Chapter 2
Alternative Histories of Digital Humanities
Tracing the Archival Turn
Puthiya Purayil Sneha
The emergence of the field of digital humanities (DH) has marked a crucial development in the way interdisciplinary modes of research and knowledge production are imagined, particularly with respect to what is seen as the role of digital technologies and the internet in these spaces. The prevalent global discourse around DH is largely Anglocentric, with its antecedents in humanities computing and textual studies primarily located at American and European universities. This preponderance has invited criticism, even dismissal, owing to lack of a similar history in other locations and resonance with broader disciplinary concerns of the arts and humanities.1 The expansive scope of the field has made DH a catch-all term in many contexts, covering existing practices of research, pedagogy, practice, and scholarship located at the intersections of technology and the humanities. What this use obfuscates, however, is a rich history of concepts, methods, and practices that seem to have come together at this particular moment to be identified as DH.
The archive is one such space where a lot of early and ongoing DH conversations have been located, in India and globally. Archiving continues to inform the development of the field, as its research and practice depend on creation and access to corpora of cultural content and, importantly, on the diversity of their use in both academic and creative practice. Even as state archives continue as remnants of a colonial past, the “decolonization of the archive” has become an important part of understanding how cultural and technological histories are produced today. This undertaking takes several forms: interrogating the colonial legacy of the archive, questioning its commodification, and “recognizing that the seemingly neutral Western criteria and classifications are in fact tools for maintaining the role of an archive as an imperial project of domination and affirmation” (Ištok, Decolonising Archives, 5). This imagination of state archives continues to prevail, though they also render those spaces as active sites of politics, resistance, and alterity.
There are other archival mechanisms developing with different kinds of stakeholders, from private institutions to individuals, with access to diverse avenues of funding. These changes have been contemporaneous with the growth of the internet (an archive in itself), facilitating infrastructure from open-source content management systems to web annotation tools. These developments present advances in methods of preservation, curation, and dissemination, and specific concerns related to access, infrastructure, and linguistic barriers. This chapter will discuss some pertinent efforts and concerns in the field, drawing on a report on mapping initiatives in DH in India and conversations on archival practices in different institutions. It will seek to understand the politics of archiving in a postcolonial and now digital context and how these myriad histories of digitization continue to shape growth and create tensions in fields like DH in the global context today.
Digitization and the Archival Turn: From State to Personal Archives
Over the last decade, there has been much discussion around the “archival turn” in various disciplines. Eric Ketelaar, drawing on a rich history of work across several disciplines, including social sciences, humanities, literary and media studies, as well as creative practice, summarizes this in two ways; as “a move from archives as sources to archives as epistemological sites and the outcome of cultural practices,” and “the archive as a metaphor, often leading to ontological reframing of the archive” (Ketelaar, “Archival Turns and Returns,” 228). He further elaborates how these archival turns in different disciplines, along with a number of turns—linguistic, social, performative, and representational—within archivistics itself, has led to the adoption of concepts from other domains, thus reconfiguring the traditional understandings of the archive. He characterizes this as an “archival return,” “because archivistics may consider these reconceptualisations both as a coming back and as a return in exchange for the use of some of its own concepts by other disciplines” (240).
The move of the archive from subject to process, from the archive “as it is” to “phenomena as archives,” owing to this reimagination of the object has led to much progress in the theory and practice of archives. In his discussion of the interplay between the formal and the trace archive, Geoffrey Bowker (“The Archive”) further emphasizes the performative aspects of the latter, as an archive mediating our experiences of the past through our lived experiences in the present. The role of the internet in this process of mediation has been significant, through the advent of large-scale digitization and the emergence of born-digital archives. With the proliferation of different forms of digital recording technologies and better access to the internet and devices such as mobile phones, it is much easier to document, collect, store, and circulate content in real time, urging us to rethink what should be the nature of dynamic, born-digital archives today.
