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Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the final section. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <strong>Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</strong></p>
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<h2>Concluding Thoughts</h2>
<p>This exercise in mapping ‘digital humanities’ in India has brought to the fore several learnings and challenges, especially in trying to locate the domain of enquiry even as our understanding of what constitutes new objects, methods and forms of research and pedagogy constantly undergo change and redefinition. As some of the people interviewed in the course of this study remarked, DH, with its interdisciplinary approach and porous boundaries is like a moving target that becomes increasingly difficult to define as it is constantly evolving into something new, which then adds another dimension to what is already understood about the field. This is not to say that there is a consensus on what is DH, globally or in India, but just to emphasise that the object or domain of enquiry is not fixed, or demarcated clearly.</p>
<p>Even as I wrap up this study, some of the key questions or problems of definition, ontology and method remain with us, as the ‘field’ – if there is such a thing – is incipient in India, as with other parts of the world. What it does for us immediately is throw open several questions about how we understand the idea of the ‘digital’, and what may be new areas of enquiry for the humanities at large, post the advent of the digital. This study therefore is not interested in the question of whether there is a field called DH in India, but rather in what questions are raised by and for DH and DH-like projects by a range of practices and scholarship in the humanities post the digital.</p>
<p>We began with the understanding that DH is a new space of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and practice with several possibilities for thinking about the nature of the intersection of the humanities and technology. The term was a little more than a found term of sorts, in the context of this study, which since then has taken on various meanings and undergone some form of creative re-appropriation. The history of the term in the context of “humanities computing” in the Anglo-American context has helped in locating and defining the field globally within the ambit of certain kinds of practices and scholarship in the contemporary moment. In India, this has been relatively complex endeavour, given that DH, or engagements with humanities-after-digital and/or with digital-through-humanities come out of a different chequered history of humanities and technology. As most of the literature around DH even globally has pointed out, the problem with arriving at a definition is ontological, more than epistemological. The conditions of its emergence and existence are yet to be completely understood, although if one is to take into account the larger history of science and technology studies or the more recent cyber culture and digital culture studies, these ‘epistemic shifts’ have been in the making for some time now. In India particularly, where a clear picture of the ‘field’ as such is still to emerge in the form of a theorisation of its key concerns, it is only through a practice-mapping that one may locate what are at best certain discursive shifts in the way we understand content, structures and methods in the humanities, within the context of the digital. These changes may be visible across only a few domains – particularly in the multi-layered technological landscape in India, and lack a wider consensus in terms of whether they really constitute a larger epistemic shift or new direction of thought. The first couple of chapters in this report tried to lay out ways of understanding the current state of ‘digitality’ that India is in, and the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise or understand it better. The layered technological and media landscape that we inhabit today, where both the analogue and digital co-exist serving various purposes, and access and usage are still contentious points of debate, provides an interesting and dynamic context to understand what are new practices of humanities research and scholarship today.</p>
<p>The fundamental premise of the nature of the digital and its relation to the human subject still lacks adequate exploration which would be required to define the contours of the field. The inherited separation of humanities and technology further makes this a complex space to negotiate, when the term may now actually indicate the need to decode the rather tenuous relationship between the two supposedly separate domains. If one may locate the question even earlier, the separation of the natural and social sciences lies above this segregation of disciplines, and needs further exploration. There is a need therefore to understand the growth of a ‘technologised’ history of humanities to examine whether this almost forced coming together of two historically separated domains may in itself be something novel, or create new and qualitatively different kinds of practices for humanities. Even so, the disciplinary contexts of the usage of the term DH in India open up certain questions of ontology and method more broadly for humanities research and practice in the digital space. These include changes in the nature of cultural artifacts brought about by digitisation, in a landscape where the analogue and digital co-exist but also are in a state of transition from the first to the second. One example is the digitisation of objects like film posters, lobby cards and other paraphernalia around a film text, which although analogue objects, can now be layered onto a digital film object in online archivel like Indiancine.ma, thus also changing the object or opening it up for more questions. The digital object or image, is a new object of study that also demands a different kind of analysis. The change in the nature of the archival object and the challenges to archival practice are some of the related questions stemming from this context. As mentioned by Dr. Indira Chowdhury in the chapter on archival practice, oral history archives and the practice of creating and maintaining them is fraught with many challenges because of a change in the archival object itself. A digital audio file has its own protocols of storage, retrieval and use, given the problems of format and technological obsolescence. Further the classification of such files, its copies in different formats, and their preservation also demands changes in archival practice. This points to some of the larger challenges that have emerged for archival practice in India today, which include – storage and preservation of materials, cross-referencing and meta-data standards, conditions and structures of access, roles and forms of curation, re-usage of archival materials in research and pedagogy, and the constraints to digitization of archival materials, particularly in terms of rare materials and those in Indian languages. The challenge of working with materials in Indian languages (see section on Data as Text) are several, and will form one of the significant areas of work in DH.</p>
<p>The question of methodology comes in as the next most important aspect here, as the method of DH is yet to be clearly defined. The proliferation of new disciplines and conflict over methodology is not new, the Gulbenkian Commission report published in 1996 titled ‘Open the Social Sciences’ documents some of these and other concerns with the growth and segregation of disciplines, and the debates it generated both internally, seen in the rise of cultural studies, and in the natural sciences as complexity studies as well (Wallerstein et al 1996). At present DH seems to be a combination and creative appropriation of methodologies drawn from different disciplines and creative practices. The change in the methodology of the humanities and social sciences itself as no longer remaining discipline-specific has been a contributory factor to the evolving methodology of DH as well. This has raised several methodological questions, as outlined by some of the people interviewed in the study. The foremost is the challenge in rethinking the notion of the text as a digitally mediated object, and the blurring of boundaries between film, audio and print and archival materials as they are transformed into digital objects. The existing methods of reading these texts then are inadequate. An example is the Bichitra variorum at Jadavpur University, or online archives like Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, where you need new tools to navigate the vast corpus of material on these platforms, and to work with them. The notion of text and textual analysis also demands some rethinking in the light of new terms such as ‘distant reading’ that have come up in the DH discourse. Bichitra and Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma would facilitate some form of such ‘distant reading’ as they involve a method of reading the print or film text using a large number of texts, something possible only with a computer, but also with other kinds of ancillary material, like marginalia, errata, posters, pamphlets and lobby cards of a film. This brings up not just new ways of contextualizing the digital object, but also asking questions of it in terms of its material aspects. Working with collaborative online archives, while creating a new analytical and creative space for work using different kinds of film and film-related material, also pose questions of authorship and privacy. The lack of better transcription tools and other methods to work with sound in the digital space, has posed significant methodological challenges in oral history work as well, as outlined in earlier sections of this report.</p>
<p>The use of computational methods for humanities research is one of the important shifts that forms part of the growth of DH in India, although there is very little work being done in this area in academic spaces except for a few institutions. The Tagore variorum and the online film archives Indiacine.ma and Pad.ma are two examples in this study that have done some work with computational tools and a large corpus of material. The collation guide in Bichitra, and the use of different tools and filters in the film archives like Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been able to add another dimension to the analysis of humanities texts, but whether they help ask any qualitatively new questions still remains open to debate. The other spaces studied as part of this report, such as work on digitisation and archives at the School of Cultural Texts, Centre for Public History, or SPARROW, or media art work at CAMP, have been more engaged with exploring what the digital turn has meant for certain humanities research. Some of the more recent courses offered in DH, such as the master’s programme at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, and the certificate course at University of Pune, do engage with some form of building or ‘material making’, by offering workshops and some practical sessions, as well as topics like data mining, and textual computing. As such the skills and infrastructure needed to work with large data sets and new technologised processes of interpretation and visualisation still remain outside the ambit of the mainstream humanities. Through an exploration of allied fields such as media, archival practice, design and education technology, the study tries to locate how certain practices in these areas inform what we understand of DH today.</p>
<p>The archive, media and now to a certain extent art and design have become the sites for most of the discussions around DH in India, primarily because of the nature of institutions and people who have engaged with the question so far. Archival practice has seen a vast change with the onset of digitisation, and the growth of more public and collaborative archival spaces will also bring forth new questions and concepts around the nature of the archive and its imagination as a dynamic space of knowledge production. The Centre for Public History at the Srishti School focuses on some of these questions, by trying to build more collaborative, online and public archival spaces, and involving in the process a rather diverse group of practitioners and researchers. The objective is also to make not only archives, but history, and oral histories as a discipline more accessible, and dynamic. he notion of the archive as a metaphor, and the possibility of looking at the archive as a database are some new questions which would inform the growth of DH in India. The growth of an open, distributive and collaborative archive, such as Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma also asks questions about the changes in film as an archival object, in its transition to the digital space. The availability of the film text for study, and the layering of different kinds of ancillary material around the film, such as posters, advertisements, literature and errata, opens up possibilities of reading the film text differently. At a more abstract level, the nature of the text as an unstable object itself, now increasingly being mediated and negotiated in different ways through digital spaces, tools and methods would be one way of locating an object of enquiry in DH and tracing its connection to the humanities, which are essentially still seen as ‘text-based disciplines’.</p>
<p>What has been a definite shift is the emphasis on process which has become an important point of enquiry, and one of the many axes around which DH is constructed. The rethinking of existing processes of knowledge production, including traditional methods of teaching-learning, and the emergence of new tools and methods such as visualisation, data mapping, distant reading and design-thinking at a larger level would be some of the interesting prospects of enquiry in the field. Though there is little conversation in the above areas in DH in India (even among the institutions and people mentioned in this study), and some work in other fields like the natural sciences, media and communication, its seems to not be part of the larger discourse developing around DH yet. The collation tool developed for the Tagore variorum, or the editing and annotation tools used in Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are some examples of the tools and methods presently used in what could be DH or DH-like work in India. The method of DH is however, necessarily collaborative and distributed at the same time, as evidenced by its practice in these various areas and disciplines. A lot of the work done on both these platforms has been through collaboration among people across diverse domains of expertise, in the arts and humanities and technological fields. As the description of the variorum suggests, it needed the expertise of people from Computer Science, Library and Information Sciences, English and Bengali departments to set up such a platform. The method of using or working with Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma is necessarily collaborative and distributed, because everything from the primary film material to the annotations and editing is in some way user-generated, as the archive itself is open to different groups of people ranging from the film enthusiast to the film studies scholar.</p>
<p>The complex and somewhere problematic history of science and technology in India and the growth of the IT sector also forms part of this context, and will inform the manner in which DH grows as a concept, area of enquiry or even as a discipline. DH is yet another manifestation of changes that we have seen in the existing objects, processes, spaces and figures of learning, particularly the open, collaborative and participatory nature of knowledge production and dissemination that has come about with the advent of internet and digital technologies. More importantly, they also point towards the larger changes in what were earlier considered unifying notions for the university, and the humanities as disciplines founded on the ideas of reason and culture. The idea proposed by Bill Readings that the university is no longer concerned with the production of a radical or liberal subject is also an important one, as it points to a further question of the nature of the subject produced, and who the process of knowledge production is to be aimed at (Readings 1997). If one may extend this argument to DH, the subject of this new discourse around the digital is also now rather unclear.</p>
<p>One could explore the notion of the 'digital humanist,' or in a more abstract manner the digital subject as one example of this lack of clarity, which is also why it has been of much concern for several scholars, DH and otherwise. As Prof. Amlan Dasgupta says, it is difficult to identify such a category of scholars, although a person who is able to situate his work in the digital space with the same kind of ease and confidence that people of a different generation could do in manuscripts and books would perhaps fit this description, and he is sure that such a person may be found. For example someone who knows Shakespeare well and can write a programme, and he is sure a day will come when this is a possibility. It is a familiarity in which the inherent distance between these two pursuits becomes lesser – DH is at that moment - a composite of these two approaches rather than the difference. While many scholars concur with this explanation, others find the term misleading – humanities scholars do not call themselves ‘humanists’. Also, by virtue of being a digital subject, anybody engaged with some form of digital practice is already a digital humanist of some sort. The problem also is in the rather unclear nature of the practice, all of which is not unanimously identified as DH, as a result of which not many scholars would want to identify with the term. This poses another question about the skills required of a humanities scholar in the near future, will she have to learn how to code etc. Additionally there is also a concern, as pointed out by some scholars, about the loss of criticality as a result of a relying on algorithms to work with a corpus of texts, among other things.</p>
<p>However, many of these alternate or liminal spaces have always existed; they are perhaps becoming more visible and acknowledged now. This is also indicative of the larger changes in the landscape of work in the humanities, whether creative, academic or pedagogic. With the advent of the internet and new digital technologies, the nature of cultural artifacts has also been altered significantly, thus demanding a new mode of enquiry and analysis, which often goes beyond interpretation and representation. How these digital objects are constituted, are they ever complete or finished, such as the text in the variorum or the film in the archive which continue to take on layer upon layer of annotation to generate a plethora of meanings, are related questions. They pose a challenge to the existing methods of the humanities, and along with the distributed, collaborative, and networked structures of practice and research that the internet has engendered, they have opened up several possibilities for the humanities. DH, with its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and different kinds of knowledge drawn from a diverse set of practices definitely opens up space for a new mode of questioning; whether all of these different modes of questioning can coalesce as a new discipline or interdisciplinary field in itself will remain to be seen.</p>
<p>More importantly, it also indicates the changes taking place in the university system in India, which is trying to address multiple anxieties at a larger political and the every-day administrative levels, reflected in problems with quality, equity and access to education (Misra and Singh 2015; Academics for Creative Reforms 2015). The digital turn has been one of the sources of concern, as it has pushed for the need to rethink the role of technology, particularly internet, in teaching and learning practices, both within and outside the classroom. The internet, and the different challenges posed by it in terms of methods, objects and contexts of learning, has contributed greatly to the emergence of some of the digital practices discussed in this study, which also take some of the questions they pose about knowledge production, pedagogy or scholarship, outside the ambit of the classroom or university space. The emergence of DH can be seen as a coming together of these anxieties in some manner, and perhaps indicative of a distinct ontological basis for such a discipline or area of study in India. This is not to conflate the discourse with the narrative of a ‘crisis’ in the university (something that exists in the Anglo-American context of DH) but rather to highlight the changes that it is undergoing, where the internet and digital technologies continue to play a crucial role. In the absence of a history or established traditions for the growth of disciplines like media studies, software/internet studies or digital cultural studies in India, apart from the work done by research programmes like the Sarai programme at CSDS, it is imperative to ask if the emergence of DH is then a push to trace such a history, to understand better its ontological and political stake, and more importantly to explore what the ‘digital’ means not just for the humanities, but for a larger processes of knowledge production today.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Academics for Creative Reforms ‘What Is To Be Done About Indian Universities? In <em>Economic and Political Weekly</em>, Vol. 50, Issue No. 24, 13 Jun, 2015.</p>
<p>Misra, Rajesh and Supriya Singh ‘Continuum of Ignorance in Indian Universities’ in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 48, 28 Nov, 2015</p>
<p>Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997</p>
<p>Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. California: Stanford University Press, 1996, <a href="http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm">http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iwstanfo.htm</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts</a>
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No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchEducation TechnologyDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T04:48:27ZBlog EntryComments on the RBI's Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/comments-on-the-rbi-consultation-paper-on-peer-to-peer-lending
<b>The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending on April 28, 2016, and invited comments from the public. CIS submitted the following response, authored by Elonnai Hickok, Pavishka Mittal, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Vidushi Marda, and Vipul Kharbanda.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>1. Preliminary</h2>
<p><strong>1.1.</strong> This submission presents comments and recommendations by the Centre for Internet and Society (<strong>“CIS”</strong>) on the Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending (<strong>“the consultation paper”</strong>) by the Reserve Bank of India (<strong>“RBI”</strong>) <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<h2>2. The Centre for Internet and Society</h2>
<p><strong>2.1.</strong> The Centre for Internet and Society, CIS <strong>[2]</strong>, is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfiguration of social processes and structures through the internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa.</p>
<p><strong>2.2.</strong> This submission is consistent with CIS’ commitment to safeguarding general public interest, and the interests and rights of various stakeholders involved. The comments in this submission aim to further the concerns of citizens’ and users’ rights in the context of products, services, and transactions facilitated by digital media technologies, the , the principle that regulation should be defined around functions of the acts concerned, and not the technologies of delivery. Our comments are limited to the clauses that most directly have an impact on these concerns.</p>
<h2>3. Response</h2>
<h3>3.1. Whether there is a felt need for regulating peer to peer lending platforms?</h3>
<p><strong>3.1.1.</strong> Peer to peer (<strong>“P2P”</strong>) lenders are platforms serving as marketplaces for the lenders and the borrowers of funds to connect. Their very business model does not render them as a provider of finance, as they aspire to function as pure intermediaries to enable lending and borrowing.</p>
<p><strong>3.1.2.</strong> The Section 45I.(f)(iii) of the RBI Act, 1935 <strong>[3]</strong>, provides RBI the authority to classify any financial institution as a non-banking financial company (<strong>“NBFC”</strong>) “with the previous approval of the Central Government and by notification in the Official Gazette.” Since the P2P lending platforms do not provide any finance themselves, undertake acquisition of financial instruments, deliver financial and/or insurance services, or collect financial resources directly, the only ground for classifying such companies as “financial institutions” <strong>[4]</strong> appears to be their involvement in “managing, conducting or supervising, as foreman, agent or in any other capacity, of chits or kuries as defined in any law which is for the time being in force in any State, or any business, which is similar thereto” <strong>[5]</strong>. P2P lending platforms can be considered to be brokers and thus there are other aspects that merit scrutiny such as antitrust issues, obligations of either party, company activities and the transactional system involved, as we will discuss in this document.</p>
<p><strong>3.1.3.</strong> The consultation paper itself states that the balance sheet of the platform cannot indicate any borrowing / lending activity, which entails that the platform cannot itself provide finance or receive any funds for the provision of loans to others. Platforms are not allowed to determine the interest rates as they are not a party to the transaction. Neither would they be liable in cases of default by the borrower. These rules, standard for P2P platforms in other jurisdictions as well, confirm the assumption that the platform itself is not providing finance and thus, cannot be entrusted with any liability, obligation from the transaction.</p>
<p><strong>3.1.4.</strong> Further, with RBI raising the threshold asset size for an NBFC to be considered systemically important (NBFC-ND-SI) from Rs. 100 Crores to Rs. 500 Crores <strong>[6]</strong>, and Economic Times reporting that one of the biggest Indian P2P lending platform’s enterprise valuation (which can be taken as indicative of its net assets) is Rs 50 Crores <strong>[7]</strong>, we may assume that most P2P lending platforms will have net assets worth less than 500 crore, at least in the near future; although there is a possibility for exponential growth with some companies.</p>
<p><strong>3.1.5.</strong> Given the limited sphere of operation, restricted ability (by design) of these platforms to shape interest rates and other features of financial instruments, and their generally non-systemically-important nature, we would submit that the regulation of such P2P lending platforms are kept to an absolute minimum, so that their economic viability is not undermined, and at the same time the key risks associated with their operations are addressed by RBI.</p>
<h3>3.2. Is the assessment of P2P lending and risks associated with it adequate?</h3>
<p><strong>3.2.1.</strong> CIS observes that the following are the key risks involved with the operations of the P2P lending platforms, and these are being respectively addressed by, or can be addressed by RBI in the following manners.</p>
<ol type="A"><li><strong>Insufficient information about the conditions of lending, leading to defrauding of the borrower:</strong> The borrower may not receive appropriate information about the terms of the loan, and/or the P2P lending platform may not act in a “fair” manner (say, in case of collusion between the P2P lending platform and the lender, or the lending platform and the borrower), which may lead to defrauding and/or economic loss of either party. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs <strong>[8]</strong>, which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Insufficient information about the borrower, or her/his ability to repay the loan, may lead to non-repayment and economic loss of the lender:</strong> If the P2P lending platform allows the lender to offer loans to borrowers without acquiring and/or providing sufficient information to the lender about the borrower’s credit history and/or ability to repay the loan, modes of formulating security for loans, this may heighten the risks of non-repayment of loans. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Master Circular – 'Know Your Customer' (KYC) Guidelines – Anti Money Laundering Standards (AML) - Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 - Obligations of NBFCs <strong>[9]</strong>, which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Credit-related information of the lenders and the borrowers collected by P2P lending platforms may not be made available to other financial institutions and that will lead asymmetry in credit information available across various actors in the sector:</strong> Credit information, related to both lending and borrowing practices of entities using the platform concerned, is a key asset of the P2P lending platforms. Lack of sharing of such information with Credit Information Companies, for economic reasons or otherwise, may however, lead to information asymmetry within the financial sector, which will structurally weaken the entire sector (with pieces of credit information being distributed across actors and not being shared internally). By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005 <strong>[10]</strong>, which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>P2P lending platforms diversifying their financial operations without informing RBI and hence without appropriate regulatory control:</strong> It is possible that P2P lending platforms may decide to diversify their activities. There have been similar examples in other related sectors, say e-commerce marketplaces, that have started their own product re/selling companies that use the same online marketplace concerned. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies provide RBI with detailed and regular reports of their economic activities and investments, which is expected to address concerns related to this type of risks.</li></ol>
<h3>3.3. Are there any other risks which ought to be addressed?</h3>
<p><strong>3.3.1.</strong> CIS observes that as part of the usual transaction related activities of the P2P lending platforms, the companies will come into possession of what has been defined as “sensitive personal data or information” by the Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011 <strong>[11]</strong>. The concerns related to this type of risk is directly addressed by the Rules concerned, and may not require additional attention from the RBI.</p>
<p><strong>3.3.2.</strong> CIS observes that as borrowers and lenders start using specific P2P lending platforms, the data regarding their credit histories and/or “financial reputation” will be owned by these companies. While such information might be shared internally within the financial sector through the Credit Information Companies, the borrowers and lenders themselves may not get direct access to such data. Hence, the borrowers and lenders will not be able to move easily and smoothly to a new P2P lending platform and make use of their existing credit information and/or “financial reputation” when accessing services offered via the new P2P lending platform. In other words, the borrowers and lenders may face a <em>service provider lock-in</em>, and inability to move between P2P lending platforms easily, without explicit access to their own credit history/reputation, and will not have the ability to migrate such information from one P2P lending platform to another (or to any other agency, for that matter). CIS submits that RBI must provide a mechanism to allow users to migrate between platforms as it has not been discussed in the consultation paper.</p>
<h3>3.4. Is the proposed approach to regulating these platforms adequate?</h3>
<p><strong>3.4.1.</strong> CIS observes that while classification of P2P lending platforms will appropriately address key risks associated with their operations (as listed in 3.2.1. A-D), it will not address a major risk emerging out of their operations that is unique to the technological basis of the business concerned (as mentioned in 3.3.2.), and further, it will impose substantial financial and management obligations that have a very high probability of undermining the economic viability of this emerging and niche sector of intermediated direct lending and borrowing.</p>
<p><strong>3.4.2.</strong> CIS observes that these financial and management obligations may involve the following topics among others discussed: 1) minimum net worth requirement for registration, 2) minimum investments required to be made government securities, 3) transferring of minimum percentage of net profits to RBI, 4) guidelines regarding corporate governance <strong>[12]</strong>, etc.</p>
