we been, trying to defend our craft (and sometimes the art) that we have started speaking in the language of those who question, rather than strengthening the voices we already have.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So, I write today (see, I told you, we would need an explanation), as an experiment, in a language and style that I have forced myself to forget, in a way that I don’t even remember that it is forgotten. I write about three things – archives, life-cycles, and habits — in order to look at the complex and complicated relationships that we have presumed and established in the practices of digital humanities. I write to question our human-centric approach, where we think about things, but we only think of them from our human perspectives. I write to imagine, nay, to persuade you to imagine, what it would be like to think of things as things, dislodged from our human positions and dreaming cyborg dreams. I write, to explore, what it means in our DH concerns, to take care of things as things, and not as the separate, the other, the human.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Taking Care of Things: The Beginning</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Welcome, human beings, cyborgs, and things, to this blog post<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4] </a>It has been designed, by a few human beings, by a few machines, and a few things in-between. Here, I lay the ground and lead you into the fine practice of taking care of things. But this task produces in me a strange existential anxiety. I try to figure out what role I play in introducing something as common place, quotidian and everything as taking care of things.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Should I be like the head of an organised crime unit, who, for a price, shall take care of things that bother you by destroying them, silencing them, or making them invisible? Maybe I channel the energies of a grandmother, looking down the family tree of resemblances, giving out instructions on how to take care of the legacies and heirlooms, of the epilepsies in blood, that we shall pass from generation to generation. Should I be a historian who identifies patterns in the order of things, giving you hints at how we need to take care of things past and things to come so that we can live with things as they are? Or, how about a witness, blindfolded in my ignorance, a heathen in his blindness, describing to you the wonders of an elephant that looks like a pillar, a rope, a pan and a sword, trying to preserve what I remember, always knowing, always despairing that what I recall is smaller than what I remember, what I remember is smaller than what I know, what I know is smaller than what is, and what is, is both inscrutable and ineffable by the mere human?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As I negotiate with these fractured, fragmented, frail and failed attempts at trying to care for you, care for ideas, care enough to transmit thoughts via words into your receptive selves, I realise that it is a futile attempt. Even if I were to enter that state of information nirvana, where what I think translates into words, pristine, pure, uncontaminated by powers of interpretation and untouched by the fallacy of meaning, you still would be unable to process it. Everything that I say will only be misunderstood by you. And, I shall misread your misunderstanding. And, together we shall fake it, like orgasms on a surreptitious one-night stand, in the quest of making meaning. In other words, I lament that we are not machines. That we are not things. It is only in the machinistic, especially in the digital machines of computing, that these seamless flows of information are possible. Garbage in, garbage out. What you see is what you get. Does exactly what it says on the tin. All your base are belong to us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And so, welcome, once again human beings, cyborgs, things to this piece of text that I hope turns out to be fantastic, terrific, awesome. Fantastic because it invites you to enter realms of fantasy. Terrific because it leads us into things that terrify us. To this awesome evening. Awesome because it silences us into awe. Welcome, to this text, which is a safe space — look, you can ride on the hyphen, or drop between the white spaces of words. It is a safe space where we think, not of things, but as things. That is the only way out of the quandary into which I have trapped myself.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Taking Care of Things<br /></b>It is humanly impossible to do so. And it is in thinking of taking care as a human function, that we face bewilderment and anxiety. If we pretend, for the space of this text<a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5]</a> to be things — immortal but destructible, without agency but with design, bereft of intention but with defined purpose, devoid of ambiguity but prone to abuse — and try and make sense of the three things that we shall return to, recursively, obsessively, desperately, in the next three days, then we might be on to something.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As things, we look at archives. The repository of things. An indexicality of things that are present. A glaring array of things that are absent. The archive has been imagined in the service of the human, at the desire of the human, and the curatorial logics of collective human experience too long. Let us think of not only an archive of things, but an archive that follows the internal logics and logistics of things. An archive that is constructed by things, which might sometimes give us human access and interface to things within it. Archives, which might use human powers — biological, organic, intellectual, affective — to organise themselves, to fuel their constant expansion and arrangement. Archives as a purpose for human existence. Archives as the alien space jelly that feeds on the human in order to survive, so that it can sustain the order and power of the things that reside within it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a world where the human has already conceded its right to memory — memory is a stick, it is a promiscuous, adulterous, plug and play flash drive, that romances, serenades and has infectious relationships with different machines… in such a world, it should be easy to imagine that the human, at least when it comes to informational