Digitization therefore forms an essential yet sometimes invisible aspect of the discourse around fields like DH, digital cultures, and cultural analytics, as much research and practice in these fields depends on the creation and availability of digitized corpora of cultural content. Digitization projects undertaken at archives and other cultural and memory institutions become particularly significant in this context. A lot of early work in DH was devoted to digital archiving and curation, and it continues to be an important thematic focus of the field today. Though primarily undertaken with the objective of preservation, the digital turn has brought about a change in the nature and scope of archives by promoting better public access to and use of archival material. The digitization of existing corpora of cultural content—whether located in state archives, collaborative repositories, or private collections—is an important part of such archival initiatives.
In India, as in many parts of the world, the conception of the archive has largely remained rooted in colonial contexts of administration and governance, which continue to define much archival practice and scholarship even today. While, as Terry Cook (“Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community,” 95) suggests, there have been several “paradigm shifts” in archival practice, moving from “juridical legacy to cultural memory to societal engagement to community archiving,” its colonial legacies have shaped the practice and politics of these transformations, both culturally and technologically. Thus the concept of the archive still has a strong relationship with the exercise of power within the nation-state, especially visible now in efforts to unpack and decolonize such framing of digitization projects.
Ann Stoler captures these contradictions in her description of archives as “condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources. These colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves” (Stoler, “Pulse of the Archive,” 20). Large state institutions in India, such as the National Archives and various state archives, have been the traditional stakeholders in this space, hence also in control of its access and interpretation, which is still drawn from colonial legacies and indeed its imbrications of caste, class, and gender. Histories of archival practice in India are therefore not homogeneous, nor are practices of digitization. There are substantial points of difference between them, as illustrated by some of the initiatives outlined here.
The advent of the internet and digital technologies in the last decade or so, however, has led to a shift in this particular imagination of the archive as primarily a repository space for history and memory, with the digital archive often blurring the line between the two.2 The archival object has been transformed greatly with digitization: apart from text, the ambit of archival work now includes images, audiovisual materials, oral histories, performance, and works of new media. Traditional challenges of archival management, such as storage, curation, and dissemination, persist in the digital domain as well, along with new questions arising from digitized or born-digital content—questions, especially, related to access, infrastructure, and language. A lot of new initiatives are focused on developing accessible, networked, and dynamic archives that can address these challenges.
Some efforts in digitization and collection emerging from this milieu are state initiatives such as the National Digital Library of India (https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/), the National Cultural Audiovisual Archive (NCAA) at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA, http://ncaa.gov.in/repository/), and the National Museum Collections’ National Portal and Digital Repository (http://museumsofindia.gov.in/repository/page/digitization_initiative). There are also archival activities at universities and academic institutions like the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) with its Virtual Museum of Images and Sound (VMIS: http://vmis.in), Jadavpur University, and Ambedkar University, besides private, individual, and collaborative efforts such as the Indian Memory Project, the 1947 Partition Archive, Indian Cinema, and the video archive Pad.ma.3
These projects, however, do not present an exhaustive picture of digitization and archival efforts in arts and humanities in India, or indeed the scope of DH work there. Access to archives, as well as the ability to archive, is still very much limited to certain sections of people, as illustrated by the present landscape where a majority of these archival efforts have been made by mainstream institutions and dominant voices. Rather, it would be pertinent to locate these within larger histories of digitization in India, which trace different trajectories through efforts in education, science and technology, and cultural heritage.
In education in particular, there has been a strong emphasis on the use of digital technologies and the internet by the state. This can be illustrated by the introduction of information communication technologies (ICTs) in education in the 1980s, through the growth of large-scale digital educational platforms, state-led MOOCs, learning apps and “smart” classrooms, to collaborative spaces for information, research, and publication (including now a number of private-sector initiatives) which have urged the development of new curricula and new forms of digital pedagogy.4 The adoption of digital technologies in library and information sciences is also an important part of this history, especially in terms of developing technical standards for cataloging and metadata.5
Galleries and museums, especially public institutions such as the National Museum, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, have also focused on digitizing their collections, to facilitate better content management and wider public outreach. Arts and culture archiving, in particular, has seen immense growth in recent years, given the rise of a number of institutions such as Osian (https://www.osianama.com/), the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (http://acparchives.com/), Asia Art Archive (https://aaa.org.hk/en), Sahapedia (https://www.sahapedia.org/), and India Foundation for the Arts (http://indiaifa.org/), which have been involved not only in archival work but in research, documentation, and outreach.