<p><strong>3.4.3.</strong> Given this, CIS submits that instead of classifying P2P lending platforms as “Misc NBFCs,” a new sub-classification is created under the category of NBFC for such platforms, that directly addresses the key risks associated with businesses of P2P lending platforms, and protects lenders as well as borrowers while enhancing transparency in operations. This new sub-classification of P2P lending companies should also be divided into systemically-important and non-systemically-important like other NBFCs, and requirements regarding financial operations and corporate management should only be enforced for the former category of P2P lending companies.</p>
<h3>3.5. Any other relevant issues pertaining to P2P lending</h3>
<p>Beyond the issues already discussed above, CIS seek clarity from the RBI around the following aspects:</p>
<ol><li><strong>Transactional system pertaining to P2P lending:</strong>
<ol type="a">
<li>What are the requirements and prerequisites for mandating the collection of user identity?</li>
<li>Establishing a maximum sum that can be transferred per transaction.</li></ol>
</li>
<li><strong>Company activities:</strong>
<ol type="a"><li>Fees that can be charged by platforms.</li>
<li>How data security can be best addressed.</li>
<li>How the financial transactions are brokered.</li>
<li>Modes of redressal.</li>
<li>Restitution to users if something goes amiss in the transaction.</li>
<li>Insurance that the company has to buy or capital on hand to support.</li></ol>
</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3164">https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3164</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIA1934170510.pdf">https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIA1934170510.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See Section 45I.(c) of RBI Act, 1923, last amended on January 07, 2013.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See Section 45I.(c)(v) of RBI Act, 1923, last amended on January 07, 2013.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/pdfs/PNNBFC200315.pdf">https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/pdfs/PNNBFC200315.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/faircent-com-raises-pre-series-a-funding-of-250k/articleshow/47630279.cms">http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/faircent-com-raises-pre-series-a-funding-of-250k/articleshow/47630279.cms</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=7866">https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=7866</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_ViewMasCirculardetails.aspx?id=8168">https://rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_ViewMasCirculardetails.aspx?id=8168</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/credit-information-companies-act.aspx">http://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/credit-information-companies-act.aspx</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR313E_10511%281%29.pdf">http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR313E_10511%281%29.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=3706">https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=3706</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/comments-on-the-rbi-consultation-paper-on-peer-to-peer-lending'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/comments-on-the-rbi-consultation-paper-on-peer-to-peer-lending</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroPrivacyReserve Bank of IndiaData ProtectionResearchNetwork EconomiesP2P LendingResearchers at Work2016-06-01T20:21:13ZBlog EntryRBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Data Security and Privacy Concerns
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending
<b>On April 28, 2016 the Reserve Bank of India published a consultation paper on P2P Lending and invited comments from the public on the same. The Paper discusses what P2P lending is, the various regulatory practices that govern P2P lending in different jurisdictions and lists our arguments for and against regulating P2P lending platforms.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Arguments against Regulation</h2>
<p>The arguments against regulation of P2p lending companies as set out in the paper are (briefly):</p>
<ol><li>Regulating an exempt or nascent sector may be perceived as rubber stamping the industry through regulation, thus lending credibility to the P2P lending which could attract ill informed lenders to the sector who may not understand all the risks associated with the industry. In this way Regulation may cause more harm than good.</li>
<li>Regulations may also be perceived as too stringent, thus stifling the growth of an innovative, efficient and accessible industry.</li>
<li>The P2P lending market is currently in a nascent stage and does not pose an immediate systemic risk meriting regulation.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h2>Arguments in favour of Regulation</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The arguments for regulating the market on the other hand are:</p>
<ol><li>Considering the significance of the online industry and the impact which it can have on the traditional banking channels/NBFC sector, it would be prudent to regulate this emerging industry.</li>
<li>The, the importance of these methods of financing, specially in sectors where formal lending cannot reach, needs to be acknowledged.</li>
<li>If the sector is left unregulated altogether, there is the risk of unhealthy practices being adopted by one or more players, which may have deleterious consequences.</li>
<li>Section 45S of RBI Act prohibits an individual or a firm or an unincorporated association of individuals from accepting deposits “if its business wholly or partly includes any of the activities specified in clause (c) of section 45-I (i.e. activities of a financial institution); or if his or its principal business is that of receiving of deposits under any scheme or arrangement or in any other manner, or lending in any manner. Contravention of Section 45S is an offence punishable under section 58B (5A) of RBI Act. As per the Act, ‘‘deposit’’ includes and shall be deemed always to have included any receipt of money by way of deposit or loan or in any other form, but does not include any amount received from an individual or a firm or an association of individuals not being a body corporate, registered under any enactment relating to money lending which is for the time being in force in any State. Since the borrowers and lenders brought together by a P2P platform could fall within these prohibitions, absence of regulation may lead to perpetrating an illegality.”</li></ol>
<p>After listing out the arguments, the paper adopts the approach of regulating this industry and proposes to bring P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI’s regulation by defining them as Non Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) under section 45-I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act. Once notified as NBFCs, RBI can issue regulations under sections 45JA and 45L. Though there is scope to comment on many aspects of the consultation paper our comments here will be limited to the data security and privacy aspects of the recommendations.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Data Security and Privacy Concerns</h2>
<p>While the understanding of potential borrowers, specially those who have had experiences with commercial financial institutions, is that the more amount of information they provide, the better their chances become of getting a loan. This perception emanates from the fact that any potential borrower is asked for a myriad of documents, including personally identifying documents before a request for a loan is considered, infact for almost all financial institutions it is part of their core prudential norms to ask for identity documents before disbursing a loan. Getting as much information as possible from the borrower is not just a quirk of the financial institutions but it makes business sense for them, since it is those institutions who bear the risk of recovery of their money. There is no reason why the same logic or allowing creditors all the information about the borrower should not be applicable to P2P lending platforms, as far as the principle of prudential business practices is concerned. However, the key difference between disclosing information to P2P lending platforms as opposed to financial institutions is that whilst the information supplied to financial institutions stays limited to the institution and its employees, a large amount of the information (though not necessarily all) given to P2P platforms is made available to all potential creditors, which in P2P lending translates to any internet user who registers as a potential creditor. In this way the potential for the information to reach a wider group of people is much higher and therefore privacy and data security risks require special attention in P2P lending.</p>
<p>In section 5.3(v) of the Paper it is recommended that “Confidentiality of the customer data and data security would be the responsibility of the Platform. Transparency in operations, adequate measures for data confidentiality and minimum disclosures to borrowers and lenders would also be mandated through a fair practices code.” Whilst the fair practices code has not yet been developed or at least not yet made publicly available, as companies in the P2P lending industry are body corporates, these fair practice codes should be in line with and satisfy the requirements of section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (“<strong>IT Act</strong>”) as well as the Guidelines issued by the RBI’s Guidelines on Information security, Electronic Banking, Technology risk management and cyber frauds <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<p>The minimum standards for data protection in Indian law have been laid down by section 43A of the IT Act and the Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011 (“<strong>Rules</strong>”) issued under section 43A. As per Rule 4 of the Rules P2P platforms would be required to have a privacy policy to deal with sensitive personal data, which includes any details regarding financial information such bank account, credit/debit cards, etc <strong>[2]</strong>.</p>
<p>This policy would have to be published on the website of the platforms and would provide for a number of things such as (i) Clear and easily accessible statements of its practices and policies; (ii) type of personal or sensitive personal data or information collected; (iii) purpose of collection and usage of such information; (iv) disclosure of information including sensitive personal data or information; (v) reasonable security practices and procedures for the data. The other requirements of the Rules as regards consent before usage of the information, collection limitations, imparting information/notice to the consumer (information provider), retention limitation, purpose limitation, opt-out option, disclosure, etc. will also be applicable to P2P platforms and the fair practices code that the RBI would issue for this purpose will have to take all these issues into account.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Rules also provide that body corporates will be considered to have complied with reasonable security practices if they have implemented such security practices and standards and have a comprehensive documented information security programme and information security policies that contain managerial, technical, operational and physical security control measures that are commensurate with the information assets being protected with the nature of business. Although there are no such practices which have been endorsed by any governmental body for P2P lending platforms, however the Department of Banking Supervision, Reserve Bank of India, has issued guidelines on “Information security, Electronic Banking, Technology risk management and cyber frauds" <strong>[3]</strong>. which could be relied upon until a fair practices code is put into place. The major privacy and data security provisions of these guidelines are given below:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Security Baselines</strong>: The guidelines require banks to be proactive in identifying and specifying the minimum security baselines to be adhered to by the service providers to ensure confidentiality and security of data;</li>
<li><strong>Back up records</strong>: A cloud computing system must ensure backup of all its clients' information;</li>
<li><strong>Security steps</strong>: An institution may take the following steps to ensure that risks with respect to confidentiality and security of data are adequately mitigated: (i) Address, agree, and document specific responsibilities of the respective parties in outsourcing; (ii) Discuss and agree on the instances where customer data shall be accessed; (iii) Ensure that service provider employees are adequately aware and informed on the security and privacy policies.</li>
<li><strong>Confidentiality</strong>: Agreements should provide for maintaining confidentiality of customer's information even after the contract expires or is terminated by either party and specify the liability in case of security breach or leakage.</li>
<li><strong>Encryption</strong>: Normally, a minimum of 128-bit SSL encryption is expected. Banks should only select encryption algorithms which are well established international standards.</li>
<li><strong>Fraud Risk Management</strong>: It is also necessary that customer confidential information and other data/information available with banks is secured adequately to ensure that fraudsters do not access it to perpetrate fraudulent transactions.</li></ul>
<p>Although inclusion of the above principles in the fair practices code would be helpful, however since the workings of P2P platforms are quite unique, therefore it would be counterproductive to restrict the security and privacy protocols to only those applied to regular banking transactions and the fair practices code should take into account these unique problems of P2P lending rather than seek to apply the existing norms blindly.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf">https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> The Rules define “sensitive personal data or information” as information relating to: "(i) password, (ii) financial information such as Bank account or credit card or debit card or other payment instrument details, (iii) physical, physiological and mental health condition, (iv) sexual orientation, (v) medical records and history, (vi) Biometric information, (vii) any detail relating to the above clauses as provided to body corporate for providing service, and (viii) any of the information received under above clauses by body corporate for processing, stored or processed under lawful contract or otherwise."</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf">http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending</a>
</p>
No publishervipulPrivacyReserve Bank of IndiaData ProtectionResearchNetwork EconomiesP2P LendingResearchers at Work2016-06-01T11:41:17ZBlog Entry RBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Legality and Implications
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-legality-and-implications
<b>The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer-to-Peer Lending on April 28, 2016. The Paper proposes to bring the P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI’s regulation by defining P2P platforms as NBFCs under section 45I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act. Once notified as NBFCs, RBI can issue regulations under sections 45JA and 45L. The last date for submission of comments to the Consultation Paper is May 31, 2016. In this post, Pavishka Mittal discusses the legality and implications of the proposed classification of Peer-to-Peer lending companies as NBFCs. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>1.</strong> <a href="#1">Introduction</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>2.</strong> <a href="#2">Legal Basis for Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>3.</strong> <a href="#3">Legal Implications of Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>3.1.</strong> <a href="#3-1">Threshold Mechanism under Indian Law</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>3.2.</strong> <a href="#3-2">Change in Management or Control of NBFCs</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>3.3.</strong> <a href="#3-3">Compliance with KYC/AML/CFT Norms</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>3.4.</strong> <a href="#3-4">Compliance with Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>3.5.</strong> <a href="#3-5">Obligations to Share Credit Information</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>4.</strong> <a href="#4">Endnotes</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>5.</strong> <a href="#5">Author Profile</a></p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<h2 id="1" style="text-align: justify; ">1. Introduction</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">RBI in its Consultation Paper has proposed to classify Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending platforms as NBFCs. NBFCs in India are considered to be an alternative to the banking sector, with the only distinction being the prohibition on collecting demand deposits and the absence of running accounts. The established categories of NBFCs as per section 45I include loan, investment, asset finance and residuary non-banking companies incorporated under the Companies Act 1956. This blog post will examine the various categories of NBFCs in India and whether P2P lending platforms are within any of these established categories under law. The legality of the proposed course of action by the RBI in its consultation paper is subsequently examined. Further, the legal implications of the same, i.e the components of the increased compliance by the P2P platforms is discussed in detail.</p>
<h2 id="2" style="text-align: justify; ">2. Legal Basis for Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">P2P lenders are platforms serving as marketplaces for the lenders and the borrowers of funds to connect. Their very business model does not render them as a provider of finance, they are only an intermediary in the financial services sector. There is no question that loan companies are NBFCs under section 45I(f) of the RBI Act, 1935 <strong>[1]</strong>. However, since these P2P platforms do not provide any finance themselves, there can be no ground for classifying them as a loan company within section 45I of the RBI Act. NBFCs are also classified into deposit taking NBFCs and non-deposit taking NBFCs. In this situation, the question of permissibility, or legal basis, of taking deposits by the platform does not arise as the funds are to be directly transferred from the lender to the borrower, as stipulated in the Consultation Paper itself. The Paper further states that the balance sheet of the platform cannot indicate any borrowing/lending activity, which entails that the platform cannot itself provide finance or receive any funds for the provision of loans to others. Platforms are not allowed to determine the interest rates as they are not a party to the transaction. Neither would they be liable in cases of default by the borrower. These rules, standard for P2P platforms in other jurisdictions too, confirm the assumption that the platform itself is not providing finance and thus, cannot be entrusted with any liability, obligation from the transaction. However, it has to be vigilant in its role in maintaining data on the market participants on the platform for the fulfillment of KYC norms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Serious concerns as to the financial health of the economy, however, are bound to arise if such entities are to continue operations without any regulatory supervision. The existing regulations, when made could not have fathomed the niche business models of the present. It is for this reason that sector-specific guidelines are often released for the benefit of all market participants as was seen in the case the revised e-commerce regulations <strong>[2]</strong>. In the present case, the proposed action is classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs with the RBI reserving the power to name any 'non-banking institutions' as NBFCs. Clause (a) of section 45I of the RBI Act 1934 declares that the business of a non banking financial institution includes the business of a non-banking financial company as specified under subsection (f). Clause (iii) of subsection (f) defines a non-banking financial company to include any other non-banking institution or class of such institutions, as the RBI may, with the previous approval of the Central Government and by notification in the Official Gazette, specify. Clause (c), in contrast identifies NBFCs through their activities, through their 'principal business'. The <em>fifty/fifty</em> test to determine the principal business of the firm as to the engagement of at least fifty percent of the assets of the firm in the core operations of the firm is not applicable if the RBI chooses to declare any 'non-banking institution' as a NBFC. In the present case, in the absence of any established characteristics of a NBFC within clause (c), the RBI has made use of clause (f) to meet the primary objective of regulation. The RBI will not exceed its regulatory authority in doing so. The only restriction on such an action is that an NBFCs cannot include any institution whose principal business is that of agricultural activity, industrial activity, sale/purchase of goods, sale/purchase/construction of immovable property.</p>
<h2 id="3" style="text-align: justify; ">3. Legal Implications of Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Reserve Bank under section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934, can validly determine the policy and give directions to all or any of the non-banking financial companies relating to income recognition, accounting standards, making of proper provision for bad and doubtful debts, capital adequacy based on risk weights for assets and credit conversion factors for off-balance sheet items and also relating to deployment of funds by a non-banking financial company, or a class of non-banking financial companies, or non-banking financial companies generally, as the case may be. Further, such non-banking financial companies shall be bound to follow the policy so determined and the directions so issued. Without prejudice to the generality of the powers named above, the Bank may also give directions to NBFCs generally or to a class of NBFCs or to any particular NBFC as to (a) the purpose for which advances or other fund based or non-fund based accommodation may not be made; and (b) the maximum amount of advances or other financial accommodation or investment in shares and other securities which, having regard to the paid-up capital, reserves and deposits of the NBFC’s and other relevant considerations, which can be validly made by that NBFC.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934 is illustrious of the vast powers with the central bank to frame directions and policies applicable to NBFC’s. Powers of regulation extend to the subjective satisfaction of the RBI that the affairs of the NBFC are being conducted in a manner prejudicial to its depositors or the NBFC itself other than the established grounds of public interest and regulation of the financial system of the country to its advantage. This is of importance to P2P lending platforms because the characterization of their organizations as NBFCs would not just indicate compliance with the existing regulatory mechanism applicable to NBFCs but also any other direction, notification, policy that can be validly issued in the future on the subjective satisfaction of the above broad grounds. P2P lending platforms, many not even public companies presently may not be able to operate in the manner that is most beneficial to its private interests in the interest of the public. Further, no other legal form of organization other than a company would be valid under law. Further, no P2P Platform would be able to adopt any other legal form of organization (sole proprietorship, partnership etc.) other than a company due to the fact that clause (c) grants the power on the RBI to name any non-banking financial ‘company’ to include any other non-banking ‘institution’ or class of ‘institutions’. These ‘institutions’, when named NBFCs under law would be companies and would have to change their form of organization, by registration as a company within the Companies Act 2013, if necessary.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As per section 45I of the RBI Act 1934, all NBFCs excepting those which are regulated by other statutory/regulatory bodies are to be registered with the RBI. P2P lending platforms will thus have to comply with the following:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Minimum net worth requirement of Rs 2 crore for registration.</li>
<li>Make minimum investments as stipulated in RBI notifications in central, state government securities and would be liable to pay a penal interest in the case of non-compliance.</li>
<li>A minimum of 20% of net profits will have to be transferred to the Reserve Fund from which no appropriations are permissible except with intimation to the Central Bank within 21 days from such withdrawal.</li>
<li>Statements, information called for under the provisions of chapter IIIB would have to be furnished.</li>
<li>RBI bank is empowered to file a winding up petition if it is satisfied that the NBFC is unable to pay its debt or its continuance is detrimental to public interest/depositors of the company.</li>
<li>Prohibited from disclosing any information contained in any statement or return submitted by such company under the provisions of Chapter IIIB; or obtained through audit or inspection or otherwise by the Bank. Such information is to be treated as confidential with the exception of disclosure to any other NBFC in accordance with the practice and usage customary amongst such companies or as permitted or required under any other law.</li>
<li>Scope of business of banks is limited by section 16(1) of Banking Regulation Act - the only limitation being the prohibition on checking facilities, due to absence of demand deposits.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="3-1" style="text-align: justify; ">3.1. Threshold Mechanism under Indian Law</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Due to differential financial risk posed by different categories of NBFCs, there exist different regulatory mechanisms applicable to the different classes. For these reasons other than administrative convenience, NBFCs were categorised into the following three groups:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Deposit accepting NBFCs,</li>
<li>Non-deposit accepting NBFCs with assets of less than Rs.100 crore, and</li>
<li>Non-deposit accepting NBFCs with assets of Rs.100 crore and above.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the aim to achieve a balance between under-regulation and over-regulation in the sector, RBI increased the threshold asset size for an NBFC to be considered systemically important (NBFC-ND-SI) from Rs.100 crore to Rs.500 crore <strong>[3]</strong>. A simplified regulatory framework has been established for NBFCs which are not systemically important (NBFCs-ND), i.e. NBFCs having total assets less than Rs.500 crore.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As per Economic Times, Faircent’s <strong>[4]</strong> enterprise valuation, which can be indicative of its net assets, is Rs 50 crore <strong>[5]</strong>. Keeping in mind that Faircent is arguably one of the biggest market players in the P2P segment, it seems that most P2P lending platforms will have net assets worth less than 500 crore, at least in the near future. Thus, this blog post, to analyse the <em>applicable</em> regulatory regime relies on the assumption that P2P lending platforms, if recognized as NBFCs, would not be systematically important as per the criteria laid down under law. Systematically Important NBFCs have different leverage, capital adequacy, asset classification, corporate governance and disclosure norms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The RBI issued Prudential Norms Directions for Non-Systematically Important Non-Banking Financial (Non-Deposit Accepting or Holding) Companies in 2015 <strong>[6]</strong>. This framework classifies non deposit taking NBFCs on the basis of their access to public funds and customer interface. Subclause (ii) of clause (3) of Paragraph 1 states that these directions, excepting paragraph 15 are not applicable to NSI-NBFC’s provided that they do not accept or hold public funds. As per paragraph 15, a certificate will have to be submitted to the Regional Office of the Department of Non-Banking Supervision by the statutory auditor within one month from the date of finalization of the balance sheet and in any case not later than December 30th of that year.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">NSI-ND-NBFCs do not have to comply with the limited prudential norms when there is no access to public funds, either directly or indirectly. In the present case, the P2P Platform will not itself have any access to public funds, the funds being transferred directly from the lender to the borrower. The RBI in its consultation paper has proposed the applicability of a leverage ratio to P2P platforms which is in contravention of Paragraph 1 of the deemed regulations. The powers of the RBI under section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934 do not include the making of any directions/regulations which involve the applicability of a leverage ratio. If P2P platforms are made to comply with the deemed leverage ratio requirement under law, 7, it results in apprehension as the possibility of applicability of the other provisions of the NSI-ND-NBFC Prudential Norms Directions. The question as to the existence of regulatory authority to impose the leverage ratio arises which deserves clarification by the RBI.</p>
<h3 id="3-2" style="text-align: justify; ">3.2. Change in Management or Control of NBFCs</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Non-Banking Financial Companies (Approval of Acquisition or Transfer of Control) Directions, 2014 [herein after referred to as ‘Change in Control Directions’) was a step towards ensuring that all NBFCs are managed by ‘fit and proper’ management <strong>[8]</strong>. Earlier, only intimation with the Regional Office was required.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 2015, addressing the responses from the industry, the RBI issued revised guidelines <strong>[9]</strong> to make prior written permission of the Reserve Bank be required for the following activities:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Any takeover or acquisition of control of an NBFC, which may or may not result in change of management.</li>
<li>Any change in the shareholding of an NBFC, including progressive increases over time, which would result in acquisition/ transfer of shareholding of 26 per cent or more of the paid up equity capital of the NBFC. This would not extend to cases involving buyback of shares/ reduction in capital provided approval from a competent court has been obtained.</li>
<li>Any change in the management of the NBFC which would result in change in more than 30 per cent of the directors, excluding independent directors. Prior approval would not be required for those directors who get re-elected on retirement by rotation.</li>