realities, is secondary, if not insignificant. The human, prone to decay and death, attacked by biological malware that erodes its internal functions, disabling its programmes and often short-circuiting its motherboard, is fragile and surely the most unstable form of storing something as beautiful and terrifying as information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We live too fast, die too soon, and in the process, constantly destroy the meaningless but necessary flow and circulation of information. And, so, we need to think of life-cycles differently. The things that we live with, generally outlive our carbon based biological bodies. We pass on, through genetic mutation, our eyes, our knobby knees and our genetic predisposition to chocolate to the subsequent generations. But, we also pass on our assets, our properties, our passwords and datasets. And maybe, given that the data outlives us, data is seemingly immortal, data registers our death and continues in its divine existence, we need to restructure our idea of who lives, who dies, and what constitutes a life-cycle.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hence, I beseech you, to let go of your humanity. This stubborn sticking to the idea of being human, is merely a habit. It is taught. It is a form of co-option. Remember those days, when you were still not sure about being human. The day, when you were told that when you grow up, you can become anything you want — the disappointment of realising that it was a lie… that you wanted to be a dog, but you were trapped and coerced into becoming a human. Let go of the idea that being human has anything exceptional to it. We love. We care. We kill. Well, guess what?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Things Care<br /></b>Things love. Oh, they love. Selfishly, destructively, intensely. Things love us and they demand our attention, time and intimacy, slowly enveloping us in soft glows, gently vibrating in our pockets, sensually slithering in our hands. And everybody knows what happens to a machine that you pour a cup of coffee on — like a disappointed lover, Romeo to his Juliet poisoning himself to death, like Medea on a revenge spree eating her own children, the machine, when neglected, dies.<b></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Things care. But we are mistaken in thinking that they care for us. Things care for themselves. <a href="http://www.plecebo.org/2009/01/kelly-dobson-and-robots.html">Things take care of each other.</a> When you and I are asleep, your refrigerator connects to your microwave, speaking through the analogue networks, resonating in electromagnetic frequencies. And things kill. Slowly, gently, hypnotically, they wait, they watch, and when we are not looking, they stab, they sting, they betray and remind us that the human is futile.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To take care of things as human beings is then an exercise in wasted effort. Because we shall always be addressing things from a condition of inadequacy and wastefulness, well aware that the thing that we are talking to, talking about, talking through, is more precise, more fulfilled, more in control of its intentions and more aware of its destiny than we are ever going to be. Maybe in order to take care of things, we need to think of ourselves as things. Things that talk to things. Things that take care of things. That will be a world of new equalities. A world, where we can stop living in fear of the other — the thing.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Where Everything is a Thing</b><br />A thing is in everything.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. <span>This is a footnote to acknowledge that the first thought for this line of thinking emerged in conversations at the Post Media Lab, and concretized at their </span><a href="http://www.postmedialab.org/taking-care-of-things">recent event</a><span> from where I borrow this title. Special thanks for </span><a href="http://lerone.net/?language=en">Oliver Lerone Schultz</a><span>, </span><a href="http://www.leuphana.de/clemens-apprich.html">Clemens Apprich</a><span>, </span><a href="http://hybridpublishing.org/author/christinakral/">Christina Kral</a><span>, </span><a href="http://www.risd.edu/Digital___Media/Kelly_Dobson/">Kelly Dobson</a><span> and </span><a href="https://research.brown.edu/myresearch/Wendy_Chun">Wendy Chun</a><span> who made this line of thinking grow through the </span><a href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/habits-living-being-human-networked-society">Habits of Living</a><span> workshops.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>]. For the first time, the green underline that my word processor has produced, telling me that the correct prose would end the sentence with ‘and more precise’ is not feeding my Dysgrammatophobia. How dare it tell me how I should write?</p>
<p>[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>]. I have to give a special shout out to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Drucker">Johanna Drucker</a> whose resolute mixing of the styles and genres, writing as a digital humanist while writing about digital humanities has been truly inspiring.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>]. I am not sure which of you would read it in its entirety, and I don’t really know how to talk to things yet, so while I welcome everybody and everything, I am going to address only the human reader in my text. My metadata, I hope, imparts pleasure to the non-humans who are not plotting their way into Actor-Network visualisations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>]. While battles rage on Twitter, relationships live their life-cycles on Facebook, new memes propagate and abound the Tumblrs, blink-and-you-miss-them, subcultural practices explode into meteoric showers, and somewhere, some harassed teacher tries to figure out what s/he did wrong in the last seven births that s/he now has to teach using <a href="http://www.blackboard.com/platforms/learn/overview.aspx">Blackboard</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/dmlcentral-nishant-shah-february-24-2014-defending-the-humanities-in-the-digital-age'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/dmlcentral-nishant-shah-february-24-2014-defending-the-humanities-in-the-digital-age</a>
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No publishernishantDigital Humanities2014-03-06T11:40:42ZBlog Entry