The list can be extended to other institutions such as the American Institute of Indian Studies—one of the earliest institutions to digitize its collections—the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC, http://www.cssscal.org/), the Centre for Public History at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology (http://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/), and the Sarai program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (https://www.csds.in/sarai). Archival work, media practice, and research at these institutions (among others) have contributed to both a critical and a theoretical understanding of the field, and to varied practical engagement with the creation and management of archives.
More recently, several efforts by individuals and private institutions have added to digital cultural archiving in India today. The manner in which such digital transition is envisaged in policy reform has been widely criticized. The move toward a neoliberal model of education and governance has often failed to account for contextual specificities, especially in the case of arts and humanities education and practice, and its histories in India.6 It is important, therefore, to locate the developing discourse around DH in India within these intertwining histories of the digital and the humanities. Also, while only a few organizations (mostly universities) and individuals have actively identified with the term “digital humanities,” many extant digital initiatives in arts and humanities find resonances in some of the larger concerns of the global discourse around DH. These include the preservation of cultural content, wider public access, and diversity in the use of content, developing new methods of digital pedagogy, changes in the forms of research and scholarship, creative practice using digital technologies, and the felt need for a critical lens to understand this digital turn.
The renewed focus on digitization for access, rather than for preservation alone, has resulted in several technological and cultural shifts—in particular, to understanding how the transition to the digital also determines the creation and consumption of the cultural content itself, especially in the case of born-digital artifacts. The NCAA at IGNCA is an example of a large-scale archival, digitization, and outreach effort to create a comprehensive collection of the Indian audiovisual cultural heritage. Working with over twenty-six partner institutions in its pilot phase, the archive has digitized and made available online approximately 30,000 hours of unpublished, noncommercial cultural audiovisual resources. Its targeted objectives also include the “formulation of digitization and metadata standards for the project in line with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model, and helping build capacities in preservation, cataloguing, metadata creation and retrieval of audiovisual resources” (http://ncaa.gov.in/repository/common/about). The shift “from digitization for preservation to digitization for access” has been one of the significant challenges of this project, given the various anxieties that exist around the digital medium, as also around open access to cultural content on the internet. The urgency posed by technological obsolescence of audiovisual content (playback media becomes obsolete a lot sooner than paper) has resulted in a strong impetus for digital archiving, even as it may have undermined traditional analog archival practice.7
A project on this scale also reflects the broader concerns of memory institutions about digitization and open access: apprehensions regarding not only the technical aspects of digitization but also ownership and control, privacy and misuse of cultural content. The growing volume of content also indicates the need for benchmarking of standards, as archival practices vary significantly across the country. It is particularly important to design robust digitization and metadata standards for a diversity of cultural content, and to navigate issues of copyright, especially for traditional cultural expressions (TCE) and intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Opening up cultural content in this manner and devising standards of digitization and metadata creation also speak to some of the larger concerns of infrastructure and sustainability around digital archives in India. The cultural and linguistic diversity of the land makes for technological challenges posed by the varied forms of the content, often difficult to access and use in innovative ways. State initiative is imperative for the sustenance of such efforts in the long term.
Apart from large state institutions, universities have perhaps been the oldest sites of archival practice in India and many other parts of the world, and many have been keenly working toward digitizing their collections. The Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive at CSSSC is one of the oldest collections of visual and textual materials from colonial Bengal. While there were efforts in microfilming and digitizing content as early as 1993, a good part of these collections is also available online as part of a collaboration with Savifa at the University of Heidelberg (https://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisch/fachinfo/suedasien/zeitschriften/bengali/overview.html). The School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University has undertaken several archival and digitization efforts for over a decade (http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/view_department.php?deptid=135). It also hosts Bichitra, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s work (http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php), which has the distinction of being one of the early DH projects in India.8 More recently, the focus on oral histories and community archiving has been brought to the fore through spaces like the Centre for Community Knowledge at Ambedkar University, Delhi (https://aud.ac.in/centre-for-community-knowledge) and the Centre for Public History at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology (http://www.srishtimanipalinstitute.in/centers-and-labs/center-for-public-history).