<li>Further, P2P lending platforms will have to continue to inform the RBI regarding any change in their directors/ management as stipulated under Non-Systemically Important Non-Banking Financial (Non-Deposit Accepting or Holding) Companies Prudential Norms (Reserve Bank) Directions, 2015.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="3-3" style="text-align: justify; ">3.3. Compliance with KYC/AML/CFT Norms</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Non-deposit-taking NBFCs with assets of Rs 25 Crore and above are to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) norms / Anti-Money Laundering (AML) standards / Combating of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) through the allotment of Unique Customer Identification Code for NBFC Customers in India (UCIC) as intimated by the RBI in its circular dated May 3, 2013 <strong>[10]</strong>. According to RBI's master circular dated July 1, 2014 <strong>[11]</strong>, NBFCs are required to prepare a risk profile of each customer and apply enhanced due diligence measures on higher risk customers. Further, NBFCs are to put in place policies, systems, and procedures for risk management keeping in view the risks involved in a transaction, account or banking/business relationships. In 2015, the RBI issued another notification <strong>[12]</strong>, which stated that the periodicity of the updation of the data required to be maintained through the 'client due diligence' directions should not be less than once in five years in the case of low risk category customers, and not less than once in two years in case of high and medium risk categories. Full KYC exercise will have to be done every two years for high risk, every eight years for medium risk, and every ten years for low risk individuals and entities taking in to account the adequacy of the data obtained through client due diligence measures, if any. The 2014 directions also stated that detailed guidelines on Customer Due Diligence (CDD) measures made applicable to Politically Exposed Person (PEP) and their family members or close relatives will have to be complied with.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Further, NBFCs have been warned in the notification that the information collected from the customer for the purpose of opening of account should be kept confidential, and should <em>not</em> be divulged for cross selling or any other purposes. NBFCs have to ensure that the information sought from the customer is <em>relevant</em> to the perceived risk, is not intrusive, and is in conformity with the guidelines issued in this regard. Any other information from the customer should be sought separately with her/his consent, and <em>after</em> opening the account.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If the NBFC has knowledge or reason to believe that the client account opened by a professional intermediary is on behalf of a single client, the client must be identified. NBFCs should not allow opening and/or holding of an account on behalf of a client/s by professional intermediaries, like Lawyers, Chartered Accountants, etc., who are unable to disclose the true identity of the beneficial owner due to professional obligations of customer confidentiality. Some documents have been specified which should be called for and verified for the opening of an account in the name of a proprietary concern.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Principal officer should be appointed to ensure compliance with the KYC/AML/CFT norms and the obligations under the Prevention of the Money Laundering Act 2002. A system should be made for the recording of transactions involving counterfeit coins/currency, cash exceeding Rs 10 lakh rupees, either individually or in a series, and for transactions that are ‘suspicious’ according to the Money Laundering Act 2002. NBFCs should maintain for at least ten years from the date of transaction between the NBFC and the client, all necessary records of transactions referred to in rule 3 of the Prevention of Money-laundering (Maintenance of Records of the Nature and Value of Transactions, the Procedure and Manner of Maintaining and Time for Furnishing Information and Verification and Maintenance of Records of the Identity of the Clients of the Banking Companies, Financial Institutions and Intermediaries) rules 2005, (hereinafter, referred to as the PMLA rules) to enable the reconstruction of transactions and the provision of evidence for prosecution of persons involved in criminal activity <strong>[12]</strong>. Even if P2P lending platforms do not enter into the transaction with the customer for the provision of the loan itself, there does exist a transaction involving the payment of processing fee etc. to the P2P lending platform, indicating compliance with the PMLA rules. Further, records pertaining to the identification of the customer will have to be maintained for a period of ten years after the termination of the business relationship. ‘Suspicious transactions’ will have to be reported to the Financial Intelligence Unit India. To combat financing of terrorism activities, continuous screening and monitoring of transactions which have no apparent economic or visible lawful purpose should be done. NBFCs should give special attention to business relationships and transactions with persons in countries which do not or insufficiently apply the FATF recommendations.</p>
<h3 id="3-4" style="text-align: justify; ">3.4. Compliance with Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Though P2P lending platforms are not loan companies, the object of classifying them as a NBFC would be defeated if they are not made to comply with the RBI established FCP guidelines. These requirements include:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>All communications to the borrower shall be in the vernacular language or a language as understood by the borrower.</li>
<li>To enable the borrower to make an informed decision, loan application forms should include necessary information which affects the interest of the borrower, so that a meaningful comparison with the terms and conditions offered by other NBFCs.</li>
<li>A system of providing acknowledgement for receipt of all loan applications with a time frame should be established.</li>
<li>The amount of the loan sanctioned along with the terms and conditions including annualised rate of interest and method of application thereof should be kept on record by the NBFC.</li>
<li>NBFCs shall mention the penal interest charged for late repayment in bold in the loan agreement.</li>
<li>Non furnishment of a copy of the loan agreement or enclosures quoted in the loan agreement being an unfair practice, NBFCs are, therefore, advised to furnish a copy of the loan agreement along with a copy each of all enclosures quoted in the loan agreement to all the borrowers at the time of sanction / disbursement of loans.</li>
<li>The NBFCs should give notice to the borrower of any change in the terms and conditions including disbursement schedule, interest rates, service charges, prepayment charges etc.</li>
<li>NBFCs should also ensure that changes in interest rates and charges are effected only prospectively. A suitable condition in this regard should be incorporated in the loan agreement. Decision to recall / accelerate payment or performance under the agreement should be in consonance with the loan agreement.</li>
<li>NBFCs should release all securities on repayment of all dues or on realisation of the outstanding amount of loan subject to any legitimate right or lien for any other valid claim. If such right of set off is to be exercised, the borrower shall be given notice about the same with full particulars about the remaining claims and the conditions under which NBFCs are entitled to retain the securities till the relevant claim is settled/paid.</li>
<li>NBFCs should refrain from interference in the affairs of the borrower except for the purposes provided in the terms and conditions of the loan agreement (unless new information, not earlier disclosed by the borrower, has come to the notice of the lender).</li>
<li>In case of receipt of request from the borrower for transfer of borrowed account, the consent or objection of the NBFC, should be conveyed within 21 days from the date of receipt of request. Such transfer shall be as per transparent contractual terms in consonance with law.</li>
<li>In the matter of recovery of loans, the NBFCs should not resort to undue harassment. Staff should adequately trained to deal with the customers in an appropriate manner.</li>
<li>The Board of Directors of NBFCs should also lay down an appropriate grievance redressal mechanism within the organization to resolve disputes arising in this regard.</li>
<li>NBFCs will have the freedom of implementing measures which enhance the scope of the guidelines without sacrificing their underlying spirit.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The directions as to the formation of appropriate internal principles and procedures in <em>determining</em> interest rates excepting processing and other charges are not be applicable to P2P lending platforms. Thus, P2P lending platforms are not be made to adopt the interest rate model and communicate with the borrower as to the approach for gradation of risk and rationale for charging different rate of interest to different categories of borrowers.</p>
<h3 id="3-5" style="text-align: justify; ">3.5. Obligations to Share Credit Information</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In terms of Section 2(f) (ii) of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005, a non-banking financial company as defined under clause (f) of Section 45-I of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 has also been included as "credit institution" <strong>[13]</strong>. Further, the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act provides that every credit institution in existence shall become a member of at least one credit information company <strong>[14]</strong>. Thus all NBFCs being credit institutions are required to become a member of at least one credit information company as per the statute. In this regard, in terms of sub-sections (1) and (2) of Section 17 of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005, a credit information company may require its members to furnish credit information as it may deem necessary in accordance with the provisions of the Act and every such credit institution has to provide the required information to that credit information company.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In terms of Regulation 10(a) (ii) of the Credit Information Companies Regulations, 2006, every credit institution shall:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>keep the credit information maintained by it, updated regularly on a monthly basis or at such shorter intervals as may be mutually agreed upon between the credit institution and the credit information company; and</li>
<li>take all such steps which may be necessary to ensure that the credit information furnished by it, is update, accurate and complete.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Thus, P2P lending platforms will have to regularly disclose credit information, both current and historical, to enable the creation of robust databases with Credit Information Companies.</p>
<h2 id="4" style="text-align: justify; ">4. Endnotes</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[1]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIAM_230609.pdf">https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIAM_230609.pdf</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf">http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/pdfs/PNNBFC200315.pdf">https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/pdfs/PNNBFC200315.pdf</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.faircent.com/">https://www.faircent.com/</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/faircent-com-raises-pre-series-a-funding-of-250k/articleshow/47630279.cms">http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/faircent-com-raises-pre-series-a-funding-of-250k/articleshow/47630279.cms</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9830&Mode=0">https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9830&Mode=0</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf">http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=8899&Mode=0#f1">https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=8899&Mode=0#f1</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9934">https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9934</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=7962&Mode=0">https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=7962&Mode=0</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9081&Mode=0">https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9081&Mode=0</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9449">https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9449</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/credit-information-companies-act.aspx">http://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/credit-information-companies-act.aspx</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_ViewMasCirculardetails.aspx?id=9913#16">https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_ViewMasCirculardetails.aspx?id=9913#16</a>.</p>
<h2 id="5" style="text-align: justify; ">5. Author Profile</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pavishka Mittal is a law student at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata and has completed her second year. She takes contemporary dance very seriously and hopes to contribute to the dance community in India. Other than dancing, she indulges in binge-watching in her spare time.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-legality-and-implications'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-legality-and-implications</a>
</p>
No publisherPavishka MittalSharing EconomyReserve Bank of IndiaResearchNetwork EconomiesP2P LendingResearchers at Work2016-05-31T13:25:37ZBlog EntryNew Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the sixth among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <strong>New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</strong></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself, in India. As the previous sections may have illustrated, most of the prominent initiatives around DH in India have largely been within the university context, or have at least focused around the university as the centre of the processes of knowledge production, and emphasise a move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, and at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation. In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and topics, which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide or even accommodate. These include tools for working with digitisation processes, digital archives, and the use of computational methods in the study of cultural artifacts. Thus processes such as topic modelling, data visualisation, cultural analytics, sentiment analysis and several more become increasingly prominent in discussions about DH. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a particular kind of teaching-learning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.</p>
<p>Wikipedia and internet-based sources of information are entering classrooms with the proliferation of gadgets and tools, and with this there is a tendency towards adopting a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration. DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010) – not only in terms of people, but also spaces, methods and objects of learning - to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this in the global discourse on DH is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ <strong>[1]</strong>: people with training in the humanities who now inhabit what earlier seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. But it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that are now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters within the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. While the DH discourse in India has developed mostly within the university space, given its multidisciplinary interests and methods, it is often seen as bearing potential in terms of working outside the academic norm. Through an examination of changes in teaching-learning methods, creative and critical practices that come about with the adoption of the digital, it may be useful to explore whether it indeed opens up such alternate modes of humanities practice and how it informs the way we do DH in India; as practitioners, researchers, students, teachers or the lay person. The growth of the internet and digital tools and technologies has led to many changes in teaching-learning practices, and engendered new methods and forms of humanities practice, all of which may now be found within the university or academic space. It is therefore imperative to examine these new modes of research and practice, to arrive a better understanding of the changes in and possibilities available for humanities work after the digital. The notion of the ‘alternate’ is also an important concern here, and the emergence of these new modes of humanities practice help unpack and understand this term better.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Technology in the Classroom</h2>
<p>This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster new and alternate knowledge-making practices. India is also still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition, and the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the university circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research, where one may see DH–related work being done. What remains an important part of the discourse in the context of the university is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom.</p>
<p>The use of technology in education has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom <strong>[2]</strong>. However, the digital divide still persists, as a result of which many initiatives come with problems of their own, the most important being the lack of connection among practice, content and pedagogy <strong>[3]</strong>. Vikram Vincent, a doctoral scholar in the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, attributes this to a problem of understanding technology itself and what it can do for learning. He looks at technology as an extension of the human body and not something alien to it. Over the course of his research, he has found that the prevalent attitude to the use of technology in the classroom, particularly in early ICTs in education projects, has been more techno-centric rather than learner-centric, which is not the most effective approach <strong>[4]</strong>. Technology has always been around in some form or the other, from drawing on walls to the blackboard to now the smart board; it has always been in the classroom. How you choose to use it determines the outcomes, and one needs to ensure that the learning environment evolves with the new technology that is introduced, because it does not happen automatically but over a period of time.</p>
<p>The Wikipedia India Education programme pilot project, implemented in Pune in 2011 is an example of the number of challenges that the introduction of a new technology in the classroom brought forth, in terms of skills, content and pedagogy <strong>[5]</strong>. The need to focus on the educational component of the technology, the improvement of skills of the learner in writing, research and communication, rather than on the tool itself has been an important learning from the programme, even as it continues in a different university today. As Vincent adds further, the problem arises with looking at technology as a disruptive element or merely a tool to aid learning, which prevents institutions from envisioning a more holistic model of learning that takes some amount of time and effort. This also requires the appropriate stimulus and other conditions such as training of teachers, access to resources and training in certain required skills, addressing barriers of language and so forth, which is a feature of some programmes, such as the IT @ school in Kerala which have seen a measure of success <strong>[6]</strong>. Vincent further mentions examples of programmes he has been part of, some of them under the MHRD-NMEICT initiative which focussed on the teaching-learning process rather than the technology itself, key to which is building teacher capacity to use new and already available resources better <strong>[7]</strong>. These would be crucial steps to take before envisioning a model of teaching-learning that is premised largely on digital technologies and the internet.</p>
<p>While educational technology is a separate field in itself which looks at better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology <strong>[8]</strong>, it does form part of the context, or landscape in India within which DH would perhaps develop as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach.</p>
<p>Another predominant discourse that informs DH is that of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) which is often used as a rather broad, catch-all term, and has been variously defined and used by different groups and stakeholders across domains (Saith et al, 2008). ICT4D is premised largely around the question of access, and seeks to bridge the digital divide in terms of knowledge, resources, people and infrastructure, among other things. This has also been an intensely debated term, given its social and political implications, particularly in the manner in which it informs a larger discourse on development, technology and globalisation in the global South.(Sundaram, 2005) It is important to understand whether DH has been posited as making an intervention into these prevailing systems of knowledge – so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change. What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it – will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Towards a Digital Pedagogy</h2>
<p>Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University is positive about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies. According to him, while a media or film studies department would be close to the concerns of DH, and use some form of digital technology such as video clips or blogs as part of coursework, it is particularly important to see what change it has brought about in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages. While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research that he sees a vast change now. Many researchers, many of his students also, have found this a useful part of the research process, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms and tools like Academia or Scalar <strong>[9]</strong>. It not only makes the process more transparent, but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities for teaching-learning practices.</p>
<p>It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies, but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few, with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata, and more recently Srishti School of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore. The change is recent, as several researchers have pointed out. There have always been concerns about privacy and regulation of content, whether on a university archive or its network. The enthusiasm towards ‘anything digital is good’ is relatively new, and comes from a larger (and sometimes rather utopian) development discourse focussed around modernity and technology. Curricularisation comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets - we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital, and both modes exist simultaneously - but the rate of change is faster with the digital than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities, thus also seen as threat to the disciplines themselves, but to see if it has its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.</p>
<p>The development of courses on DH in three universities in India, and the manner in which the field has been ‘curricularised’ so to say, would be an indication of its specific academic concerns in the Indian context, and the disciplinary challenges and questions that it may throw up for the teaching-learning process. Expectedly, the three courses mobilise a set of resources and expertise that the schools have built over the course of many years. In doing so they also foray into areas that existing humanities courses at the university may not have explored enough, within their own disciplinary framework. For example the course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at Jadavpur University <strong>[10]</strong> comprises of components on software studies and digital music preservation, building on work done at the large archives at the School of Cultural Texts and Records. Similarly, the course at Presidency University <strong>[11]</strong> has components on storytelling in digital media through video games, while the course at Srishti <strong>[12]</strong> has a focus on design practice and critical making amongst other interests. The courses therefore follow a decidedly interdisciplinary framework, which no doubt interesting, also makes curriculum development and course assessment a challenge. While the ‘digital’ aspect of ‘DH’ forms a significant part of these explorations, the manner in which it is being studied is an important point of focus – whether as a condition, space, concept or object, rather than just a set of tools and methods that facilitate the enquiry of the humanities. Digitisation significantly alters the cultural artifact, and there is a need to understand and theorise this digital object better. As Padmini Ray Murray points out, the digital is one way to mediate the material object, particularly those that are not textual, since that kind of experiential access can only be provided by the digital, especially in the case of archival objects. A critical understanding of the digital needs to therefore be a key aspect of such an enquiry in DH.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Alternate Spaces of Humanities Practice</h2>
<p>While these are the developments within academia or the university space, there are a number of spaces outside this circle that have also been asking similar questions, and producing new kinds of scholarship and research around these ideas. The Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma archives have not only served as rich repository of material on film and video, used by scholars and film enthusiasts alike, but also as a pedagogic tool in spaces like the Media Lab at Jadavpur University. Through an innovative fellowship programme, Pad.ma has supported research and film making using the archive as a platform. An interesting example here would be a documentary film on power plants in Chhattisgarh made by Sunil Kumar. Available as a film treatment/script on Pad.ma, Kumar’s work is based on research in mainly two districts of Chhattisgarh, where he met and spoke with people, collected documents and shot several hours of video, which he then published in the form of 80 footage series on Pad.ma <strong>[13]</strong>. There are several other examples on Pad.ma, such as the video-art project on the Radia tapes, and the work on "perfume arts" in Bangalore <strong>[14]</strong>. The Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) through its workshops on oral and visual history has tried to engage with the more pedagogic aspects of the archive <strong>[15]</strong>. While the possibilities are many, the uptake of such platforms in universities has been slow, due to issues that range from lack of internet connectivity to a discomfort or unfamiliarity with the internet and other kinds of technology. This eventually relegates initiatives like these to the space of an alternate, extracurricular or outlier, even though they seem to be asking the same questions as the mainstream institutions and doing similar work.</p>
<p>What this also refers to is the space for new modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders or even brings to the fore in already existing practices. With these however, also come the questions about the legitimacy of these forms and methods of knowledge production, as seen in the rather polarised positions around DH in its global discourse. The Wikipedia is one example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang (2011) describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the 15th -18th centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the Internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says:</p>
<blockquote>The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an inherent quality but a transitive one 6 located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge, but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?</blockquote>
<p>He further goes on to elaborate that the question of the authority of knowledge should ideally be located within a larger ‘knowledge apparatus’, comprising of certain technologies and practices, (in this case that of reading, writing, editing, compilation, classification and creative appropriations) which help inflate the definitions of authority and knowledge even more.</p>
<p>The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’–often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge. While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of prominent practices and occupations are but alternatives - from alternative medicine to education - to the already established or mainstream system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now. The attempts to subsume these alternate practices under a unifying term such as DH, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long, within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Humanities and Technology: A Twinned History</h2>
<p>Another factor in this reduced visibility of the alternate and now re-emergence is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. Therefore by extension then, the term DH itself may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. David Berry (2012) in his essay on the computational turn speaks of possibilities that computationality, and specifically new software and code offer in terms of unifying multiple kinds of knowledge in the university. He says that:</p>
<blockquote>In trying to understand the digital humanities our first step might be to problematize computationality, so that we are able to think critically about how knowledge in the 21st century is transformed into information through computational techniques, particularly within software. It is interesting that at a time when the idea of the university is itself under serious rethinking and renegotiation, digital technologies are transforming our ability to use and understand information outside of these traditional knowledge structures. This is connected to wider challenges to the traditional narratives that served as unifying ideas for the university and, with their decline, has led to difficulty in justifying and legitimating the postmodern university vis-à-vis government funding. (5)</blockquote>
<p>Berry therefore indicates that this turn towards computationality is the result of an emerging need to demonstrate the relevance of the university structure to processes of knowledge production, therefore reiterating the ‘crisis’ argument. The notion of the postmodern university has been examined in detail by Bill Readings, who Berry quotes in his paper. Readings (1997) is sceptical of the term postmodern, preferring instead the idea of a post historical university, which is divested from the notion of the nation-state and further culture as a unifying idea, and is moving towards a notion of excellence that he sees as techno-bureaucratic, a result of several factors including globalisation and the fact that processes of knowledge production and institutionalisation are no longer centred around a liberal subject. If the demonstrated project of the university has changed, the emergence of such new discourse, and specifically concepts and terms such as the ‘alt – academy’ has relevance to how one may now imagine new spaces, objects, processes and figures of knowledge itself.</p>
<p>The significance of the university system to knowledge production has been a recurring point of much debate and discussion in India. Although not explicitly stated as a crisis in humanities by the people interviewed, there are problems of content, pedagogy, infrastructure, and vision that continue to plague higher education at large <strong>[16]</strong>, and very often technological fixes are seen as a solution to these, in some part due to the imagination of a techno-democracy as described in the introduction to this report. As Berry points out then, computationality is a promise, or possibility to do things differently, which is then also inherently assumed to be a way of doing things better. The computational possibilities of DH still need to be explored, but how much of these contribute qualitatively to addressing or even furthering certain disciplinary concerns, still remains an open question. As Jan and Sebastian point out from their experience of working on Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma, the computational aspects of the archives are still to be developed, as there are still restrictions in terms of speed and feasibility (see chapter on infrastructure <strong>[17]</strong>); the kind of new questions it produces for cinema studies at large will remain a contention. Further, as Padmini Ray Murray observes, drawing on archival material, or data to develop new computational hypotheses would be a direction to work towards, as not much work has been done in this respect in India (See chapter on archives <strong>[18]</strong>). The challenges with computationality then demand, as Berry argues, a more critical exploration of the term itself, and in fact can be extended to a critical analysis of the state of digitality more broadly.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Final Notes</h2>
<p>The problems with the crisis in the humanities and the contribution of technology to these changes could be located to this change in what has traditionally been seen as the space of culture and reason, which has now moved on to something else, a notion of excellence in Readings’ example, thereby changing the questions at the centre as well. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field. At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of humanities practice have been brought to the foreground, but have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come. Some of the questions or points or focus that open up are as follows:</p>
<ol><li>The role of extra-institutional/non-academic or alternate spaces in humanities practice, and in producing and creating new kinds of knowledge.</li>
<li>The increased visibility of new objects and methods within informal and marginal spaces of knowledge production. This demands different, and often innovative methods of enquiry, and whether they alter disciplinary modes of humanities practice and research.</li>
<li>The notion of a moving away from established modes of humanities practice, research and scholarship (therefore the question of a ‘crisis’) which would open up a larger debate around the authority of knowledge.</li>
<li>The ontological and epistemological stake of DH, in short the kinds of new questions it enables us to ask.</li></ol>
<p>As important and visible as the idea of the alternate is in DH, it also presents the mainstream itself as fractured space that imbibes several contradictions of the practices in question, which cannot be confined to these watertight silos of formal/informal, academic or creative. Nevertheless, the mainstream spaces remain crucial for widening and deepening creative digital practice and research in arts and humanities disciplines, and will be the spaces to watch to understand the development of a substantive DH discourse in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> For more on this see: Nowviskie, Bethany, (Ed.) Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011, <a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars">http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars</a>, last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> The largest and most ambitious has been the Ministry of Human Resources and Development’s National Mission in Education through ICT programme (NMEICT), started in 2009. See: http://mhrd.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-0 Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> To stay with the example of the NMEICT, an evaluation of the programme pointed out several challenges to technology-enabled learning, namely in the areas of connectivity, content, and pedagogy. See <a href="http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf">http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more see this position paper by the NCERT on education technology in India: <a href="http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf">http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See an evaluation report on the programme by Tory Read: <a href="http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/">http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59">http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> For more on these projects see: <a href="http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87">http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: Spector, J. Michael. <em>Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives</em>. New York: Routledge, 2015; and Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) <em>Opening up Education</em>. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf">https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf</a>. Also see: <a href="http://ciet.nic.in/">http://ciet.nic.in/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.academia.edu/">https://www.academia.edu/</a> and <a href="http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/">http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/</a>. Last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html">http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities">http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script">http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script</a>. Last accessed December 12, 2015</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/texts">http://pad.ma/texts</a> Last accessed December 12, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sparrowonline.org/">http://www.sparrowonline.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> See the report of 'The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education: by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development: <a href="http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf">http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf</a>; and Roy, Kum Kum, "Decoding 'New Education Policy,'" <em>Economic and Political Weekly</em>, Vol. 50, Issue No. 19, May 09, 2015, <a href="http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html">http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html</a>, last accessed December 23, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[18]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn." <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2012 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440. Last Accessed April 12, 2016.</p>
<p>Davidson, Cathy N and David Theo. Goldberg. <em>The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age</em>. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.</p>
<p>Iiyoshi, Toru and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) <em>Opening up Education</em>. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.</p>
<p>Liang, Lawrence. "A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century." In <em>Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader</em>. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (Eds). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.</p>
<p>Readings, Bill. <em>The University in Ruins</em>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Saith, A, M. Vijayabaskar and V. Gayathri. <em>ICTs and Indian Social Change</em>. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008.</p>
<p>Spector, J. Michael. <em>Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives</em>. New York: Routledge, 2015.</p>
<p>Sundaram, Ravi. "Developmentalism Redux." In <em>Incommunicado Reader</em>. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (Eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T04:45:25ZBlog EntryRBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Summary
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-summary
<b>The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer-to-Peer Lending on April 28, 2016. The Paper proposes to bring the P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI’s regulation by defining P2P platforms as NBFCs under section 45I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act. Once notified as NBFCs, RBI can issue regulations under sections 45JA and 45L. The last date for submission of comments to the Consultation Paper is May 31, 2016. In this post, Pavishka Mittal presents a summary of the Paper.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>1.</strong> <a href="#1">Introduction</a></p>
<p><strong>2.</strong> <a href="#2">Crowdfunding and P2P Lending</a></p>
<p><strong>3.</strong> <a href="#3">Observations Made Regarding Current Practice of P2P Lending Companies</a></p>
<p><strong>4.</strong> <a href="#4">Types of Regulatory Regimes for P2P Lending Companies across the World</a></p>
<p><strong>5.</strong> <a href="#5">Arguments against Regulation</a></p>
<p><strong>6.</strong> <a href="#6">Arguments for Regulation</a></p>
<p><strong>7.</strong> <a href="#7">Proposed Regulatory Framework</a></p>
<p><strong>7.1.</strong> <a href="#7-1">Permitted Activity</a></p>
<p><strong>7.2.</strong> <a href="#7-2">Prudential Requirements</a></p>
<p><strong>7.3.</strong> <a href="#7-3">Governance Requirements</a></p>
<p><strong>7.4.</strong> <a href="#7-4">Business Continuity Plan (BCP)</a></p>
<p><strong>7.5.</strong> <a href="#7-5">Customer Interface</a></p>
<p><strong>7.6.</strong> <a href="#7-6">Reporting Requirements</a></p>
<p><strong>8.</strong> <a href="#8">Scope of RBI's Regulation</a></p>
<p><strong>9.</strong> <a href="#9">Endnotes</a></p>
<p><strong>10.</strong> <a href="#10">Author Profile</a></p>
<hr />
<h2 id="1">1. Introduction</h2>
<p>The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer-to-Peer Lending on April 28, 2016 <strong>[1]</strong>. The Paper notes that:</p>
<blockquote>Although nascent in India and not significant in value yet, the potential benefits that P2P lending promises to various stakeholders (to the borrowers, lenders, agencies etc.) and its associated risks to the financial system are too important to be ignored. The Reserve Bank (the Bank) has therefore found it necessary to put out this discussion paper to elicit public opinion and views of the various stakeholders on the future course of action having regard to the current legal and regulatory framework in place to regulate the business of financial intermediation.</blockquote>
<p>Here I present a summary of the Consultation Paper. The next post in this series will discuss in detail the different types of obligations that the Peer-to-Peer (henceforth, P2P) Lending Companies will have to satisfy if classified as Non-Bank Financial Companies, and other related issues.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="2">2. Crowdfunding and P2P Lending</h2>
<p>The Paper starts with discussing (and distinguishing) SEBI’s <em>Consultation Paper on Crowdfunding in India</em>, published on June 17, 2014, to avoid overlap of jurisdiction <strong>[2]</strong>. SEBI's paper classified crowdfunding initiatives in to:</p>
<ul><li><strong>Community Crowdfunding:</strong> 1) Social Lending, and 2) Reward Crowdfunding; and</li>
<li><strong>Financial Return Crowdfunding:</strong> 1) Peer-to-Peer Lending, and 2) Equity Crowdfunding.</li></ul>
<p>Traditionally, Start-ups are funded through private equity, angel investor or loan arrangements with a financial institution. Any offering of public equity takes place only after the product or business becomes commercially viable. However, in Equity based Crowdfunding solicitation is done at an earlier stage. It refers to fund raising by a business, particularly early-stage funding, through offering equity interests in the business to investors online through a crowdfunding platform website acting as the intermediary.</p>
<p>Though, P2P lending did not appear to involve securities, loan/notes/contracts can be traded on a P2P platform or a secondary market. Thus, these loans may become securities, with the contract between the lender and the borrower being the security note.</p>
<p>In summary, SEBI’s paper suggested that under Security Based Crowd funding, the possible routes that could be explored are the following:</p>
<ul><li><strong>Equity based Crowd Funding (EbC):</strong> Raising equity through a crowd funding platform.</li>
<li><strong>Debt Based Crowd Funding (DbC)</strong> Raising of funds by issuing debentures or debt securities through a crowd funding platform.</li>
<li><strong>Fund Based Crowd Funding (FbC):</strong> Raising of funds for pooling under an Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) through a crowd funding platform.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="3">3. Observations Made Regarding Current Practice of P2P Lending Companies</h2>
<ul><li>P2P lending is in relation to unsecured loans.</li>
<li>The borrowers and the lenders can be both natural and juristic persons.</li>
<li>The interest rate can range from a flat interest rate fixed by the platform to dynamic interest rates as agreed upon by the borrowers and the lenders to cost plus model (operational costs plus margin for platform and returns for lender).</li>
<li>The companies often follow a reverse auction model in which the lenders bid for a borrower’s loan proposal and the borrower has the freedom to either accept or reject the offer.</li>
<li>Borrowers are able to avail lower rates than those offered by money lenders/unorganized sector. Lenders can obtain higher returns than what conventional investment opportunities offer.</li>
<li>Some of these are involved in the business targeted at micro finance activities with the stated primary goal being social impact and providing easier access of credit to small entrepreneurs.</li>
<li>The borrowers pay an origination fee (either a flat rate fee or as a percentage of the loan amount raised) according to their risk category.</li>
<li>The lenders, depending on the terms of the platform, have to pay an administration fee and an additional fee if they choose to use any additional service (e.g. legal advice etc.), which the platform may provide.
</li><li>The platform provides the service of collecting loan repayments and doing preliminary assessment on the borrower’s creditworthiness.</li>
<li>The regulatory concerns in such cases would relate to KYC and recovery practices. Since all payments are through bank accounts, the KYC exercise can be deemed to have been carried out by the banks concerned. The platform facilitates collection of post-dated cheques from the borrower in the name of the lender as a proxy for repayment of the loan.</li>
<li>The platform does NOT profit from the difference in the deposit and the loan rates, as is the case with Banking Financial Institutions.</li>
<li>In summary, while crowd funding - equity, debt based and fund based- would fall under the purview of capital markets regulator (SEBI), P2P lending would fall within the domain of the RBI.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="4">4. Types of Regulatory Regimes for P2P Lending Companies across the World</h2>
<ul><li><strong>Complete Exemption / Non-regulation due to Lack of Definition:</strong> Regulations already in place to be applicable which protect the borrowers from unfair interest rates, unfair credit provision, and false advertising. Hence no further, or specific, regulation is undertaken.</li>
<li><strong>Intermediary Regulation:</strong> Registration required as an intermediary to enable it to access the market. Other rules and requirements determine how the platform should conduct its business (for example, the licensing needed to provide credit and/or financial services).</li>
<li><strong>Banking Regulation:</strong> To be applicable due to their credit intermediation functions. As such, the platforms must obtain a banking licence; fulfil disclosure requirements and other such regulations.</li>
<li><strong>US Model:</strong> Involves two levels of regulation, involving a central agency (SEC in this case) and state legislations.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="5">5. Arguments against Regulation</h2>
<p>The presence of regulation would lend credibility to P2P lending, attracting lenders with low awareness to these platforms who may not understand the risks involved specially in the context of susceptibility of these platforms to attract high risk borrowers. Regulation may stifle the growth of an innovative, efficient and accessible avenue for borrowers who either do not have access to formal financial channels or are denied loans by them. The market for P2P lending, currently in a nascent stage does not pose an immediate systemic risk nor any significant impact on monetary policy transmission mechanism.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="6">6. Arguments for Regulation</h2>
<ul><li>Considering the significance of the online industry and the impact which it can have on the traditional banking channels/NBFC sector, it would be prudent to regulate this emerging industry. Regulation would reduce its potential to disrupt the financial sector and throw surprises. As P2P lending promotes alternative forms of finance, where formal finance is unable to reach and also has the potential to soften the lending rates as a result of lower operational costs. Therefore, the importance of these methods of financing needs to be acknowledged. If the sector is left unregulated altogether, there is the risk of unhealthy practices being adopted by one or more players, which may have deleterious consequences.</li>
<li>Section 45S of RBI Act prohibits an individual or a firm or an unincorporated association of individuals from accepting deposits, if his or its business wholly or partly includes any of the activities specified in clause (c) of section 45-I (i.e. activities of a financial institution); or if his or its principal business is that of receiving of deposits under any scheme or arrangement or in any other manner, or lending in any manner. Contravention of Section 45S is an offence punishable under section 58B (5A) of RBI Act. As per the Act, ‘‘deposit’’ includes and shall be deemed always to have included any receipt of money by way of deposit or loan or in any other form, but does not include any amount received from an individual or a firm or an association of individuals not being a body corporate, registered under any enactment relating to money lending which is for the time being in force in any State. Since the borrowers and lenders brought together by a P2P platform could fall within these prohibitions, absence of regulation may lead to perpetrating an illegality.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="6">7. Proposed Regulatory Framework</h2>
<p>RBI concludes that a regulatory mechanism would facilitate the creation of an alternative avenue of credit. It proposes to bring the P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI's regulation by defining P2P platforms as NBFCs under section 45I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act by issuing a notification in consultation with the Government of India. After the notification, RBI can issue directions under sections 45JA and 45L of RBI Act to such platforms regarding registration requirements and prudential norms. Below are the features of the proposed regulation.</p>
<h3 id="7-1">7.1. Permitted Activity</h3>
<p>Considering the present stage of development, the platform could be registered only as an intermediary. i.e. the borrowing and the lending activity could not be reflected on the Balance Sheet. The platform will be required to ensure that section 45S of the RBI Act is not attracted by its activities. The platforms will be prohibited from giving any assured return either directly or indirectly. The platforms will be allowed to opine on the suitability of a lender and creditworthiness of a borrower. Adequate regulations on advertisements will also be put in place. It will also be mandated that funds will have to necessarily move directly from the lender’s bank account to the borrower’s bank account to obviate the threat of money laundering. The guidelines would also prohibit the platforms being used for any cross-border transaction in view of FEMA provisions relating to transactions between residents and non-residents.</p>
<h3 id="7-2">7.2. Prudential Requirements</h3>
<p>The prudential requirements will include a minimum capital of Rs 2 crore. With a view to ensure that there is enough skin in the game at a later date, leverage ratio may be prescribed so that the platforms do not expand with indiscriminate leverage. Given that the lenders may include uninformed individuals, prudential limits on maximum contribution by a lender to a borrower/segment of activity could also be specified.</p>
<h3 id="7-3">7.3. Governance Requirements</h3>
<p>The guidelines in this regard will include fit and proper criteria for promoters, directors and CEO. A reasonable proportion of board members having financial sector background could be suggested. The guidelines may also require the P2P lender to have a brick and mortar place of business in India. The management and operational personnel of the platform would need to be stationed within the country.</p>
<h3 id="7-4">7.4. Business Continuity Plan (BCP)</h3>
<p>The platforms need to put in place adequate risk management systems for its smooth operations. BCP and back up for the data needs to be put in place since the platform also acts as a custodian of the agreements/cheques etc. In case of failure of the platform to continue its operations, it should have a ‘living will’ or alternative arrangement in the form of an agreement for continuation of its operations.</p>
<h3 id="7-5">7.5. Customer Interface</h3>
<p>Most of the platforms operating in India provide a credit score for the borrowers using their customized algorithms. Confidentiality of the customer data and data security would be the responsibility of the Platform. Transparency in operations, adequate measures for data confidentiality and minimum disclosures to borrowers and lenders would also be mandated through a fair practices code. The current regulations applicable to other NBFCs will be made applicable to the P2P platforms in regard to recovery practice. The operators would also be mandated to have a proper grievance redress mechanism to deal with complaints from both lenders and borrowers and require reporting to the Board.</p>
<h3 id="7-6">7.6. Reporting Requirements</h3>
<p>In order to assist monitoring, the platforms will need to submit regular reports on their financial position, loans arranged each quarter, complaints etc. to the Reserve Bank. The Bank may come out with a detailed reporting requirement.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="8">8. Scope of RBI's Regulation</h2>
<p>It may be noted here that RBI has powers to regulate entities which are in the form of companies or cooperative societies. However, if the P2P platforms are run by individuals, proprietorship, partnership or Limited Liability Partnerships, it would not fall under the purview of RBI. Hence, it is essential that P2P platforms adopt company structure. The notification can therefore specify that no entity other than a company can undertake this activity. This will render such services provided under any other organisational structure illegal. Alternatively, the other forms of structure may be regulated by the State Governments.</p>
<p>Comments are sought on following aspects of this discussion paper:</p>
<ul><li>Whether there is a felt need for regulating P2P lending platforms?</li>
<li>Is the assessment of P2P lending and risks associated with it adequate?</li>
<li>Are there any other risks which ought to be addressed?</li>
<li>Is the proposed approach to regulating these platforms adequate?</li>
<li>Any other relevant issues pertaining to P2P lending.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="9">9. Endnotes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3164">https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3164</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sebi.gov.in/cms/sebi_data/attachdocs/1403005615257.pdf">http://www.sebi.gov.in/cms/sebi_data/attachdocs/1403005615257.pdf</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="10">10. Author Profile</h2>
<p>Pavishka Mittal is a law student at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata and has completed her second year. She takes contemporary dance very seriously and hopes to contribute to the dance
community in India. Other than dancing, she indulges in binge-watching in her spare time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-summary'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-summary</a>
</p>
No publisherPavishka MittalSharing EconomyReserve Bank of IndiaResearchNetwork EconomiesP2P LendingResearchers at Work2016-05-18T12:12:23ZBlog EntryCall for Proposal: Big Data for Development – Initial Field Studies
http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/call-for-proposal-big-data-for-development-field-studies
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society, as part of a project with the University of Manchester and University of Sheffield, is inviting calls from researchers to undertake a brief initial study of a specific instance of use of big data for development in India. This is an exercise to build preliminary understanding of the landscape of big data for development in India, identify key research questions and priorities, and start developing connections with researchers interested in the field. The studies will be 6 weeks long - running from May to June 2016 - and the researchers are expected to produce a 3,000 words long report. We will support three field studies.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Study Process and Deliverable</h3>
<p>The researcher is expected to propose and undertake a 6 weeks long study – starting from <strong>May 09</strong> and ending on <strong>June 17</strong> – of an instance of big data is being used to inform, target, operationalise, monitor, or support developmental and/or humanitarian activity in India.</p>
<p>During this period, the researcher is expected to interview <strong>4-5</strong> persons directly involved in the big data for development project concerned, and <strong>2-3</strong> other persons to get a wider sense of the context of the project.</p>
<p>By the end of the 6 weeks period, the researcher is expected to submit a <strong>3,000 words</strong> long report. The report will be commented upon by Prof. Richard Heeks (University of Manchester), Dr. Christopher Foster (University of Sheffield), and Sumandro Chattapadhyay (CIS), and revised accordingly during the last weeks of June.</p>
<p>The individual reports will be published independently and as part of the larger project report, under Creative Commons <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Attribution 4.0 International</a> license. The authors will be attributed appropriately.</p>
<p>All researchers will take part in a work-in-progress meeting (held over internet) during last week of May or first week of June.</p>
<h3>Research Questions</h3>
<p>The interviews will focus on the following topics:</p>
<ul><li><strong>Innovation:</strong> What is the nature of the innovation being done by the use of big data? What technical systems and/or applications are being deployed and replaced/superceded? Who are key actors in this innovation process?</li>
<li><strong>Implementation:</strong> What is the grounded experience of implementing the big data technology? What are the key enablers and constraints being faced, both in the data collection stage, and the analysis and decision making stage?</li>
<li><strong>Value:</strong> What is the value being created, and how is it understood? Is it organisational value, or socio-economic value? Who is gaining this value?</li>
<li><strong>Ethics:</strong> What ethical concerns are emerging? Do they involve concerns about data quality, representation, privacy, or security? Is there concerns about a data divide being created among people who are represented in data and who are not, or among people who can gain value from the data and who cannot?</li></ul>
<h3>Application, Eligibility, and Remuneration</h3>
<p>Please submit the following documents to apply:</p>
<ul><li><strong>Proposal:</strong> A one page note on the big data for development project that you would like to study. Please share a brief description of the project and how you will study it, including the name/designation of key people you will speak to.</li>
<li><strong>Writing Sample:</strong> An article or a collection of articles, of not more than 8,000 words length in total.</li>
<li><strong>CV:</strong> A short CV, two pages or less.</li></ul>
<p>Please e-mail the documents to <strong>raw[at]cis-india[dot]org</strong> by <strong>Wednesday, May 04</strong>, 2016.</p>
<p>There is <strong>no eligibility criteria</strong> for submitting proposals. However, we will prioritise researchers living and studying big data for development projects in <strong>non <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_cities">X-class</a> cities</strong>, that is in cities other than Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Pune.</p>
<p>We will select <strong>three</strong> researchers, and will offer <strong>Rs. 35,000</strong> to each of them for this study. The amount will be paid in a <strong>single</strong> installment, <strong>after</strong> the draft field study report is submitted for comments.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/call-for-proposal-big-data-for-development-field-studies'>http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/call-for-proposal-big-data-for-development-field-studies</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroBig DataData SystemsBig Data for DevelopmentResearchResearchers at Work2016-04-28T07:28:23ZBlog EntryBuying into the Aakash Dream - A Tablet’s Tale of Mass Education
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/buying-into-the-aakash-dream
<b>The low-cost Aakash tablet and its previous iterations in India have gone through several phases of technological changes and ideological experiments. Did the government prioritise familiarity and literacy about personal technological devices over the promise of quality mass education generated by low-cost devices? This article by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey (India Institute, King's College London) was published by EPW in the Web Exclusive section. Here is the unabridged version of the article.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>Originally published by <a href="http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/17/web-exclusives/buying-aakash-dream.html">Economic and Political Weekly</a> on April 23, 2016. Below is the unabridged version.</p>
<hr />
<em>This research note is based on a project conducted as part of the Max Weber Foundation’s Transnational Research Group on "Poverty and Education in India," and draws from a paper recently published by the authors in History and Technology.</em>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>The Aakash tablet, hailed as the vanguard of India's “tablet revolution,” was unveiled at the United Nations. It was to showcase India's technological prowess but was quickly lamented as a failed “dream,” and as India's “object lesson” in how not to do technological innovation. The so-called failure of the device became a metonym for the government that backed it, and for the technology establishment of the country. While our longer paper <strong>[1]</strong> questions this notion of “failure,” in this note we wish to highlight the role played by the discourse and experiments in technologies of mass education in creating the practical context and the market conditions for low-cost tablets in India.</p>
<p>A 2011 report by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) claimed that although the initiation of the Aakash tablet project met with “skepticism and scorn,” over time it not only developed an affordable device aimed at students in India, but has produced an entirely new market niche of sub-100 USD tablets <strong>[2]</strong>. This ambitious statement appears to be vindicated by a recent report by IDC, an economic intelligence company, on the tablet market in India. The report notes that the market has grown in the previous year at an annual rate of 8.2%. More importantly, the two companies leading in market share are DataWind (20.7%) and Samsung (15.8%) <strong>[3]</strong>. Incidentally, after the first quarter of 2014, Samsung had the largest (22.5%) and DataWind the fourth largest (6.8%) share <strong>[4]</strong>. What is noteworthy here is not the rise of DataWind as the leading seller of tablets alone, but that it is MHRD that heralded this creation of a market niche in India for affordable tablets.</p>
<h3>Broadcasting Education: Satellite to Internet</h3>
<p>On May 30, 1974, American National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) launched an ATS-6 satellite that formed the central infrastructural component of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), one of the early initiatives to harness communication technology for primary and adult education. The SITE project involved broadcasting educational and informational audio-visual content, produced by All India Radio and Television, directly to televisions across 2400 selected villages located in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Rajasthan. Operating from August 01, 1975 to July 31, 1976, the Experiment was led by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), and was supported by UNESCO, UNDP, UNCF, and International Telecommunication Union <strong>[5]</strong>.</p>
<p>The objective of the SITE project was inspired directly by the importance given to skill-development oriented higher education and adult education in the report of the first Education Commission (1964–1966). However, as Asif Siddiqi notes in a recent publication, the project performed a crucial task of establishing the Indian space research programme through a direct alliance with NASA, which held special geopolitical significance given the Chinese nuclear tests of 1964 <strong>[6]</strong>.</p>
<p>This experiment paved the way for development of INSAT, the first Indian satellite. The entanglement of the Indian space programme with the idea of national-level technological infrastructure for education has continued since. The EDUSAT, launched in 2004, was a collaborative project between ISRO and MHRD to drive satellite-based education across disadvantaged and remote regions of the country. In an audit report in 2013, however, the Department of Space declared that the project has failed, and highlighted three lacks in particular: network connectivity, content generation, and management structure <strong>[7]</strong>.</p>
<p>The earliest initiatives in India to put computers in schools, supplementing and supplanting the television screens, began in the 1980s. These efforts pre-dated extensive terrestrial communication fiber networks and relied almost completely upon the success of the Indian space programme. The UGC Countrywide Classroom, Computer Literacy and Studies in Schools, and Computer Literacy and Awareness Programme are the key examples from this time. The revised Programme of Action of the National Policy on Education (1986) reiterated the need for increased attention to upgrading education technology infrastructure, as well as the development of electronic content for the same. This led to the initiation of the ICT@Schools scheme beginning with the eighth Five Year Plan (1993-1998). Even after twenty years of the introduction of computers in schools across India, a 2006 report on education technology by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) noted that computer-based teaching and learning in an actual classroom setting remains more of a 'spectator sport' <strong>[8]</strong>.</p>