Importantly, the creation and use of digital cultural archives are also dependent on navigating new ways of using digital tools and understanding their role in research, practice, and pedagogy. With the proliferation of devices like the smartphone, and the growth of social media and a culture of sharing, documentation and circulation have become quicker, easier, and more diverse. This has fostered the growth of many private archival initiatives, often by individuals and institutions other than universities, further transforming the landscape of archival work in India. With the rise of more niche and private archival spaces today, questions of privacy, ownership, and access have acquired importance, as a lot of content is personal and/or a documentation of everyday affairs and general problems, rather than relating to specific historical events, figures, or cultural forms. Some examples include the Indian Memory Project (https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/), Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW, https://www.sparrowonline.org/), People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI, https://ruralindiaonline.org/), the 1947 Partition Archive (https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/), Indian Cinema (https://indiancine.ma/), and the video archive Pad.ma (http://pad.ma/). Among institutional archives in this category is the India Foundation for the Arts Archive (http://indiaifa.org/about-us/ifa-archive.html).
A platform like the Indian Memory Project illustrates how the conditions of Web 2.0 have been conducive to the creation of new archival efforts. The home page (https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/about/) describes the project as “a visual and narrative based online archive that traces the histories and identities of the Indian Subcontinent, via photographs (and sometimes letters) found in personal archives.” It also mentions that narratives are “curated, edited, corrected and if required rewritten to suit its format.” It was founded in 2010 by Anusha Yadav, a photographer and graphic designer, who went on to set up “The Memory Company” (http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/memorycompany/), an interdisciplinary space for visual arts practice. As of February 2021, the archive featured 200 curated stories, framed around photographs and letters from the predigital era.
The project demonstrates how the nature of archives has shifted in the digital moment to become more ephemeral, personal, and connected to the everyday. It began as a Facebook group to crowdsource heritage photographs for a book project on Indian weddings. The call resulted in a rich collection of photographs and, importantly, stories about the Indian subcontinent from different perspectives, contributing to multiple histories. It has grown in popularity, finding resonance with diverse sets of users in academia, media, and creative industries in India and abroad.
As with the other institutional archives mentioned earlier, better access to archival content was one of the key motivations behind setting up the project, and the various affordances of social media and digital platforms to crowdsource, organize, curate, tag, and circulate offered that possibility. A privately initiated, largely volunteer-driven archive poses significant challenges in terms of sustainability and diversification of content—for example, to incorporate visual material other than photographs, or content in Indian languages which require a higher level of technological and infrastructural support. The project also lays great emphasis on the aesthetic and creative process, the founder herself being a creative practitioner.9
Importantly, the project indicates how the concept of the archive has transformed with the advent of the digital. It has become participatory and generative in nature by creating “prosumers,” who not only consume or imbibe the site’s content but also have a role in its production. As Katja Mueller notes in her study of the project (“Between Lived and Archived Memory”), the archive has a stake in the production of history, but at the same time, owing to its participatory nature, it blurs the line between history writing and commemorative practices, prompting a redefinition of how we understand the concept of lived and archived memory and, indeed, the concept of the archive itself.
Archival labor emerges as an important question here, both in terms of working with the original analog content and effecting its transition to the digital. From sourcing and acquiring new content, accessioning and digitizing (including physically scanning analog material, cataloging, and creating metadata), to maintaining the quality of preservation and developing new methods of outreach while navigating concerns of rights, privacy, and censorship—the labor involved is tremendous but often remains largely invisible. The effort also requires a diversity of skills: a knowledge of coding, management of a Wordpress-based website, video editing of promotional material, and handling Google analytics, the Adobe media editing suite, Creative Commons licensing, and so on.
Digitization and metadata standards for the NCAA project were also developed over multiple iterations, as also building its knowledge about intellectual property rights, in order to create a scalable and robust model that could be replicated by partner institutions, with greatly diverse modes of access and varying technological expertise. The Indian Ministry of Culture has implemented the software program Jatan to digitize, for online viewing, the museum collections in its charge. But there are also specific software projects for individual archives such as Collective Access (https://www.collectiveaccess.org/), which hosts the digital collections of the Delhi Memory Project at Ambedkar University; or Pandora (https://pan.do/ra), which runs Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma. Tools for annotation and referencing, clustering, pattern recognition, storytelling, and data visualization offered by these platforms, and their integration with social media, provide new ways of accessing and cocreating the archival content. Such archives are perpetually in the making, in tune with the nature of the digital medium. Yet offline modes of accessing and activating the collections, especially for community archiving and public history projects, remain a crucial aspect of their wider outreach and engagement.