<p>With the advent of the internet, the MHRD started experimenting with internet-based delivery of distance education from 2003, beginning with the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). It did so alongside satellite-based distribution of educational content. NPTEL involved five Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, and Madras) developing openly available course materials for more than one hundred undergraduate courses in five engineering subjects, as well as courses in basic science. These course materials were later made part of the online learning portal called 'Sakshat,' which eventually became one of the pillars of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT), initiated during the 11th Five Year Plan (2007–2012). This portal marked the completion of a conceptual and technological shift from the satellite-based models of delivery of educational content, to an internet-based one.</p>
<h3>Making and Un-making of the Aakash Tablet</h3>
<p>With NMEICT, large-scale education technology initiatives of the Indian state moved away from the earlier emphasis on primary education and school-oriented computer literacy, to that on higher education and aids for self-learning. The plan for an affordable tablet computer was announced in mid-2010 as part of this Mission. This “low-cost access-cum-computing device” was aimed at bypassing the institutional, bureaucratic, and infrastructural barriers to access to quality higher education. It’s main audience were students in disadvantaged regions and non-elite institutions, as well as self-learners. The actualisation the device, however, were continuously delayed and blocked by conflicts between the governmental and non-governmental actors, strong skepticism from the media, and several changes in the state's approach to the project.</p>
<p>The first approach to the project was an international company that approached the MHRD in 2006, with a proposal to sell educational laptops for school students at 100 USD each. N.K. Sinha, then Mission Director of NMEICT, argued against the purchase. The MHRD saw this as an opportunity for developing an indigenous low-cost computer, and initiated a competition among the IITs to come up with a prototype for this device, which was won by the IIT Kanpur team led by Prof. Prem Kumar Kalra, then Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering. The first publicly exhibited (2010) prototype of the device was the one developed in IIT Kanpur, which was priced initially at 35 USD.</p>
<p>The MHRD, however, soon decided to buy the device from a commercial manufacturer. The responsibility of procurement and testing went to IIT Rajasthan, under the leadership of Prof. Kalra who joined the newly established institution as its first Director. After the contract with HCL Infosystems was called off in January 2011, DataWind, a Canada and UK based company specialising in internet-access devices, won the new tender to produce the first version of the device. On 5 October 2011, the first version of tablet was launched, priced at Rs 2,500, and co-branded as Aakash and Ubislate: respectively for those bought and redistributed at a subsidised rate by MHRD, and those sold commercially by DataWind <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p>An early controversy about the tablet, apart from its technical capabilities, was around the claim that they were produced and assembled in China. DataWind rejected the allegations and claimed that all the devices were assembled by Quad Electronics in its factory in Secunderabad, (then Andhra Pradesh). Within a year, however, DataWind got involved in serious conflict with IIT Rajasthan on one hand, and Quad Electronics on the other. The MHRD intervened again to change the approach by bringing in IIT Bombay (March 2012) as the new procuring and testing agency, thus removing IIT Rajasthan from the project. DataWind also found a new partner in VMC Systems, who started assembling the “kits” imported from China in its establishments in Amritsar and Delhi.</p>
<p>With M. M. Pallam Raju becoming the Minister of Human Resource Development in late 2012 by succeeding Kapil Sibal, one might say, the Aakash project gradually moved to what we know as its final form. At first, it was suggested that the state should entirely move out of the business of providing low-cost tablets as there is already a vibrant market. Later on, and with thought leadership from Prof. Rajat Moona, Director General of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, and others, it was decided that “Aakash” would become a brand name available for commercial manufacturers of affordable tablets that satisfy a minimum set of technical specifications <strong>[10]</strong>. The first draft of the specifications list was published in June 2013. The tendering process, however, got delayed, and eventually came to a near-permanent pause with the General Elections in 2014.</p>
<p>As of November 2015, the MHRD has again shown interest in the idea of a state-subsidised tablet computer for education. The tablet was now called Udaan, and aimed at girl students at the higher secondary level, priced at Rs. 10,000 (against Rs. 2,500 of Aakash), and distributed only to 1,000 students.</p>
<h3>Government Dream and Device Desire</h3>
<p>In an interview in late 2013, Kapil Sibal (then Union Minister of Communication and Information Technology, former Union Minister of Human Resource Development) shared that "[the] Aakash tablet was [his] dream but it was not fulfilled" <strong>[11]</strong>. Sibal, undoubtedly the key political driver of the project, in his admission to failure, raises deep concerns about the present state and the future of the technological infrastructure - and the imagination - for mass education in the country.</p>
<p>Tracing the transition of these technologies from SITE to Aakash, we continously find it difficult to delineate the state’s transforming and transformative agenda of mass education from that of building technological capability. At times, though, we wondered if the agenda for mass education did not become one that served the purpose of generating, for lack of a better phrase, a certain familiarity and literacy about personal technological devices among the population. The motivations and goals that informed these mammoth projects become more and more difficult to decipher when we look at the relatively poor attention given to the production of content. Careful monitoring and documentation of how such content is being received and utilised by the actual learners and their educators was not prioritised; and whenever undertaken, such exercises revealed the deep lack of pedagogic concerns at the heart of these education technology programmes.</p>
<p>Alongside the overwhelming narrative of <em>failure</em>, however, we cannot ignore the remarkable, but quiet, success of the project in normalising and framing the tablet computer as familiar, and almost essential, object for personal learning and development. Apart from presenting the tablet computer as an everyday media object, almost similar to the way television entered the households, the NMEICT and the Aakash project played a crucial role in normalising the notion of online self-learning, and thus that of the <em>online</em>, in the Indian public imagination. In an insightful comment, Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of DataWind, remarked that the Aakash tablet was not an “iPad for the poor”, it was the “the computer and Internet of the masses” – it was not selling a demo version of the real thing, it was shaping the very imagination <strong>[12]</strong>.</p>
<p>These stories, together, conspire to make us wonder if all this eventually amounts to create desires for devices; and that the educational and developmental rhetoric helped frame electronic devices as everyday and household objects. The consequences, as we see, cannot exactly be called unintended.</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Phalkey, Jahnavi and Sumandro Chattapadhyay. "The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India." <em>History and Technology</em>, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2015. <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142">http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. The History of Aakash
Low Cost Access cum Computing Device. Sakshat, October 05, 2011. <a href="http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf">http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> International Data Corporation. "India Tablet Market Posts 8.2 percentage Annual Growth in 2015." March 21 (2016). <a href="http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAP41123816">http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAP41123816</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> Press Trust of India. "Tablet Market in India Shrank 32 Percent in Q1 2014 on YoY Basis: IDC." Gadgets 360, NDTV. May 28, 2014. <a href="http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/tablet-market-in-india-shrank-32-percent-in-q1-2014-on-yoy-basis-idc-532253">http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/tablet-market-in-india-shrank-32-percent-in-q1-2014-on-yoy-basis-idc-532253</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Chander, Romesh, and Kiran Karnik. <em>Planning for Satellite Broadcasting: The Indian
Instructional Television Experiment</em>. Paris: The Unesco Press, 1976.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Siddiqi, Asif. "Making Space for the Nation: Satellite Television, Indian Scientific Elites, and the Cold War." <em>Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East</em>, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2015: 35–49./p></p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Department of Space. Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Government of India. Report
No. 22 of 2013 - Compliance Audit on Union Government (Scientific and Environmental Ministries/ Departments). New Delhi: Government of India, 2013: 23–53.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> National Council of Educational Research and Training. <em>Position Paper of National Focus
Group on Educational Technology</em>. Government of India, New Delhi, 2006, 6.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Press Information Bureau, Government of India. 2011. “Shri Kapil Sibal Launches ‘Aakash’,
Low Cost Access Device.” Press Information Bureau, October 05. <a href="http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=76476">http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=76476</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> Agarwal, Surabhi. 2013. “Govt Plans to License ‘Brand Aakash.’” Business Standard, June 19.
<a href="http://www.businessstandard.com/article/technology/govtplanstolicensebrandaakash
113061800902_1.html">http://www.businessstandard.com/article/technology/govtplanstolicensebrandaakash
113061800902_1.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> Press Trust of India. "Kapil Sibal: Aakash Tablet is My Unfulfilled Dream." Financial Express, December 24, 2013. <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapilsibalaakashtabletismyunfulfilleddream/1211284/0">http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapilsibalaakashtabletismyunfulfilleddream/1211284/0</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Kurup, Saira. 2011. “We Want to Target the Billion Indians who are Cut off.” Times of India, October 09. <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/stoi/deepfocus/WewanttotargetthebillionIndianswhoarecutoff/articleshow/10284832.cms">http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/stoi/deepfocus/WewanttotargetthebillionIndianswhoarecutoff/articleshow/10284832.cms</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/buying-into-the-aakash-dream'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/buying-into-the-aakash-dream</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroAakashResearchEducation TechnologyInternet HistoriesResearchers at Work2016-04-25T08:04:28ZBlog EntryStudying Digital Creative Industries in India: Initial Questions
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions
<b>This brief overview of the discourse around creative industries is an attempt to explore some ways of identifying what could be digital creative industries in India, and the questions they raise and problematize for us in terms of cultural expression, knowledge production, creativity and labour. The term ‘creative industries’ has been around for a while now, but with the advent of the digital, and with interest from different sectors, especially with a focus on policy and economic development, it would be essential to critically examine the discourse around the term, and see where it may be changing to open up new possibilities, particularly for the arts, humanities and design.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>The term ‘creative industries’ has been popular for more than two decades now, and continues to remain an important sector for research and development, as indicated by several shifts in policy and public discourse in the last few years. A significant move has been the foregrounding of creativity and knowledge as important resources for economic growth and social well–being. The term has a connection with the older and more specific term ‘cultural industries’, with its origins in the Frankfurt School <strong>[1]</strong> of theory, but has developed as part of a larger discourse around the creative economy/knowledge economy. First used in Australia in 1994 as part of a report titled Creative Nation <strong>[2]</strong>, it became more widely recognized in the following years with the setting up of the Creative Industries Task Force by the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 1997.The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) <strong>[3]</strong> was perhaps the most prominent global effort in recognizing and taking steps towards fostering the growth of creativity and cultural production as part of sustainable development.</p>
<p>Following this there have been several other initiatives across the world, most noticeably in the Anglo-American context, that have built upon this framework to ease and facilitate cross-cultural flows and diversity in the circulation of information, labour and goods. Increasingly, the attempt now is to understand the relevance of these efforts in the digital age, where several advancements in technology and the ubiquitous presence of the internet continue to determine the creation, circulation and consumption of cultural commodities. This blog post is an attempt to outline some initial thoughts on what could be the possibilities of studying ‘digital’ creative industries in India. The digital is an inherent aspect of much cultural and creative expression today, given the steady transition from analogue to digital and the increased presence of internet in almost every domain. What would constitute creative digital industries in the present moment, how do they determine the larger course of cultural production, and pose new questions for labour, commodities, creativity and technology more broadly are some of the questions explored here.</p>
<p>According to the UN Creative Economy Report 2010 <strong>[4]</strong> the creative industries:</p>
<ul>
<li>are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs;</li>
<li>constitute a set of knowledge-based activities, focused on but not limited to arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights;</li>
<li>comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives;</li>
<li>stand at the crossroads of the artisan, services and industrial sectors; and</li>
<li>constitute a new dynamic sector in world trade.</li></ul>
<p>As the report mentions, these are ‘evolving’ concepts and definitions, and just the number of areas that can come within the purview of the creative industries has increased greatly in the last decade. The report classifies creative industries under four different models as illustrated here:</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/CIS-RAW_CreativeIndustriesClassification_CER2010.png" alt="Classification of creative industries." />
<h6>Source: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">UN Creative Economy Report 2010</a>.</h6>
<p> </p>
<h3>Creative Industries in India</h3>
<p>In India, there has been a keen interest in the potential of creativity as a resource, although creative industries may not be a popularly used term. From a policy perspective it is largely in terms of opportunities for economic growth, and more recently the potential for innovation and entrepreneurship, as seen in the Niti Aayog report presented in 2015 <strong>[5]</strong>, which says that:</p>
<blockquote>the committee proposes using digital platforms to encourage innovation, reforming the educational system to encourage creativity and upskilling workers to make them more employable, improving the ease of doing business, and strengthening intellectual property rights. Finally, the committee also proposes a number of measures to change cultural biases and attitudes towards entrepreneurship in the long-term, including attaching entrepreneurship to large scale economic and social programs, promoting new high-potential sectors via the government’s “Make in India” campaign, fostering a culture of coordination and collaboration, attempting to redefine cultural notions of success, and tying entrepreneurship with the social inclusion agenda.</blockquote>
<p>The report therefore reflects an interest in harnessing creativity or creative labour as a significant factor in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and in some sense also expanding the scope of such entrepreneurship by tying it with social inclusion and encouraging collaboration. What this also has implications then is for educational reform, capacity-building and upskilling for increased employability and better livelihoods, something that requires a systemic and focused effort spread over time. The report also explicitly speaks of strengthening an existing intellectual property regime, which also has been a rather dominant framework for the creative industries discourse from a policy perspective. While there is a need to focus on growth and innovation, a perceived objective of IP, the easy conflation of the two is problematic. Further, the role of IPR in fostering innovation and socio-economic development, as reflected in the draft National IPR policy (2014) <strong>[6]</strong> is contentious, as responses to the draft have pointed out <strong>[7]</strong>. It would also be imperative to understand better the ‘cultural notions of success’ and how these would also impact the creative industries discourse in India.</p>
<p>As part of a large research initiative titled <em>Culture: Industries and Diversity in Asia</em> (CIDASIA) <strong>[8]</strong> spread over two years, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Bangalore worked on some of the pertinent questions that emerged out of the creative industries discourse in India and the sub-continent. In a report produced as part of this initiative creative industries are described as:</p>
<blockquote>[T]he vast sector that has emerged with the arrival of modern technologies (emphasis as in the original) and forms of mass reproduction since the colonial period. This sector has now become an important site of intervention for both governments such as in UK, Australia and India and international agencies such as the United Nations.</blockquote>
<p>Further, about the programme the report says:</p>
<blockquote>The initiative attempts to assess the viability of international and government policies for cultural and creative industries and thus lay the groundwork for a hitherto unprecedented intervention of philanthropic organizations in the domain. We specifically focus on culture industries through the node of ‘livelihoods’ that we see as inextricably tied to this sector.</blockquote>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>There were several learnings from these initiatives about the nature of creative industries (audio-visual media including film and television), the conflation and overlap with culture industries (including craft and legacy industries) and the complex relationship between the two, and how the latter benefits from the first. The question of livelihoods, particularly those of non-citizens, or the migrant is an important one, for it highlights the cultural visibility of these industries, and more importantly establishes the presence of an underground economy that produces goods of high economic value, using cheap labour. Policy reforms, especially with respect to IPR and any regulation of these industries would need to take into account these features. The convergence of difference forms of cultural production with the growth of new media technologies, in particular is a pertinent question. Along with growing concerns around piracy, growth of new kinds of content, exclusivity and distribution become important factors here. The availability of capital and technology, and a growing global presence has also changed dramatically the nature of several creative industries, such as media, entertainment and advertising, but also brought with it challenges of finding creative and sustainable business models <strong>[9]</strong>. The problem of cultural impenetrability, or the difficulty of certain commodities to find a market in certain countries was also brought up as part of a study on the Korean wave in India. The translation of cultural worth into economic value, here studied through an examination of the cinema as cultural object, produced interesting observations in addressing the commodification of these objects and understanding the problem of value in this context <strong>[10]</strong>. The role of technology in the growth of the creative industries was an inherent aspect of all these studies, with factors such as context, conditions and quality of access, and the need to understand the problem of the 'last mile' as a conceptual and cultural problem, rather than a technological one, being emphasized in these findings <strong>[11]</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Creative Labour?</h3>
<p>The importance of the question of livelihood to the growth in culture industries remains even today, as they are a source of employment for a vast section of society, mostly in rural areas, and often fall into what is called the unorganized sector. Low capital investment and the disputable legality of many of these industries however, make this connection a complicated one, as pointed out by the CIDASIA research. The study also critiqued existing models of creative and cultural industries which emphasized copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) as safeguards of livelihood and identity, a rather contentious connection given the presence of a large underground economy based on creative labour, which is also often migrant in nature. Other initiatives in the programme included a consultation to rethink the existing debates around cultural policy and diversity, with a focus on the rights of marginalized people, rights in the domain of mass culture, copyright and IPR. Diminishing spaces for cultural or political-artistic performances, and the role of creative cities in fostering such spaces was another area of concern.</p>
<p>In the last decade alone, the internet and digital technologies have grown at an exponential pace in India. Creative industries have been driven greatly by advancements in technology, and the role of the digital here then becomes an important aspect of the discourse, in terms of either a space, object or context. The term itself has drawn different kinds of criticism, beginning with the juxtaposition of creativity and industry, or the ‘economisation of culture’, as another product of contemporary capitalism, a critique that stems from the Frankfurt School. The problems are several, as outlined here by Andrew Ross <strong>[12]</strong>:</p>
<blockquote>It may be too early to predict the ultimate fate of the paradigm. But sceptics have already prepared the way for its demise:: it will not generate jobs; it is a recipe for magnifying patterns of class polarisation; its function as a cover for the corporate intellectual property (IP) grab will become all too apparent; its urban development focus will price out the very creatives on whose labour it depends; its reliance on self-promoting rhetoric runs far in advance of its proven impact; its cookie-cutter approach to economic development does violence to regional specificity; its adoption of an instrumental value of creativity will cheapen the true worth of artistic creation.2 Still others are inclined simply to see the new policy rubric as ‘old wine in new bottles’ – a glib production of spin-happy New Labourites, hot for naked marketization but mindful of the need for socially acceptable dress. For those who take a longer, more orthodox Marxist view, the turn toward creative industries is surely a further symptom of an accumulation regime at the end of its effective rule, spent as a productive force, awash in financial speculation, and obsessed with imagery, rhetoric and display.</blockquote>
<p>Similar concerns may be highlighted in the Indian context as well, where the employability of many in creative fields of work, which often fall under the informal or unorganized sector, has always been fraught with uncertainty. The access to cultural and social capital also defines the discourse in a certain manner, as largely urban-centric and focused around a particular class. Education, training and capacity-building efforts in creative fields, and access to these are an important factor that requires further exploration. As reflected in the discussions above, the prevalent imagination of cultural and creative industries still focusses on IPR and socio-economic development of certain sectors of the knowledge economy, therefore making invisible other kinds of labour. The appropriation of the term itself to focus on innovation in certain sectors, at the cost of others, and streamlining and regulation of these in some way would be another aspect of concern. More importantly, the definition of creativity, as beyond skilling for certain kinds of work also needs to be emphasized in these discussions.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Key Questions</h3>
<p>Whether these are still pertinent criticisms now is a question, and more importantly, what would be new ways to frame the creative industries debate today would be a relevant starting point of engagement. The following are some questions that could be useful in mapping the creative industries discourse and how it could be thought about today, post the digital turn:</p>
<ol><li>What are digital creative industries? Is it possible to identify a smaller subset of industries that would come within the purview of this term, or is it another entry point into the creative industries discourse in India, where the digital is all pervasive? What are new kinds of creative industries that are heavily and/or purely reliant on the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Does the digital add a new perspective/dimension to how we theorise the notion of creative labour, because of the manner in which it affects, or determines creative expressions in the present, on the internet and more broadly in the digital? More importantly, do we need to critically think about a definition of creativity itself, today within the digital context? How do we then understand questions of precarity in working conditions, innovation and entrepreneurship in this space?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Who is the creative subject? Is it possible to understand such a subject outside of the very Eurocentric discourse around creativity and ‘creation’, which paints the creator as hegemonic in some sense? Another new way to reframe the livelihoods question is to understand the creative worker/knowledge worker, and how to think of these distinctions. What are the new ways to understand this debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>The discourse around creative industries has largely been framed within the context of the intellectual property rights, and as a method to ensure the stability of the IPR regime. Given the changes, and many nuances to the IPR debates in the last few years, and the growth of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement, it would be useful to understand the growth of creative digital industries in this context.<br /><br /></li>
<li>What does this tell us about a growing digital economy in India? Creative industries would raise interesting questions about the fostering of a digital economy in India, and the many ways in which it determines cultural production in the rest of the world.<br /><br /></li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,' 1944. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm">https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994">http://apo.org.au/resource/creative-nation-commonwealth-cultural-policy-october-1994</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html">http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf">http://unctad.org/en/Docs/ditctab20103_en.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf">http://niti.gov.in/mgov_file/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf">http://dipp.nic.in/English/Schemes/Intellectual_Property_Rights/IPR_Policy_24December2014.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> For more on this see: 'Comments on the First Draft Of The National IPR Policy' submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society, 2015 <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments_first-draft-of-national-ipr-stategy.pdf</a>, and 'SpicyIP Tidbit: New IPR Policy in 2 months' by Balaji Subramanian, SpicyIP, October 2015, <a href="http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html">http://spicyip.com/2015/10/spicyip-tidbit-new-ipr-policy-in-2-months.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1">http://cscs.res.in/irps/cidasia-1</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> S. Ananth, 'Business of Culture in India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-12-18.9970782136</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong>'When The Host Arrived: A Report on the Problems and Prospects for the Exchange of Popular Cultural Commodities with India,' 2008. <a href="http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file">http://cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2009-07-17.9853066637/file</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong>Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 'The Last Cultural Mile' (Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society, 2011) <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old">http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Andrew Ross, 'Nice Work of You Can get it: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy,' in <em>MyCreativity Reader</em>. Eds. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-digital-creative-industries-in-india-initial-questions</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital EconomyDigital KnowledgeResearchCreative IndustriesResearchers at Work2016-03-18T13:55:56ZBlog EntryThe Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India (Excerpt)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-education-in-india-excerpt
<b>In a recently published paper, Jahnavi Phalkey and Sumandro Chattapadhyay explore public initiatives in technological solutions for educating the poor and the disadvantaged in independent India. Here is an edited excerpt from the paper that traces the recent history of technological solutions for mass education and unpacking the narrative of ‘failure’ that is associated with the Aakash experiment.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/2016.02.14_s-campion-aakash.jpg" alt="Students using <p>Aakash tablet, Anupshahr, Uttar Pradesh. Photograph by Sonali Campion." /></p>
<h6>Students at Pardada Pardadi Education Society in Anupshahr, Uttar Pradesh, use the Aakash tablet in class as part of a pilot project introducing the low-cost computer into rural schools. Photograph by Sonali Campion, April 09, 2013: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonalicampion/9449250639/">https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonalicampion/9449250639/</a>.</h6>
<p> </p>
In 2010, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India launched a set of prototype devices of an affordable tablet computer, the development and production of which were to be supported by the Ministry as part of its larger ICTs for education project. This device later came to be known as the “Aakash” tablet, and the project went through several iterations, between 2010 and 2014, of not only technological re-designs, but also institutional arrangements to design, develop, manufacture, test, and procure the devices.