Training and capacity building in digital archiving practices would, then, be a key factor here. Many of the institutions mentioned earlier, such as AIIS, IGNCA, the National Museum, Jadavpur University, CSSSC, and certain state archives, do offer such training. Capacities can also be developed around specific institutional interests and requirements: however difficult to accomplish, they need to be benchmarked to some degree (with heed to specificities of form, format, language, etc.) so that they may be replicated across different kinds of organizations or individual projects, avoiding duplication of efforts and resources. Given their dependence on digital corpora, the emergence of DH as a field, and new forms of digital pedagogy in general, might offer the conditions and contexts for these conversations. That would aid the creation of archival tools, platforms, and infrastructures whereby different kinds of memory institutions might be able to speak to each other.
Alternative Histories of DH
The emergence of these new sites of archival practice, and specifically digital archives as spaces of resistance and alterity, contribute to developing new ways of understanding what could be multiple and alternative histories of DH. As an interdisciplinary field, DH also offers the possibility of engaging with alternative practices at the margins of mainstream academia and creative practice, thereby encouraging collaborative work across different domains of expertise; but the manner of its formalization over the years may be seen as shoring up some of these efforts within existing disciplinary or institutional frameworks. A panel at the international conference DH2017 in Montreal captured some efforts in tracing such alternate histories of DH in many academic fields and wider activities: digital literary studies and new historicism, screen cultures of media studies, steam punk fandoms, jugaad or practices of repurposing, or explicit complications of the more widely known history of humanities computing and DH (Whitson et al., “Alternate Histories of the Digital Humanities”). By locating these histories of DH outside the globally more accepted origin stories (and their contextualization within the American university), these practices and advances also intervene in efforts at constructing a linear narrative of an imminent field, instead opening up possibilities through efforts already underway in different disciplinary, creative, and informal contexts.
The archival turn and return can be seen as precisely such an effort to complicate existing linear histories of DH, where the creation of corpora of media content, and tools and methods to work with such content, is most germane to the interpretation. Archives, or digital repositories and collections, form an important part of the development of DH in India; but the efforts continue to be informed by the larger politics of history writing and knowledge production in the country, which precede the digital moment. The invisibilities and oppressions within colonial archives—of race, religion, caste, gender, language, sexuality, and disability—also highlight important and continuing asymmetries of power in how we access, document, collect, record, and circulate material in both online and offline worlds. The prospect of the “postcolonial digital archive,” opening up a space to resist and rethink dominant, colonial, and often patriarchal factors of knowledge production—and thereby opening up decentered perspectives—emerges as an alternative to traditional forms of archival practice; but it too needs to be viewed through a critical lens to assess its new epistemic possibilities.10
Elaborating on the affordance of digital media to lend itself to “both the sensible and the intelligible,” P. Thirumal and Sai Komarraju (“Listening to the Sonorous”) explain how the “sensible” offers new ways to understand the embodiment of caste, as illustrated in their study of performative practices built around listening, whereas textual or visual media are still shaped by dominant caste-led conceptual forms of representation. Digital archiving, then, becomes a political practice to counter such hegemonies of knowledge production through its contribution to anticaste discourse—not only by turning a critical gaze on existing practices, but also by harnessing this prolific moment of digital content creation, even through activism.
Reiterating these omissions of nondominant caste struggles from the archive, Padmini Ray Murray, while discussing the democratic and subversive potential of the digital archive, treats it with restraint, lest it inevitably replicate Western modes of knowledge production at the expense of local political realities. Her specific context is the need for, and the attempts to build, an inclusive and expansive feminist digital archive that effectively taps the contemporary digital momentum around gender and sexuality in India. She notes that a “meaningful act of digital archiving therefore must be performed at the level of epistemological understanding, ontological authenticity, and scaffolded appropriately by interface and code in order to interrogate the existing archive as well as to expand its scope” (Ray Murray, “Writing New Sastras,” 106).11 Creating digital archival content on gender and sexuality,12 addressing linguistic barriers, and facilitating better accessibility for persons with disabilities are other much-needed areas of work in India. To reiterate, such archival efforts are yet to emerge because access to archives and the ability to archive are still greatly limited by several sociopolitical realities.
The recent move from state institutions to the proliferation and visibility of personal archives (again, not a linear or straightforward process) is also indicative of a complex history of technology, sketched through the myriad forms of documentation, access, and circulation that they entail. This has been further complicated by the internet, where now even traditional institutions are urged to open up their collections online. The workings of a completely born-digital archive, begun through crowdsourcing pictures on social media, are vastly different from those of archives of a traditional memory institution like the NCAA, but they both offer an interesting interplay of how we imagine mainstream and alternative archival spaces. Understanding how they engage with questions of content creation, digitization, access, labor, skill building, pedagogy, and outreach also provides an insight into the adoption of new concepts within archivistics. These multiple, intertwined histories of archival practice and digitization form a crucial aspect of the total history of a field such as DH, which is premised on working with digital content. In these multiple and nuanced digitization practices, one may locate alternative histories of the field, as well as new possibilities.
These concerns reflect the larger global discourse around DH as well. Much work in the field has been informed by, and continues to depend on, the creation and access to digital corpora and the tools to engage with them in innovative ways. DH scholarship and practice therefore need to be located within, and cognizant of, the varied practices of digitization and their bearing on the creation and circulation of cultural content, creative practice, and pedagogy. They would thereby outline the many alternative trajectories of fields like DH, outside the familiar origin stories of the Anglo-American context, but at the same time identifying with some of its core epistemological and ontological concerns. A broader effort at mapping these archival initiatives would be helpful by outlining the scope for digital knowledge production at large and in the arts and humanities in particular. While this might afford the opportunity of interrogating and rectifying knowledge gaps, it also provides opportunities for a more nuanced and creative engagement with the digital moment.
Notes
The author would like to thank Anusha Yadav and Irfan Zuberi for the insights on their projects, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay for valuable inputs in writing this chapter.
This critique of Anglophone DH, and the general lack of diversity in the field, has been growing over the last several years, with the emergence of work such as postcolonial and feminist DH (Bordalejo and Risam, Intersectionality in the Digital Humanities; Risam, New Digital Worlds), and the development of initiatives such as South Asian DH (Risam and Gairola, South Asian Digital Humanities) and Global Outlook DH. As Fiormonte (“Towards a Cultural Critique of the Digital Humanities”) notes, the problem is not only due to a difference of methodological approaches and a (perceived) lack of theoretical framing around tools and platforms, it is also due to limitations posed by the geopolitical and the cultural-linguistic composition of the discipline.
While delineating the connections between the archive and its historiographical functions, Wolfgang Ernst (“Radically De-Historicising the Archive”) notes the changes that digitization helps to catalyze, thereby promoting new readings of the archive. Also see Mueller (“Between Lived and Archived Memory”) on how the digital helps mediate lived and archived memory.
URLs for all these sites are provided below.
For more on ICTs in education, see Saith, Vijayabaskar, and Gayathri, ICTs and Indian Social Change. For more examples of digital education platforms, see National Mission in Education through ICT (NMEICT, http://mhrd.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-0), National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL, https://nptel.ac.in/), National Knowledge Network (NKN, http://nkn.gov.in/), and National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER, https://nroer.gov.in/welcome). For state-led MOOCs, see https://swayam.gov.in/about. For learning apps and smart classrooms, see Tata Trusts and IT for Change, ICT Implementation in School Education.
For more on this see Kalra, “Efforts towards Digitization of Libraries.” See also Shodh Sindhu: Consortium for Higher Education Electronic Resources (https://www.inflibnet.ac.in/ess/).
See Nishant Shah, “Beyond Infrastructure,” for a more detailed exploration of how the rubric of infrastructure building has been a core concern of policy reforms but has also led to an effacing of the intertwined histories of science, humanities, and technology studies.
This point, like many others in this account of the project, emerged from an interview with Irfan Zuberi, project manager, NCAA, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, on July 24, 2018.