<p> </p>
<h2>Technological Solutions for Mass Education</h2>
<p>Our exploration of technological solutions for mass education in India has taken us through a not-so-linear history of projects that have informed the imagination and making of the Aakash project. This include the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, or SITE (1975); University Grants Commission-led Countrywide Classroom project (1984 -); the Simputer, the first hand-held device developed in India (1998); the Hole in the Wall project developed and led by Sugata Mitra (1999); the Government of India-led EDUSAT (2004); National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (2003); and finally, a national online education portal named Sakshat (2006). The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment itself terminated rather quickly, but it led to several versions of television based instruction programmes, most notably aimed at higher secondary and university students. Instruction in the broadcast-format continues to date, even after the arrival of the internet and the fact it has become the preferred medium for the Indian state. The television has not been replaced, but certainly shadowed by a variety of internet access and computing devices.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Aakash, a “Low Cost Access-Cum-Computing Device”</h2>
<p>An early official description of the then-nameless tablet as a “low cost access-cum-computing device” is noteworthy <strong>[1]</strong>. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary computing device that does not also function as an access device (say, to the internet). Where does the need for calling it an “access-cum-computing” device come from? It comes, perhaps, from the hierarchy of priority – the device is primarily an access device, and secondarily can perform the function of a general-purpose computer. An archaeological reading of the assumptions of learning processes embodied in this device reveals an earlier layer of thinking – that of broadcasting educational programmes to television sets via satellite connection. Labelling it as “access-cum-computing” frames the object as being shaped by the residue of the Indian state’s education technological experiences of the past, including that of the SITE initiative.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>“[The] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled”</h2>
<p>Throughout the short history of the Aakash device, the verdict of “failed innovation” figures prominently – from the early failure of "Sakshat" <strong>[2]</strong>, to allegations of the Chinese origin of the Aakash device <strong>[3]</strong>, to manufacturing troubles and under-production of the device <strong>[4]</strong>, to criticisms of the tablet’s built quality and computing capacity <strong>[5]</strong>, to mistrust and failed collaborations between parties involved in its production <strong>[6]</strong>, and intra-governmental criticisms of the implementation process <strong>[7]</strong>. Moreover, there remained a continuous tension within the government itself regarding the necessity of the project, especially fuelled by (and fuelling) the image of the project as being driven by the dreams of a specific minister <strong>[8]</strong>.</p>
<p>To simply describe the Aakash project’s failure as one due to the unbearable heaviness of functions ranging from the technical to the symbolic and political is to fall short of a full explanation. Alongside that narrative of failure, it is critical to foreground the quiet success of the project in establishing the tablet computer as a near-essential and familiarised everyday object for access to educational material. There is an alarming accuracy in the MHRD claim that the Aakash project established a sub $100 tablet market in India – it did, even if it was not for the device they wanted to promote <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Device is the Desire</h2>
<p>We observe that the Aakash project, as well as the ones preceding it, have been driven primarily by a desire to scale up the provision of education. The initiatives towards building delivery infrastructures for such mass-scale provision of education has almost always been accompanied by a larger desire for developing capabilities in space exploration, communication, and computing – the key technologies of twentieth century geopolitics. Our study of the manufacturing of the Aakash tablet, and its surrounding discourses, foreground the technological imagination of the state after liberalisation in India (1991), and its unique arrangements and efforts to create domestic capability of technological innovation in a context of globalised production and communication networks. We see our role as one of recovering the work of technology in the history of education as understood through the interactions between the state, academia, and industry.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Archival Research in (Increasingly) Digital India</h2>
<p>Documenting the project has been an interesting historical exercise. We have been attentive to documents disappearing from their online locations. One remarkable possibility for archival research opened up by the internet is the (limited, and often uncertain) ability to access materials that are not presently available on a website, but were part of it in the past. This possibility allowed us to access a few crucial government documents that are not directly available on the official websites any more. We have also been attentive to the reiterations and revisions that do not merely overtake or shadow earlier documents. They sometimes erase earlier documents altogether as digital revisions. We do not have access to personal correspondence or internal institutional correspondence relating to the project. We are, however, skeptical of that happening as no protocols for the archiving of digital correspondence is yet in place with the Government of India. Doing recent history of India is becoming an ever more difficult exercise that historians must urgently attend to, if we are to make the present ready to have its own past in the future.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. “The History of Aakash Low Cost Access cum Computing Device.” Sakshat. October 05, 2011. <a href="http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf">http://archive.sakshat.ac.in/pdf/Final_Note_Aakash.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Mukherjee, Arindam. “Bonsai Netbooks.” Outlook. February 16, 2009. <a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Bonsai-Netbooks/239719">http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Bonsai-Netbooks/239719</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Raina, Pamposh, and Mia Li. “India’s ‘Aakash,’ Now Made in China.” The New York Times. November 26, 2012. <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/india%E2%80%99s-super-cheap-tablet-now-made-in-china/">http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/india%E2%80%99s-super-cheap-tablet-now-made-in-china/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> Nanda, Prashant K., and Surabhi Agarwal. “Government Close to Giving Up on Aakash Project.” Mint. March 22, 2013. <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Politics/fmEi8gsOSFgOzSTFfLsw6J/Govt-almost-gives-up-on-Aakash-says-no-point-in-hardware-ob.html">http://www.livemint.com/Politics/fmEi8gsOSFgOzSTFfLsw6J/Govt-almost-gives-up-on-Aakash-says-no-point-in-hardware-ob.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Chopra, Ritika. “Kapil Sibal's Cheap Aakash Proves to be a Dud.” Mail Today. January 08, 2012. <a href="http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/kapil-sibal-cheapest-tablet-of-world-aakash-failure/1/167730.html">http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/kapil-sibal-cheapest-tablet-of-world-aakash-failure/1/167730.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Julka, Harsimran. “14 Lakh Aakash Tablets Booked in 14 Days.” The Economic Times. January 03, 2012. <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/14-lakh-aakash-tablets-booked-in-14-days/articleshow/11345695.cms">http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/14-lakh-aakash-tablets-booked-in-14-days/articleshow/11345695.cms</a>. Parthasarathi, Ashok. “Cloudy Outlook for Aakash.” The Hindu. May 21, 2012 (Updated: May 22, 2012). <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3439629.ece
">http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3439629.ece</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Government of India. Report No. 19 of 2013 - Union Government (Civil) - Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Compliance Audit Observations. Government of India. 2013. <a href="http://www.cag.gov.in/content/report-no-19-2013-compliance-audit-observations-union-governmentcivil">http://www.cag.gov.in/content/report-no-19-2013-compliance-audit-observations-union-governmentcivil</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> At an event in late 2013, Kapil Sibal admitted, “[the] Aakash tablet was my dream but it was not fulfilled, I tried hard...” Quoted in Press Trust of India. “Kapil Sibal: Aakash Tablet is My Unfulfilled Dream.” Financial Express. December 24, 2013. <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapil-sibal-aakash-tablet-is-my-unfulfilled-dream/1211284/0 ">http://www.financialexpress.com/news/kapil-sibal-aakash-tablet-is-my-unfulfilled-dream/1211284/0 </a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> This is an edited excerpt from a paper titled ‘The Aakash Tablet and Technological Imaginaries of Mass Education in Contemporary India’ recently published in History and Technology, on 5 February, 2016. The paper can be accessed here: <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142" target="_blank">http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2015.1136142</a> (the first 50 downloads are free).</p>
<p>Cross-posted from <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2016/02/12/the-aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-mass-education-in-contemporary-india/" target="_blank">South Asia @ LSE Blog</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-education-in-india-excerpt'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-education-in-india-excerpt</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroResearchers at WorkEducation TechnologyInternet HistoriesResearch2016-02-14T10:11:09ZBlog EntryLiving in the Archival Moment
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fifth among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <strong>Living in the Archival Moment</strong></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, Walter Benjamin (1968: 59-67) dwells upon the many nuances of the art of collecting (books in this particular case), on everything from the sometimes impulsive acquisition to the processes of careful selection and classification which go into creating a library. "Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects" (67) he says, and this becomes important given the many ways in which we can acquire books today, as well as the problems of copyright, authorship and authority over meaning and knowledge that become a bone of contention in the digital age. The collector defines the nature of the object here, because he lives in and through them. While describing the personal process that is collecting, Benjamin is also aware that it may not be a process that will last as it is - a foreboding of the age when the impulse to collect, hoard and categorise has only grown tremendously due to increased access to books owing to the internet, but also where the figure of the collector seems to have been slowly effaced, thus presenting a ‘chaos of memories’ (60) in unarranged collections spread over several hard disks instead of book shelves. The figure of the collector, and the idea of ‘ownership’ emerge as an important trope in understanding the notion of order, or rather disorder of the art of collecting in the digital space.</p>
<p>This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in DH - the archive - particularly as it occupies a predominant space in the imagination of the field in India, and processes of knowledge production and the history of disciplines in general. The influx of digital technologies into the archival space in the last decade has been an impetus for the large scale digitisation of material, but it has also thrown up several challenges for traditional archival practice, including the preservation of analogue material, the problems of categorising and interpreting large volumes of data, and the gradual disappearance or re-definition of the traditional figure of the collector – a concern echoed across several spaces extending from private online archival efforts to large collaborative knowledge repositories like the Wikipedia. With the questions that DH seems to have posed to traditional notions of authorship or subject expertise, the 'digital humanist', when we imagine such a person, can be seen as a reinvention of this figure of the collector - a curator of materials and traces, here of course, digital traces.</p>
<p>The concept of the archive has been important to knowledge production and particularly the development of academic disciplines; whether driven by concerns of the state or the impulses of the market, there have been different ways of defining and understanding the archive, not only as a documentary record of history, but as a metaphor for collective memory and remembrance which includes technology in its very imagination. One of the most elaborate formulations of the archive has been in the work of Jacques Derrida, where apart from proposing the death and preservation drives as primary to the archival impulse, he also highlights the process of archivisation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory (1995). Michel Foucault in his concept of the archive looks at it as "a system of discursivity which establishes the possibility of what can be said," <strong>[1]</strong> thus pointing to the archive as a space not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of knowledge creation. There is today a consensus, at least in its academic understanding that archives cannot be relegated to being self-contained linear spaces of objective historical record, but that archival practice itself has political implications in terms of how collective memory and history, or as indicated by Foucault, histories are preserved and retold through a process of careful selection. Disciplines themselves may therefore be seen as archives of knowledge, and one may stretch this analogy to say that they may also appear as self-contained spaces with restrictions on entry for different ways of remembering and reading. More importantly, the question of what constitutes the archive and what objects or materials may be archived reflects a larger debate about problems with the definition of disciplines and shifting disciplinary boundaries <strong>[2]</strong>. With the shift to the digital archive, new questions about access, sharing and collaboration have emerged, as illustrated by the number of new archival spaces that have emerged, and growth of expansive archives such at the Walt Whitman, Rossetti and Blake archives in the West (Drucker 2011). However, as is apparent, the conditions of access to such archives and their interpretation have not been problematised enough, if at all, particularly with respect to how they contribute to generating new kinds of knowledge or scholarship.</p>
<p>While DH debates in the West have focussed quite significantly on archives and the possibilities that digital collections have now opened up research and creative practice involving archival material, in the Indian context it is the 'incompleteness of the archive' that still seems to be a bone of contention. Some of the scholars and practitioners interviewed as part of this study see archive creation as one of the key questions of DH as it has emerged in India, and the possibilities and challenges that this brings to the fore, (particularly in terms of access to rare materials and extending these debates to regional languages) as something that the field will need to contend with at some point. The role of digital technologies in fostering this activity of archive-building is stressed in these debates. In an earlier monograph titled Archives and Access produced as part of CIS-RAW, Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto trace a material history of archival practice in India, specifically looking at conflicts and debates surrounding state and colonial archives, and the politics of access, preservation and digitisation (2011). The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to the now within the reach of the individual, engendered by increased access to technology, and the ‘publicness’ that the visual nature of the internet fosters. However they also talk of the possibility of continuing forms of state or market control over the archive precisely through the internet and digital technologies, with the nature of individual access and use again being mediated through digitisation. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer with the archives at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata who was also part of the Archives and Access project, and has been part of some early conversations on DH in India, speaks about this change <strong>[3]</strong>. Even twenty years ago, it was difficult to define the archive, as it was considered the prerogative of the state, and this defined the nature of archival practice and management as well. From there it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved some issues of preserving content and the problems of physically accessing archives to a large extent, it may not always be the best option, as the archival or analogue material needs to be in good condition so as to make for good digitised copies, thus emphasising the need for more effective methods and better training in preservation practices. Also, as he point out, digitisation may be able to capture and preserve the content of an artifact, but not its form, which is equally important. He therefore rues the fact that even with technological advancements, there is still a lack of interest in archival practice, and often institutional mandates determine the archival agenda which may not be in the interest of generating more research and scholarship around material, as this is the only way to keep the archive alive.</p>
<p>The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, has been an important shift here, with their focus on archiving the personal and the everyday, he says, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. While on the subject of private collections and personal narratives, Dr. C S Lakshmi, writer and academic who is director of the Mumbai-based Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) <strong>[4]</strong>, has particular concerns about digitalisation making large amounts of information available for consumption online, particularly with respect to women. While digitisation is an effective tool for preservation and offers several possibilities for documentation, unmediated access is problematic and often a breach of privacy. There is so much information out there that the digital sphere makes available, sometimes this excessive communication also contributes to certain silences and obscures or makes invisible people and their stories. So very often its not a question of just making information available to people. What are you making available, how much are you making available and to whom, for what purpose - these are all important questions that contour the notion of access and need to be addressed according to Dr. Lakshmi. Curation therefore emerges as an important process. The publicness or hyper-visibility that the visual nature of the internet and digital technologies accords to the archive is seen tied to a narrative of loss here, and against the rhetoric of preservation which is still in many spaces deemed to be the primary function and imagination of the archive. What this sets up is also a conflict between the possibilities of open access and sharing of material, and concerns of privacy, and the need to find a space where both these seemingly contradictory ends meet.</p>
<p>The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies contributes to a 'problem of excess', and that is where curation and building new kinds of tools come in as a critical and creative exercise. Dr. Amlan Dasgupta reiterates this opinion. He talks about the internet as fostering an 'age of altruism', where the proliferation of technological gadgets has brought about a culture of voluntarily sharing materials online. This of course challenges notions of authority and brings forth the problems of the unarranged library which Benjamin’s essay also points towards, but the archive can be used as a metaphor to understand how notions of authorship and authority are being challenged as is apparent in the DH discourse. The theory-practice divide is also something that ails this particular domain like many others; not only is there an inadequate understanding of how to access and use the archive on the part of students and researchers alike, but there is a lack of standardisation of the practice of archive management and the science itself, in terms of metadata, problems of ownership and copyright, and most importantly inadequate infrastructure, training and expertise on preservation of analogue materials. While it may not be within the ambit of DH to address all of these questions, the renewed interest in archival practice and the diversification of its modes is something is that would continue to be an integral aspect of its practice. In fact what digitisation has also led to is diversity in the modes of documentation itself, and the larger process of archiving, which has important implications for the kinds of questions one may ask within certain disciplinary formations, history being an important example. The nature of material in the archive is never quite the same, so is the manner of working with and interpreting them. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, who has been engaged with archival practice herself, and is now working on setting up oral history archives through the Centre for Public History, speaks of the changes that digital technologies have produced in studying oral history, specifically in terms of recording and interpretation of interviews. The mode of documentation, particularly the digital, adds a new layer to the manner in which the voice, sounds or even silence is recorded or interpreted. She refers to Alessandro Portelli’s work on oral history, which talks about the nuances of the sound, such as tone, volume and speed of speaking which are all bearers of meaning and can tell you so much about what the person is trying to say, but can never be fully translated into the written word.(2006, 32-42) Although there are still some basic but crucial obstacles such as with transcription, the digital space may allow for tools that help with more nuanced interpretation of recorded material, and large volumes of it; a possibility that CPH is looking into at the moment. There are several institutions in India who want to set up their archives, most of their materials include many hours of interviews, with many people at a time and transcription is a problem, because it takes time, and there is still no software to aid or completely automate this process effectively. One of the approaches of DH may be to address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material using digital tools.</p>
<p>The digital archive is one space where many of these questions about the process of archive-creation and the separation between preservation and production that is often made in the existing discourse come into conflict, thus inflating the definition of the term much more. New technologies of publishing, the proliferation of electronic databases and growth of networks that in turn encourage production and the increasing amount of born-digital materials then present new questions for the concept of the archive and scholarship.</p>
<p>The role of technology has been significant in the development of the concept of the archive; in fact the archive, in its very nature would be a technological object, or a space where one can trace a history of the disciplines in relation to technology. The introduction of the digital has added yet another dimension to this question. Dr. Ravi Sundaram, Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and one of the co-initiators of the Sarai programme at the Centre for Developing Societies (CSDS) <strong>[5]</strong>, speaks of how the advent of the digital has brought about several shifts in the imagination of the archive, which he sees as two distinct phases. Sarai was one of the early models of a concept driven, networked archive, based on a culture of 'mailing lists' that built conversations around topics which in themselves constituted the archive. The shifts came with Web 2.0 with which archiving the everyday became a possibility, given the access to inexpensive gadgets and the pervasiveness of social media. While the model of the networked, curated and public archive still has valence today, a significant next step would be to see how one can extend these questions to thinking differently about the archive, by developing new protocols for entering, sharing and circulation of material, and producing new knowledge or concepts around these ideas. This would be crucial in terms of generating research and scholarship around the archive itself as a concept, and realising the full potential of network-generated information. Another pertinent question is that of information and technology infrastructure, which is a political question as well. The investment on infrastructure for the archive is determined by different kinds of interests and will play an important role in how archival efforts will ultimately develop. As Dr. Sundaram reiterates, the point to note is that new archival efforts are not only general repositories, but critical interventions in themselves. They foster new kinds of visibilities. The Pad.ma archive <strong>[6]</strong>, for example, works with existing footage and reinvents or adds new layers of meaning to it through annotations and citations. This also opens up possibilities for new kinds of questions to be asked about existing material. Private archival efforts, many initiated by individuals are also becoming more niche and specific, driven by a specific research agenda, public interest in conservation or as critical and creative interventions in a particular area. Some examples of this are the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma <strong>[7]</strong>, the Indian Memory Project <strong>[8]</strong>, and Osianama <strong>[9]</strong>. In some of these examples, the archive may be used as more of a metaphor rather than a description or classificatory term, because of the layers of meaning that they generate around an existing object or 'trace'.</p>
<p>They are also reflective of a different milieu that came about with the digital turn in India. Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker who set up the artist’s studio and collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[10]</strong>, and is also part of the team behind the Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma platforms, speaks of the various factors that contributed to the setting up these two online archival spaces. As artists for them the larger concern was the ever-changing electronic media or technological landscape, as seen in some of their earlier projects such as Russel TV, which involved creating content around media ecologies and intellectual property in a sort of pro-piracy, and access to knowledge framework. The focus for them was the ecology or the landscape, and within that the sharp point was where there were irregularities and inequalities and there was a need to redistribute things in a certain way. Pad.ma grew out of a larger idea of understanding this changing milieu around the early 2000s, where the digital had already become pervasive – filmmakers were editing on a laptop or desktop computer, they had access to the internet and DIY tools, resources were cheaper and more accessible as the internet was opening up a world of possibilities. Therefore, as the team realised, if there was to be an archive of the contemporary, it had to be digital or visual, or video specifically, and located online. This was also the time when the independent filmmaker had become a prominent figure and the challenges and advantages of sharing unused and raw footage became quite possible and apparent with a platform like Pad.ma. The archive was created as something contemporary, non-state and non-canonical, with a wide range of stakeholders and contributors ranging across NGOs, activists, independent filmmakers to individuals with an interest in film and video. There were however several difficulties as well, chiefly in getting people to share material, issues of privacy, and a resistance to the use of this platform as a pedagogic and academic resource, which over the years have come down with the people becoming more open to using material on the platform as primary texts, and the development of more tools for editing and annotations. Indiancine.ma that way is more of a traditional form of film studies, but with more possibilities now for working with the film text.</p>
<p>However, while entering the digital space may have enabled more sharing and dissemination of material, how much of these efforts also make their way into larger civil society and policy debates, scholarship and pedagogy is still a crucial question. Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma have been used by students, in media and film in particular but the efforts remain niche and restricted to certain disciplines only. Some part of this comes from a resistance to the film or a certain kind of text as academic, and therefore scholarly or relevant to a larger cross-section of research. This also stems from a predominant imagination of the archive as a static, linear repository. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha, film and cultural studies scholar, who was part of the team that created Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, points out, the distinction between the archive as a repository space and an interpretive space is one that needs to be made clearly, and archives are clearly a form of the later. In fact the idea of the digital as a permanent medium is false, and it should not be the solution to problems of storage and preservation. Further, in a lot of expansive archives, whether digital or physical, it is seen that only up to five percent of the material is used, and more often than not it is the same five percent! This is because most people do know about the existence of certain kinds of material which is buried deep within the archive, and therefore do not access it. The emphasis of archival practice, and particularly in the time of the digital archive where space is not seen as a constraint, yet, should be to enliven the archive to ensure that material from the 'dead space of the archive' is made more searchable and accessible for use.</p>