For a detailed account of Bichitra, see Chaudhuri, Bichitra. See also Sneha, “Reading from a Distance,” in Mapping Digital Humanities in India.
These points emerged from an interview with Anusha Yadav at Mumbai on September 28, 2017.
For more on this see Roopika Risam’s work on the development of postcolonial digital archives and how such archives inform DH discourse by offering intersectional perspectives from the Global South (Risam, New Digital Worlds; “Revising History and Re-authouring the Left”).
Ray Murray further outlines some features of such an open, networked, and accessible archive, which includes making it community-led and voluntary; creating interoperable metadata schemas while accounting for linguistic and conceptual differences; and allowing participatory and serendipitous ways of finding, creating, and sharing content.
For some recent work on this see the Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism (QAMRA, https://qamra.in/).
Bibliography
Bordalejo, Barbara, and Roopika Risam, eds. Intersectionality in the Digital Humanities. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2019.
Bowker, Geoffrey. “The Archive.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010), 212–14. doi: org/10.1080/14791421003775733.
Chaudhuri, Sukanta, ed. Bichitra: The Making of an Online Tagore Variorum. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015.
Cook, Terry. “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms.” Archival Science 13, no. 2 (2013): 95–120.
Ernst, Wolfgang. “Radically De-Historicising the Archive: Decolonising Archival Memory from the Supremacy of Historical Discourse.” In Decolonising Archives, edited by Rado Ištok, 9–16. L’Internationale. 2016. https://e-artexte.ca/id/eprint/30628/1/03-decolonisingarchives_pdf-final.pdf.
Fiormonte, Domenico. “Towards a Cultural Critique of the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 438–58. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Ištok, Rado. Decolonising Archives. L’Internationale Online. 2016. https://e-artexte.ca/id/eprint/30628/1/03-decolonisingarchives_pdf-final.pdf.
Kalra, H. P. S. “Efforts towards Digitization of Libraries in India: Problems and Prospects.” International Information and Library Review 33, no. 2–3 (2001): 197–204.
Ketelaar, Eric. 2017. “Archival Turns and Returns.” In Research in the Archival Multiverse, edited by Anne J. Gilliland, Sie McKemmish, and Andrew J. Lau, 228–68. Victoria: Monash University, 2017.
Mueller, Katja. “Between Lived and Archived Memory: How Digital Archives Can Tell History.” Digithum 19 (2017): 11–18.
Ray Murray, Padmini. “Writing New Sastras.” In New Feminisms in South Asian Social Media, Film, and Literature: Disrupting the Discourse, edited by Sonora Jha and Alka Kurian, 103–15. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018.
Risam, Roopika. “Revising History and Re-authouring the Left in the Postcolonial Digital Archive.” Left History 18, no. 2 (2015): 35–46. https://lh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/lh/article/view/39310/35610.
Risam, Roopika, and Rahul K. Gairola, eds. South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations across Technology’s Cultural Canon. London: Routledge, 2020.
Saith, Ashwani, M. Vijayabaskar, and V. Gayathri, eds. ICTs and Indian Social Change: Diffusion, Poverty, Governance. New Delhi: Sage, 2008.
Shah, Nishant. “Beyond Infrastructure: Re-humanizing Digital Humanities in India.” In Between the Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, 95–106. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Sneha, Puthiya Purayil. Mapping Digital Humanities in India. CIS Papers 2016.02. Bengaluru: Centre for Internet and Society, 2016. https://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india.
Stoler, Ann Laura. “The Pulse of the Archive.” In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, 17–54. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Tata Trusts and IT for Change. ICT Implementation in School Education in India. Bengaluru: IT for Change, 2018.
Thirumal, P., and Sai Amulya Komarraju. 2018. “Listening to the Sonorous: Digital Archiving as Political Practice.” SummerHill: IIAS Review 22, no. 1 (2018): 1–10. doi:http://iias.ac.in/ojs/index.php/summerhill/article/view/113.
Whitson, Roger, Amy Earhart, Steven Jones, Tara McPherson, and Padmini Ray Murray. “Alternate Histories of the Digital Humanities: A Short Paper Panel Proposal.” DH2017, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, 2017.