<p>Curation then comes back again as an important aspect of the archive, even in the time of the digital. Indira Chowdhury sees this as one of the main shifts from the traditional archive, where the curator or the archivist performed the role of a custodian or gatekeeper who grants restricted access to the archive only to researchers or scholars. Now with the advent of the internet and shift to the digital, it’s more about collaboration, and adding to the archive, and this has encouraged a diversity of users, and uses of the archive. This comes with its own problems however, such as with metadata standards for instance, and particularly questions of format which become important from the perspective of technological obsolescence (as discussed in the earlier chapter). The digital archive has made practitioners think about what they are archiving, for whom and what purpose, and in what formats, but these questions also go back to the traditional archive, and in fact are dependent on how we think about and defined the archive itself, then and now how we imagine the virtual archive. These are as she says, questions that may be routed through technology, but not necessarily about technology. Also, even with the traditional archive, making material accessible and usable was a concern, and this is where the archivist or custodian played an important role. She speaks about using pre-digital archives, where there are handwritten descriptions of material, all meticulously preserved, indexed and cross-referenced, and you know what material to look for because the archivist knew what was in the archive and how to find it. She speaks of her own experience of setting up the archives at TIFR, which was not digital then, but has been digitised now, and even though she has not been associated with them for a while now she still gets the occasional email requesting help to find something in the archive, because she knows the material. A lot of the new digital archives therefore, despite their huge collection which are also searchable, need archivists and assistants who oversee the organisation of material, because those cross-references and connections have just not been made (often it is not humanly possible because of the sheer volume of data), which is really what the historians will look for, and that is the challenge here.</p>
<p>Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the Centre for Public History, also sees this as a problem of not imagining the archive as a database, but as this legacy where content is being held together under this one overarching frame. She finds that there is a metanarrative that is created at the level of the database, because of the context in which the archive becomes a database – the historical / institutional questions, and what is being used to create the archive. A point of divergence however could be that it’s easier to lie with the archive, because with the database there is the empirical identifier, so the truth claim is better. This is something that Dr. Chowdhury agrees upon as well, as she finds that because archives have the potential of being multilayered, and are therefore complex, verification is difficult; it’s only another scholar who will check the materials referenced or used by one – and the interpretation would change, and this had implications for the way the archive generates scholarship. Another difference is pulling data from the archive in a way that it allows the making of computational hypotheses about other possibilities, which is the heart of DH – such as topic modelling and algorithmic shortcuts to crunch through data to posit some hypothetical claims. She feels that in India at the moment we are not doing in enough with the archive as database, which also restricts its many possibilities. Even in terms of access to the archive, which the digital archive is supposed to make easier, it comes with certain conditions, such as copyrights, privacy and even different kinds of Creative Commons licenses for open source content. It also depends on what Dr. Ray Murray describes as the ‘flavour of the archive’, something particularly relevant to a lot of new private archival spaces like the Indian Memory Project, or Indiancine.ma or Pad.ma, which focussed on 'building the archive', as opposed to working with an existing archive of material. As such these are somewhat ephemeral archives, always in the making, and where the digital intersects clearly with the archival space is in terms of finding an audience for it; the internet creates these niche spaces of interest, so you find that people want to access such spaces, and do it differently from the traditional archive, as the varied nature and functionalities of these two examples demonstrate.</p>
<p>What the long discussion seems to illustrate then is the gradual shift of the archive to become something of a metaphor, as the way the archive has been previously imagined, and its functions have changed with the advent of the internet. As Wolfgang Ernst asks:</p>
<blockquote>Does the archive become metaphorical in multimedia space? This is a plea for archiving the term archive itself for the description of multimedia storage processes. Digital archaeology, though, is not a case for future generations but has to be performed in the present already. In the age of digitalizability, that is, when we have the option of storing all kinds of information, a paradoxical phenomenon appears: cyberspace has no memory. (Ernst 2013: 138)</blockquote>
<p>What Ernst suggests is that the Internet forms a different kind of multimedia archive, or anarchive, or is a phantasm, which differs from the printed of state archives because “the archive is a given, well-defined lot; the Internet, on the contrary, is a collection not just of unforeseen texts but of sound and images as well, an <em>anarchive</em> of sensory data for which no genuine archival culture has been developed so far in the occident” (139). The internet, in documenting the discontinuities and ‘disorder’ of the history of multimedia forms thus gives rise to a new memory culture, and this is important to the process of understanding how new archival spaces are being created, and theorised.</p>
<p>Archive-building has an impact on how knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated is a crucial aspect of meaning-making practices. Related to this is another issue in terms of the amount of data that is available in the archives by the sheer amount of material that it can now hold, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data; accessing or interpreting such large volumes of information would require critical tools and new kinds of architecture. These shifts also relocate the figure of the collector from traditional practices to new ways of visualising collections and the art of collecting itself, which are now beyond the scope of the human subject. As illustrated by practices such as distant reading, it is now humanly difficult to read, and process such large volumes of data that the digital archive now makes available to us. What this then throws up as questions for archival practice, and DH of course, is the new modes by which knowledge is produced through access to such corpora – for instance the impact such changes have on history, its reading and writing, the growth of public history and the role of the internet archive in fostering its growth. On a much broader level, it also points towards the implications of this shift for pedagogy and scholarship in the humanities, in the digital age, questions which will be discussed in the next chapter.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Michel Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004: 18).</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Ibid.</p>
<p><strong>[3] </strong>A session on 'Digital Humanities and the State of the Archives in South Asia' was conducted by Prof. Abhijit Bhattacharya and his team as part of a workshop on research methodology in Women's Studies, held at Tezpur University between April 6-7, 2010.See http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.sparrowonline.org/" target="_blank">http://www.sparrowonline.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://sarai.net/" target="_blank">http://sarai.net/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/" target="_blank">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/" target="_blank">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/" target="_blank">http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://osianama.com/" target="_blank">http://osianama.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/" target="_blank">http://studio.camp/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p> </p>
<p>Balachandran, Aparna, and Rochelle Pinto.<em>Archives and Access. </em>Bangalore: The Centre for Internet and Society, 2011</p>
<p>Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" In<em> Illuminations</em>, edited by Hannah Arendt.Translated by Harry Zohn, 59-67.New York: Schoken Books, 1968</p>
<p>Derrida, Jacques.<em> Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.</em>Translated by Eric Prenowitz.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1996</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna. "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarshi<em>p" </em>In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, edited by M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.Accessed December 11, 2015.<a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a></p>
Ernst, Wolfgang. "Discontinuities:Does the Archive become Metaphorical in Multimedia Space?" In <em>Digital Memory and the Archive, e</em>dited by Jussi Parikka, 113 - 140.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013
<p></p>
<p></p>
Manoff,
M. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” <em>Portal:
Libraries and the Academy, </em>Vol.4, No.1 (2005): 9-25.Accessed December 10,
2015. <a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687">http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35687</a>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p class="MsoEndnoteText">Portelli, Alessandro
"What makes oral history different?”. In <em>The Oral History Reader</em>, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair
Thomson, 32-42. London: Routledge, 2006.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:08:22ZBlog EntryThe Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fourth among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <strong>The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</strong></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>In an article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly describing the emergence of the term cyberinfrastructure, Patrik Svensson speaks of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the humanities, pointing towards a seemingly new found interest and investment in resources and tools for humanities research, pedagogy and publication in many universities and other knowledge institutions (Svensson 2011). Though the term has not been significantly used otherwise, it is interesting to note the implications of such a statement in the context of other such important ‘turns’ in the history of ideas, such as the linguistic or cultural turn. Particularly in the predominant debates around digital humanities, which are largely Anglo-American, infrastructure is an important and inherent component of any thinking around this area, as it derives many of its theoretical and practical concerns from a history of humanities computing. A lot of early work in DH was done in in the area of digital archives and knowledge repositories, such as The Walt Whitman Archive, Rossetti and Blake archives (Gold and Groom 2011, Drucker 2011), where digitization and algorithmic querying were important developments in terms of imagining and opening up the archive. From there to seemingly complex projects on data mapping, visualization, distant reading and cultural analytics, which require parsing through a huge corpora of humanities data, the growth of infrastructure has been a key aspect of these developments, although this many not be emphasized in the early literature about the field. The use of computational methods and the move towards the use of big data in the humanities has been an important change in terms of objects of the enquiry and methodology, and infrastructure is an essential condition of both these changes.</p>
<p>Like with other disciplines the nature of infrastructure and resources available to the humanities – in the form of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and now online repositories, language laboratories, and bibliographic, writing and editing tools and software – have also in some manner influenced the nature or scope of questions that could be asked of an object or text. It is therefore useful to explore the influence of infrastructure at a very conceptual level, in terms of what new ways of enquiry have been made possible with digital technologies and the internet. Now with new tools that can parse many pages of text at a go, or an algorithm that can derive patterns from a data set of images, video or other cultural artifacts, the scope of the enquiry seems to have increased exponentially, as much literature around DH suggests (Berry 2011). Indeed this point is also a bone of contention for many traditional humanities scholars, as it not only seems to be a technologically deterministic notion, but also one that takes away from more conventional methods of humanities research, which are based on close reading and interpretation of texts. In the Indian context however, these possibilities still seem distant owing to several gaps in terms of requirements of infrastructure, resources and material. In many institutions, the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in the form of libraries, classroom teaching-learning resources and access to the internet and other digital tools for the humanities continues to remain a problem. Existing institutional infrastructure is lesser that what is required, and mostly outdated.</p>
<p>This conflict over whether new tools and resources for the humanities is taking away or adding to humanities research is better understood in the light of how the concept of infrastructure has been understood, and specifically in the context of communication and research. Brian Larkin (2008) describes infrastructures as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense”. He talks about both technical (such as transport, telecommunications, urban planning, energy and water) and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as the knowledge of a language, or cultural style and religious learnings. He therefore defines infrastructure as “this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” This definition opens out the understanding of the term a little more, for it brings within the ambit different kinds of goods – such as knowledge, and proposes that infrastructure has the power to bind people within collectivities, thus emphasizing both its limitations as well as potentialities.</p>
The notion of infrastructure as not being neutral to culture is further emphasized when Larkin talks about its mediating capacities, brought about by a layering of new technologies over old ones. "Infrastructures…mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of infrastructures themselves" (Ibid.: 6). Thus the understanding of infrastructures as merely a means of the execution of ideas is one of the obstacles in terms of imagining them as more central to the work of the humanities. Often, the notion of infrastructure has been understood in terms of the institutional infrastructure in place, and not in terms of the smaller networks, tools or resources that build it, which are often located at the level of individuals. Ownership is a key aspect of the problem here, because the ownership of such infrastructure is largely with the state or large corporate entities, and not something within the ambit of small and private institutions or even individuals, and this often mandates the manner of their use. Indeed in the case of DH, there are certain kinds of technologies and resources that cannot be replicated easily at all, as such it is something that needs investment from the state and large knowledge institutions such as the university. Another problem, as rightly identified by Svensson is that the imagination of research infrastructures has been primarily in terms of the needs of the natural sciences, as a result of which resources, tools and materials for the humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment. Thus not only is there a challenge in terms of the availability of infrastructure, but also with respect to the optimum utilization of what is available.
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<p>Some of the practitioners and scholars interviewed as part of this mapping have also repeatedly brought up a number of concerns about (or the lack of) infrastructure they have had to use, modify and develop as part of their projects and research. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore finds it rather ironic that a city like Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal has such little thinking in the humanities. There are of course several reasons for this, she says, and in many places infrastructure development is restricted for certain reasons, like for example in Kashmir, where the use of internet and mobile phones is regulated strictly due to security concerns. The key question of course is to have more of a dialogue between places to ensure that they are not functioning in isolation. She also emphasizes that the problems are also at a more basic level, like with transcription for example <strong>[1]</strong>. The advent of the digital has brought with it several new possibilities, but she also talks about the many misconceptions that seem to be prevalent with regard to the digital, particularly in terms of preservation and storage capacity. The question of format is of great importance and a determining factor in much of research that mobilizes digital technologies. As part of her work on archiving oral histories, she has often had to emphasize that there are specific formats for a digital oral archive. As she says:</p>
<blockquote>You should not switch to say MP3 just because it’s cheaper, more convenient and a lighter file. I often have people arguing that I just bought a recorder, it gives me a clear recording [in the MP3 format] etc. If you were to archive that file you would find that within a few years you begin to lose data on that file. The digital archive has also made people think a lot more about what they are preserving, in what format. These are things you then teach yourself, you do not archive in certain formats, or rely on an archive of MP3 files, because every time you copy them onto something it would have lost a little bit of its description. So these are things that make the historian more oriented, you think a lot more about what you are doing.</blockquote>
<p>She therefore warns against these presumptions that a digital archive will resolve completely problems of space and preservation, as a change in format can easily render your data inaccessible and essentially useless. The idea of ‘loss of data’ and lack of space is something easily missed, as there a notion of the digital being an endless space, but that too comes at a cost. As Jonathan Sterne (2013) explains in his work on the MP3 as a cultural artifactiv, it is a format that works through compression and elimination of excess sound, which eventually greatly affects the quality of the sound object itself. The notion of the digital rendering a certain quality of sound, and by implication generating a ‘better’ digital artifact itself, is therefore highly debatable.</p>
<p>There are other considerations to bear in mind as well. As Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the CPH points out, the context of such work in the global south is very different, and lack of good infrastructure is definitely one of the major problems. There are issues of bandwidth, problems such as surveillance, and issues with regulation of internet access, now the issue of network neutrality and so on, all of which have implications for possible digital humanities work and specifically work on digital archives. A significant challenge she sees is that we don't have mechanisms to translate between/ from Indian languages. She says that:</p>
<blockquote>It would be amazing to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages which at the moment is an impossibility. This is where a place like Bangalore comes into the picture... We need to pull on resources that are being pioneered in places like the IITs, or institutions here working with natural language processing...technologies that we cannot in a humanities context create, but pull those in to use them for humanities research. But the questions that we are asking are necessarily quite different, from what we have in the West.</blockquote>
<p>The problem with Indian languages brings out the problems that are specific to the global south and therefore the infrastructure needs of humanities research work. Padmini Murray mentions Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University as an effective illustration of the challenges faced by researchers working in languages other than English. She explains “The very level of creating the code for Bichitra was different, because it had to be done from scratch. Finding a set of reliable Bangla characters is difficult because the ligatures get mixed up, so they created a character set from scratch to create Bichitra, and for Prabhed [the collation software] which works within it.” The problem of a lack of standardization for Indic language inputs is therefore an immediate practical concern for archival work in different languages in India <strong>[2]</strong>.</p>
<p>Indiancine.ma <strong>[3]</strong>, an online archive of Indian film, has similarly been experimenting with different ways of reading and annotating film text, with a focus right now on films that are out of copyright. It uses an open-source platform named Pandor/a <strong>[4]</strong> for media archives, which helps to organise and manage large, decentralized collections of video, to collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations, and to archive as a desktop-class web application. The editing tool enables a user to pause, cut and annotate a particular scene or sequence in the film according to a time code, thus creating enormous new possibilities in terms of how we engage with the film text at several levels. The different ways of organising content through different filters also helps map content in unique ways and read them. According to Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert, who are part of the team that developed the archive and its predecessor Pad.ma <strong>[5]</strong>, Indiancine.ma is a work in progress, and it will always be, so as to allow new opportunities to present themselves with every change in the software and tools being used. They are particular about the archive being open to a variety of users and uses – that is, it is not only a tool or space of publication for humanities researchers, but is also a software project, a resource for a film fan club, and many other things as it is open to interpretation. It is meant for people to build together and have conversations across domains and disciplines. In their work with people from both the humanities and sciences, they do see a void or gap between domains, and reiterate that it is very difficult for people to have a conversation across their disciplinary moorings. Infrastructure development has also become divided across these lines, and suffers from a kind of tunnel vision which often prevents it from being developed in response to the needs of the communities it is meant to address. As Sebastian recollects the experience of creating Pad.ma, a similar online video archive using the same platform, Pandor/a, he speaks of collaborating with people from a non-technology background, at the artists collective CAMP in Mumbai <strong>[6]</strong>, and how the lack of a hierarchy between technologists and non-technologists only contributed to making these projects better. A lot of the early software projects in India suffered due to this distance between people from technology and non-technology backgrounds, and the lack of a common language for them to communicate. Both Sebastian and Jan themselves come with training and experience in diverse areas, ranging from philosophy and visual arts to software development, and believe that their contribution to this archive is more conceptual than technological. They also see the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) culture, then a rather incipient movement in India when they had just begun work on these projects, as one that can foster more conversations and collaborative work in technology and research in India. When they had started out of course, it was very difficult to convince people to use free and open source software, or even get filmmakers to release their footage for an open access platform like Pad.ma. CAMP was one of the few spaces then that had this open source culture, and it encouraged people to collaborate extensively, across areas of expertise. As Sebastian says “You deal with a relatively complex informatics system, but you are fully aware that you can modify and change things, and deal with them in a transparent way, which is great.” Both claim that nobody owns Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma, but everybody looks after it in a way, because they all use it differently depending on their interests, and this nurtures and builds the platform in different ways. The availability of this somewhat outside/alternate space for collaboration, and working within the open source context has been instrumental in the growth of these two online open access archives.</p>
<p>The computational aspects of Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and even Bichitra to some extent is may be something to look forward to for researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of such research with these platforms. Given that both are essentially large corpora of material, introducing new algorithmic tools to work with them is not a distant possibility, something that has also been the core of a lot of DH work in the Anglo-American context. Jan and Sebastian have tried this already with one of their earlier projects, 0xdb <strong>[7]</strong>, which is another online archive of cinema, by running a color recognition algorithm on it. There is an instance of face detection and speech recognition software that could be run on this platform, with interesting results. The existing filters on Indiacine.ma also make it possible to search for images or sequences based on colour and object recognition. For instance, an interesting experiment is to search for ‘telephone’ in the archive, which pulls up images containing telephones from across the entire corpus, outlining an interesting trajectory of the use of the instrument. While helpful in terms of querying and searching over a large corpus, they also emphasize the need to be able to make sense of it in a meaningful way. As Jan says “Most of this software is developed really as a means of control, in the area of surveillance etc., and not for exploring; it is more of a content identifying tool rather than to discover things. Clustering or referencing credits are other possibilities, but its more statistical analysis of the footage; are they really adding anything qualitative to cinema studies is still an open question”. Given this disjuncture in what these tools are developed for and how they are finally used, a point of concern is whether the research questions are also driven by the possibilities and limitations of the software itself. While that remains a broader question, Sebastian feels that more than a software, this is a new digital eco-system itself, and using these platforms in different ways, in fact even beyond what they were imagined for, will drive the technology in new directions. The limitation of computational tools as he sees now is really the speed, and given the expenses involved, they may not be feasible to implement and expect results anytime soon.</p>
<p>Both the above platforms demonstrate a certain ability to read texts both closely, as well as from a distance through the use of algorithmic tools, thus demonstrating the possibilities of analysis afforded by the infrastructure it has been built with. More importantly, they also highlight the limits of such tools and resources due to several challenges posed by the material itself. In the case of Bichitra, the problems of developing a code for Bengali characters has put forth a number of technological challenges; a pointer towards one among many problems for archiving materials in Indian languages. Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are more symptomatic of the context in which new technologies can develop today given the support and space for collaboration and conversations across domains of expertise. The problems of format and technological obsolescence brought up by scholars at CPH is an important one; while colluding with proprietary software is inevitable in some cases, as suggested by the practitioners and researchers behind these platforms, keeping back-ups of material and being able to migrate out of a digital platform at any given point is also extremely essential. Such flexibility of material, and immense interoperability – across domains, formats and social-cultural contexts including language is something that researchers in DH, or for that matter in any field that actively engages with the internet and digital technologies would look for in the infrastructure that they build for research, scholarship and pedagogy. Infrastructure continues to remain a critical aspect knowledge production and dissemination, and it is imperative now more than ever, that it is addressed at the conceptual level of any research intervention involving digital technologies and knowledge production.</p>
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<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See section on <em>Archives</em> for a more detailed discussion on this issue: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See the section on <em>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</em> for more on this: <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="https://pan.do/ra">https://pan.do/ra</a></p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">http://pad.ma/</a></p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="http://studio.camp/">http://studio.camp/</a></p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://0xdb.org/">https://0xdb.org/</a></p>
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<h2>References</h2>
<p>Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", <em>Culture Machine</em>. Vol 12, 2011. <a href="http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440">http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440</a>.</p>
<p>Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34</a>.</p>
<p>Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5</a>.</p>
<p>Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In <em>Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria</em>. London: Duke University Press, 2008</p>
<p>Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' <em>New Media and Society</em>. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006</p>
<p>Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities</a>
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No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:07:06ZBlog EntryReading from a Distance – Data as Text
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the third among seven sections.</b>
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<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <strong>Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</strong></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
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The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on DH given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding <strong>[1]</strong> to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of social media such as Storify <strong>[2]</strong> or Scoop-it <strong>[3]</strong> have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm <strong>[4]</strong>. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation (Wieseltier 2013). But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts.
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<p>The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts '<em>massively addressable at different levels of scale</em>' as suggested by Michael Witmore (Witmore 2012: 324-327, emphasis as in the original). According to him: "[A]ddressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction" (Ibid. 325). This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, "textuality is addressability and further ... this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event" (Ibid. 326). What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book (Ibid. 327).</p>
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<h2>Of Texts and Hypertextuality</h2>
<p>An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of 'Bichitra' <strong>[5]</strong>, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore variorum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation. Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri <strong>[6]</strong>, Professor Emeritus, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata has been part of the process of setting up this variorum. According to him the most novel aspects of this platform, or as he calls it - 'integrated knowledge site' - are to do with these functions of cross-referencing and integration. The bibliography is a hyperlinked structure, which connects to all the different digital versions of a particular text (the most being 20 versions of a single poem). The notion of a bibliography has always evoked hypertextuality – the possibility to link and cross - reference texts, but with the advent of the digital, this possibility has been fully realized, as seen in the case of the hypertext <strong>[7]</strong>. For collation, the project team developed a unique software, titled 'Prabhed,' (meaning difference in Bengali) that helps to assemble text at three levels (a) chapter in novel, act/scene in drama, canto in poem; (b) para in novel or other prose, speech in drama, stanza in poem; (c) individual words.. For instance, you can choose a particular section of a book, poem or play - and compare its occurrences across different editions and versions of the work to note their matches and differences. If two paragraphs have been removed from one chapter, and put into another, that can be traced through the collation software. If a particular word has been omitted in a later edition, or if certain lines have been rearranged in a poem, these changes can be tracked <strong>[8]</strong>. What makes the search engine 'integrated' is not simply that it can search all Tagore's works in one go, but that it links up with the bibliography and thereby with the actual text of the works. It is interesting to note here the different changes that the text undergoes to become available for study on a digital platform, where it is amenable to intense searching and querying of this kind. It is now possible to search across a large corpus of texts, for minute changes in words or sentences, and ask questions of these in terms of their usage, instances and contexts of their occurrence, thus facilitating a kind of enquiry previously never undertaken in textual studies.</p>
<p>The project however is not without its challenges, as Prof. Chaudhuri further outlines. Working with Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India. In Bengali some work has been done in the form of a scientifically designed keyboard software called Avro, which stores all the conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics <strong>[9]</strong>. Developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned material in Indian languages remains a crucial issue for most digitization and archival initiatives in India. Other issues include the problem of vowel markers appearing before the consonants, even if phonetically they follow and are keyed in afterwards. To get the font and keyboard software to recognize this is a big challenge. The third challenge, especially in the case of works printed from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, is that there are vast differences in spelling; the same word can be spelt in different ways, and as there is no lexicon, one may not do any kind of general search. There is also the issue of a high degree of inflection in the language. A word may have a suffix (or, <em>vibhakti</em>) attached to it to indicate the case: one for the subject of the sentence, another for the object, another for the possessive case and so on. These are multiplied by the different forms of the verbs. The development of a lexicon in Bengali would be one of the ways to resolve many of these issues. However, as most people can only see and interact with the digital interface of Bichitra, and not really understand the process behind it, or the amount of work involved in making the platform work the way it does, funding for research and development, maintenance and sustainability is difficult to obtain. Backroom file management, which includes both paper and digital files remains a big but largely invisible task on such a platform. The total number of files generated from Bichitra is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, and many of these are offline files which would not even go on to the website. Hence while uploading the files, the basic groundwork for a retrieval system for different files serving different functions had already been laid, including the creation of a bibliography, which was a huge exercise in itself. The process of making text available as hypertext is labor that is invisibilized, and is rarely or never available to the end user.</p>
<p>Prof. Chaudhuri also speaks of ways in which the notion of textuality has been rendered differently through the use of the internet and digital technologies. Digital or electronic text has helped theorize better the notion of a fluid text - the fact that a text is never complete, but only bound between the covers of a book at a given point of several processes that are technological as well as social. The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change in the last several decades. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content and process seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the 'text' through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces.</p>
<p>Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker, further espouses this thought when she talks about the new possibilities of textual analysis of film that are now possible, particularly in terms of temporal control, first with the DVD, then the internet and now with online archival platforms like Indiancine.ma <strong>[10]</strong> and the Public Access Digital Media Archive, or Pad.ma <strong>[11]</strong>. The first is an online archive of Indian film from the pre-copyright era (so effectively before 1955), while the second is an archive of found and archival footage, images sound clips and unfinished films <strong>[12]</strong>. Both platforms allow the user to search through an array of material, view/listen to them download or embed them as links. They make available to users not just an online database for storage and retrieval but also a space to work with a range of materials in multiple video and audio formats and themes through annotations and referencing. The annotation tool is perhaps the most innovative aspect of these platforms, wherein a user can pause, isolate a section of a sequence and annotate it using a range of options and filters. The annotations are textual, in the form of comments, commentary and marginalia (in the case of Pad.ma) and can also link to other paraphernalia around the film object, such as posters, images, advertisements and other literature. Users can also contextualize material by adding transcripts, descriptions, events, keywords, and even locating the events in the video on a map. These have brought to the fore several questions on relevance, accessibility and ownership, as in the case of raw footage from films, and opened up possibilities for such materials to be re-contextualized by the reader in different ways. This layering of annotations around the film object also creates a new research object, or text that then necessitates new methods of studying it as well. As opposed to the earlier practice of the researcher/critic having to watch the film first and then comment or analyse it, and relying on memory to generate the scholarship, it is now possible to pause, analyse or read and come back to the film and annotate the text in several ways. What does this do to the film text - the process documenting the form is new, not cinema as a form itself – is a question that comes up quite prominently here. The computational aspect also is important here, given the vast amount of footage that is now available, which then requires better lexical indexing to compute and manage large data sets. This has been a constant endeavour with Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma as well.</p>
<p>As in the case of film, what becomes prominent here is the move to a digital text of some sort. One such example of a digital text perhaps is the hypertext. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited as the 'ideal text' by Barthes (Landow 2006: 2). Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the possibilities of multilinearity of a text that can be realised in the digital, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture. As such it is only the narrative, and not the form itself that is multi-linear in hypertext fiction.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Textual Criticism in the Digital</h2>
<p>But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the 'text' is manifested through practices of reading and writing (Barthes 1977). So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, in his book <em>Graphs, Maps and Trees</em> talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an 'abstract model of literary history' (Moretti 2005: 1). He describes this approach as "within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study." He further says, "Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a <em>specific kind of knowledge</em>: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005: 1, emphasis as in original). The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can 'facilitate' this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods of reading.</p>
<p>As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as not just a reference to volume but also its other aspects of data such as velocity, scope, and granularity among others significantly increases the ambit of what the term covers, with implications for new epistemologies and modes of research (Kitchin 2014). But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text – and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a certain form of cultural and literary production (Wilkens 2012). Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by working with corpora as opposed to select texts, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper (Fitzpatrik 2011). Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc. acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content (Ibid.). More importantly, it also points towards a change and diversity in the disciplinary method. Where close reading was once the only method by which a text became completely accessible to the reader, it is now possible to approach it through a set of processes, thus urging us to rethink the method of enquiry itself.</p>
<p>Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question we may still need to ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading (quoted earlier in this chapter) suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions (Kirschenbaum XXXX: 3). The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if DH can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located. The digital text, owing to the possibilities of ‘massive addressability,’ mentioned earlier is now more fluid and socialized. The renewed focus on the textual is most apparent in this manner of imagining the text, using the metaphor of a highly interlinked, networked and shared text. It also puts forth important questions then of how we understand technology a certain way, especially in the context of language and representation as an important factor of understanding new textual objects. Is technology a tool for textual analysis, or is it in inherent to our understanding of the nature of the text? Is the development of these methods of enquiry shaped by certain disciplinary requirements, and do they also challenge or create new conflicts for traditional methods of enquiry? The growth in the study of different media objects, such as video and cinema, and the advent of areas such as media studies, oral history, media archaeologies has further prompted concerns regarding the study of the digital object in these disciplines, and a rethinking of how we understand the notion of the text.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation." See: <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/">http://www.tei-c.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://storify.com/">https://storify.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.scoop.it/">http://www.scoop.it/</a></p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> For more on text mining see Lisa Guernsey in 'Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom,' in The New York Times, October 16, 2003 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print</a>. For more on data mining, distant reading, and the changing nature of reading practices see Matthew Kirschenbaum in 'The Remaking of Reading,' <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Interview with author, July 30, 2015.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as "a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." As quoted in George Landow, <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 2-12.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Bichitra, 'Collation Guide,' accessed on September 17, 2015, <a href="http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php">http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Omicron Lab, accessed September 17, 2015. <a href="https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html">https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://pad.ma/">http://pad.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> For more on these platforms see the section on DH institutions in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text". In <em>Image, Music, Text</em>. London: Fontana Press, 1977.</p>
<p>Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Texts" in <em>Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy</em>. New York: New York University Press, 2011.</p>
<p>Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "The Remaking of Reading". <a href="http://www.csee.umbc.edu/%7Ehillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf">http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob. 'Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,' <em>Big Data & Society</em>, 2014, April–June, pp. 1–12, DOI: 10.1177/2053951714528481.</p>
<p>Landow, George. <em>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Moretti, Franco. <em>Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History</em>, Verso, 2005.</p>
<p>Wieseltier, Leon, 'Crimes Against Humanities,' The New Republic, September 3, 2013, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism">http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism</a>.</p>
<p>Wilkens, Mathew. "Canons, Close Reading and the Evolution of Method". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities </em> Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.</p>
<p>Witmore, Michael. "Text: A Massively Addressable Object". In <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:58ZBlog EntrySilicon Plateau Vol-1
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-vol-1
<b>This book marks the beginning of an interdisciplinary artistic project, Silicon Plateau, the scope of which is to observe how
the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Silicon Plateau is a collaboration between T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. Volume 1 has been developed in collaboration with or-bits.com.</b>
<p> </p>
<iframe src="//e.issuu.com/embed.html#21775460/31640028" frameborder="0" height="400" width="600"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<h4>For us this series has a two-fold core. One the one side, there is the city of Bangalore, the trigger for various reflections about the way in which technology (old or emerging, as a service or as infrastructure) informs
the socio-cultural and political environment; a city that is fascinating to us not just because we are located here but also for its characteristic fast-paced development shaped by the IT-boom and related industries. On the other side, there are the arts and creative thinking, for us the languages, lenses and methods to be used for interpreting
technological developments and discussing their role and impact in the present time.</h4>
<p> </p>
<h4>Our hope is that of building a series based on tangible accounts revolving around the unresolved complexities inherent to the intermingling of the arts, technology and society, and in the context of local histories and occurrences rather than of global narratives and mass media constructs. Stories that for our audience, we hope, will be those of the encounters—fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient—that a wide variety of contributors will have had with this fascinating city.</h4>
<p> </p>
<h4>— <em>Marialaura Ghidini</em> and <em>Tara Kelton</em></h4>
<p> </p>
<h4>High-resolution PDF: <a href="https://archive.org/download/SiliconPlateau-Vol1/SiliconPlateauVol1_highres.pdf" target="_blank">Download</a> (31.8 MB)</h4>
<h4>Low-resolution PDF: <a href="https://archive.org/download/SiliconPlateau-Vol1/SiliconPlateauVol1_lowres.pdf" target="_blank">Download</a> (4.7 MB)</h4>
<p> </p>
<h4>T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: <a href="http://t-a-j.in/" target="_blank">Website</a></h4>
<h4>or-bits.com: <a href="http://www.or-bits.com/" target="_blank">Website</a></h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-vol-1'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-vol-1</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroSilicon PlateauArtWeb CulturesResearchPublicationsResearchers at Work2019-03-13T00:56:36ZBlog EntryA Question of Digital Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the second among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <strong>A Question of Digital Humanities</strong></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>The 'digital turn' has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. DH has emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technologies and the human being or subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. It has been variously called a phenomenon, field, discipline and a set of convergent practices – all of which are located at and/or try to understand the interaction between digital technologies and humanities practice and scholarship. DH in the Anglo-American context has seen several changes – from an early phase of vast archival initiatives and digitisation projects, to now exploring the role of big data and cultural analytics in literary criticism. Some of the early scholarship in the field illustrate the problems with defining and locating it within specific disciplinary formations, as the research objects, methods and locations of DH work cut across everything from the archive to the laboratory and social networking platforms. Largely interpreted as a way to explore the intersection of information technology and humanities, DH is grown to become an interdisciplinary field of research and practice today. However, DH is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Problem of Definition</h2>
<p>The question of what is DH has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of DH – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the 'digital' itself as integral to humanistic enquiry <strong>[1]</strong>. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions <em>for</em> the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s <em>of</em> digital humanities. Dave Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that "what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities." (Parry 2012)</p>
<p>Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in this report. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested threads or modes of thought, which will also inform larger concerns of the DH work at CIS:</p>
<ol>
<li>The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the <em>Nature of the book</em>, "any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another" (Johns 1998:3). The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this 'technologised history' of the humanities. Can DH therefore be an attempt to uncover such a history and bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here?<br />
<br /></li>
<li>The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with DH practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core DH concerns, they are not all 'digital humanists' or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not DH – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most DH research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in DH– where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno-social subject <strong>[2]</strong> as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.<br />
<br /></li>
<li>Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and DH. This comes with the perception of DH being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities disciplines to reinvent themselves to remain relevant in the present context, and one way to do this is by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. DH has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not or even need not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching DH as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of DH in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying DH works with and tries to address this particular formulation of the field.</li></ol>
<p>Locating these concerns in India, where the field of DH is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on DH still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says "Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others." (Latour 2002)</p>
<p>DH then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates DH from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of DH.
There are several questions therefore for DH - in terms of what it means and what it could do for our understanding of the humanities and technology. However the questions of DH still need to be made explicit. This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of the above thoughts a little further. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and DH. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.</p>
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<h2>The Problem of the Discipline</h2>
<p>Much has been said and written about DH as an emergent field or domain of enquiry; the plethora of departments being set up all across the world, well mostly the developed world is testimony to the claimed innovative and generative potential of the field. However as outlined in the introduction the problem of definition still persists and poses much difficulty in any attempts to engage with the field. While the predominant narrative seems to be in terms of defining what DH or to take it a step back, what the ‘digital’ allows you to do, with respect to enabling or facilitating certain kinds of research and pedagogy, a pertinent question still is that of what it allows you to ‘be’. DH has been alternatively called a method, practice and field of enquiry, but scholars and practitioners in many instances have stopped short of fully embracing it as a discipline. This is an interesting development given the rapid pace of its institutionalisation - from being located in existing Humanities or Computational Sciences and Media Studies departments it has now claimed functional institutional spaces of its own, with not just interdisciplinary research and teaching but also other creative and innovative knowledge-making practices. The field is slowly gaining credence in India as well, with several institutions pursuing research around core questions within the fold of DH.</p>
<p>So is the disciplinary lens inadequate to understand this phenomenon, or is it too early for a field still considered in some ways rather incipient. The growth of the academic discipline itself is something of a fraught endeavour; as debates around the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thought have established. To put it in a very simple manner, the story of academic disciplines is that of training in reason <strong>[3]</strong>. Andrew Cutrofello says "In academia, a discipline is defined by its methodological rigor and the clear boundaries of its field of inquiry. Methods or fields are criticized as being 'fuzzy' when they are suspected of lacking a discipline. In a more straightforwardly Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary power of academic disciplines can be located in their methods for producing docile bodies of different sorts" (Cutrofello 1994). The problem with defining DH may lie in it not conforming to precisely this notion of the academic discipline, and changing ideas of the function of critique when mediated by the digital, which is of primary concern for the humanities. DH has in many spaces also emerged as a manifestation of increasing interdisciplinarity and the blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplinary concerns.</p>
<p>However a prevalent mode of understanding DH has been in terms of the disciplinary concerns it raises for the humanities themselves; this works with the assumption that it is in fact a newer, improved version or extension of the humanities. The present mapping exercise too began with the disciplinary lens, but instead of enquiring about what DH is, it tried to explore what the ‘digital’ has brought to, changed or appropriated in terms of existing disciplinary concerns within the humanities and more broadly spaces and process of knowledge-making and dissemination. This thought stems from the premise that if we have to posit the digital itself as a state of being or existence, then we need to understand this new techno-social paradigm much better. Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University in Kolkata sees this as useful way of going about the problem of trying to arrive at a definition of the field – one is to understand the history of the term, from its inherited definition in the Anglo-American context, and distinguish it from what he calls the current state of ‘digitality’ – where all cultural objects are being now being conceived of as ‘digital’ objects. In the Indian context, the question of digitality also becomes important from the perspective of technological obsolescence - where there is a great resistance to discontinuing or phasing out the use of certain kinds of technology; either for lack of access to better ones or simply because one finds other uses for it. Prof. Dasgupta interestingly terms this a ‘culture of reuse’, one example of this being the typewriter which for all practical purposes has been displaced by the computer, but still finds favour with several people in their everyday lives. The question of livelihood is still connected to some of these technologies, so much so that they are very much a part of channels of cultural production and circulation, and even when they cease to become useful they have value as cultural artefacts. We therefore inhabit at the same time, different worlds, that of the analogue and digital, or as he calls it 'a multi-layered technological sphere'. The notion of the 'digital' is also multi-layered, with some objects being 'weakly digital', and others being so in a more pronounced manner. The variedness of this space, and the complexities or ‘degrees of use’ of certain technologies or technological objects is what further determines the nature of this space and makes it all the more difficult to define. DH itself has seen several phases in the West, but has seen no such movement or gradual evolution in India, where these phases exist simultaneously.</p>
<p>This is also true of most technology in underdeveloped world. This further complicates the questions of access to technology or the 'digital divide' which have been and still are some of the primary approaches concerning the pervasiveness of technology, particularly in the Global South. The need of the hour therefore is to be able to distinguish between this current state of digitality that we are in, and what is meant by the ‘Digital Humanities’. It may after all be a set of methodologies rather than a subject or discipline in itself– the question is how it would help us understand the ‘digital’ itself much better, and more critically, and the new kinds of enquiries it may then facilitate about this space we now inhabit. This, Prof. Dasgupta feels would go a long way in arriving at some definition of the field.</p>
<p>One of the important points of departure, from the traditional humanities and later humanities computing as mentioned earlier, has been the blurring of boundaries between content, method and object/s of enquiry. The ‘process’ has become important, as illustrated by the iterative nature of most DH projects and the discourse itself which emphasises the 'making' and 'doing' aspects of the research as much as the content itself. Tool-building as a critical activity rather than as mere facilitation is an important part of the knowledge-making process in the field (Ramsay 2010). In conjunction with this, Dr. Moinak Biswas, at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, thinks that the biggest changes have been in terms of the collaborative nature of knowledge production, based on voluntarily sharing or creating new content through digital platforms and archives, and crucially the possibility of now imagining creative and analytical work as not separate practices, but located within a single space and time. He cites an example from film, where now with digital platforms and processes ‘image’ making and critical practice can both be combined on one platform, like the online archive Indiancine.ma <strong>[4]</strong> or the Vectors journal <strong>[5]</strong> for example, to produce new layers of meaning around existing texts. The aspect of critique is important here, given that the consistent criticism about the field has been the ambiguity of its social undertaking; its critical or political standpoint or challenge to existing theoretical paradigms. Most of the interest around the term has been in very instrumental terms, as a facilitator or enabler of certain kinds of digital practice. While the move away from computational analysis as a technique to facilitate humanities research is apparent, the disciplinary concerns here still seem to be latched onto those of the traditional humanities. Questions about the epistemological concerns of DH itself therefore remain unanswered.</p>
<p>While reiterating some of these core questions within DH, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee at the Department of English, Presidency University and Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, at the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, speak of the problem of locating the field in India, where work is presently only being done in a few small pockets. The lack of a precise definition, or location within an established disciplinary context are some reasons why a lot of work that could come within the ambit of DH is not being acknowledged as such; conversely it also leads to the problem of projects on digitisation or studies of digital cultures/cyber cultures being easily conflated with DH . Related to this is the absence of self-claimed ‘digital humanists’, which makes it all the more difficult to identify the boundaries of their research and practice. More importantly, the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise around questions of the digital is also an obstacle to understanding what the field entails and the many possibilities it may offer in the Indian context. This they feel is a problem not just of DH, but in general for modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities that have adopted Western theoretical constructs. One could also locate in some sense the present crisis in disciplines within this problem. Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru explicate this issue when they talk about the absence of 'experience as an important category of the act of theorising' because of the privileging of ideas in Western constructs of experience (Guru and Sarukkai 2012). This is also reflective of the bifurcation between theory and praxis in traditional social sciences or humanities epistemological frameworks which borrow heavily from the West. DH while still to arrive at a core disciplinary concern seems to point towards the problem of this very demarcation by addressing the aspect of practice as a very focal point of its discourse.</p>
<p>Dr. Indira Chowdhury, oral historian and director of the Centre for Public History, who is also a faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore sees this as a favourable way of understanding how the field as such has emerged and what its various possibilities could be in terms of different disciplinary perspectives. She is uncertain that of its emergence as a response to a ‘crisis’ in the humanities as such. She recalls an instance of one of her students who went on to work on hypertext in Canada, several years ago, which for her seemed to be the first instance of something close to DH. The IT revolution in the early 2000s was a significant change, and there were several things that it enabled people to do, in terms of concordance, cross-referencing and getting around texts in certain ways. However, whether key questions in the humanities really changed, whether they were taken any further, is something yet to be explored because it is still such a new field, and one can only be speculative about it, she feels. It perhaps pushes for a new level of interdisciplinarity, and a different kind of collaborative space that the digital enables. What is significant and exciting for her as a historian, however, is that if history has to survive as a discipline, in schools but in terms of public spaces and discourse, it should actively engage with the digital. This not only presents significant challenges, in terms how to represent the past in the digital space, (in short problems with method) but also opens up new possibilities, for example with oral history and the advent of digital sound. The definition of the field will also evolve, as people define it from different spaces of practice and research, which Dr. Chowdhury feels is crucial to keeping it open and accessible by all.</p>
<p>Even from diverse disciplinary perspectives, at present the understanding of DH is that it facilitates new modes of humanistic enquiry, or enables one to ask questions that could not be asked earlier. As Prof. Dasgupta reiterates, it is no longer possible to imagine humanities scholarship outside of the ‘digital’ as such, as that is the world we inhabit. However, while some of the key conceptual questions for the humanities may remain the same, it is the mode of questioning that has undergone a change – we need to re-learn questioning or question-making within this new digital sphere, which is in some sense also a critical and disciplinary challenge. While this does not resolve the problem of definition, it does provide a useful route into thinking of what would be questions of DH, particularly in the Indian context.</p>
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<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> For a more detailed overview of the different phases of DH, see Patrik Svensson in 'Landscape of Digital Humanities,' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Volume 4 Number 1, 2010, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, <em>The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace</em>, Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET, <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558">http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> This is rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see <em>Conflict of the Faculties</em> (1798) by Immanuel Kant and <em>Discipline and Punish</em> (1975) by Michel Foucault.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php">http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php</a>.</p>
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<h2>References</h2>
<p>Cutrofello, Andrew, <em>Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance</em>, State University of New York Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, <em>The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory</em>, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012.</p>
<p>Johns, Adrian, <em>The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making</em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Latour, Bruno, 'Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,' Trans. Couze Venn, <em>Theory Culture Society</em>, 247-260, 2002.</p>
<p>Parry, Dave, 'The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism', <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a>.</p>
<p>Ramsay, Stephen, 'On Building,' 2010, <a href="http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html">http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a>
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