Chapter 14
No “Making,” Not Now
Decolonizing Digital Humanities in South Asia
Dibyadyuti Roy and Nirmala Menon
In a polemical introduction to the updated 2019 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities, Matthew Gold and Laura Klein write: “Our principal task may no longer be to define or defend digital humanities to skeptical outsiders, but instead to translate the subtleties of our research to others within the expanded field—a project that can help DH matter beyond itself” (Gold and Klein, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, 13). By extending Gold and Klein’s contentions, this chapter interrogates the notion of who or what still remain “skeptical outsiders” within the domain of digital humanities (DH). It then uses this inquiry as a springboard to launch a new investigation into why, even after several years of academic activity, South Asian digital humanities leaves only a faint imprint in postcolonial spaces both on humanities scholars and on their practices.
As discussions abound in mainstream Anglo-American DH about the need to move away from conceptualizations of DH as the “big tent . . . [and] help DH matter beyond itself” (Gold and Klein, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, xii), we ask pointedly if an obliviousness to the existence of the “big tent” potentially implies an exclusion from the events that occur within it. In other words, how important is it for South Asian humanities researchers, pedagogues, and practitioners to identify as “digital humanists” to participate in and contribute to the global project of digital humanities? Conversely, can South Asian (and more specifically Indian) digital humanities, with its specificities and limitations—such as the technological divide, lack of a linguistic unifier, and unequal educational structures—develop a new theory and praxis for DH that is “an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which . . . print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated” (Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0)?
In this chapter, we do not claim to offer definitive answers to any of these questions, but to foreground and explore the ontological and epistemic value of such inquiries, within the ambit of what constitutes global DH. Pertinently, many of these issues were made particularly evident to the authors of this chapter, as coorganizers of the inaugural conference in June 2018 of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI), now renamed DHARTI (Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations).
Therefore, our chapter locates the inaugural DHAI conference within a genealogy of South Asian, and more specifically Indian, DH interventions, which may act as a basis for envisioning the future of postcolonial and indeed global DH. We consider some of the reasons for the resistance to institutionalizing DH within the larger Indian university systems and conclude that the causes are historical but perhaps also arise from the embedded rigidity and regimentation of university curricula across disciplines. DH, as defined by its purported interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary character, proves a tough sell within Indian university ecosystems, often constrained by their colonial origins and the limitations of a postcolonial social imaginary. We explore the contextual issues of digital affordances in postcolonial spaces through examining projects presented at the DHAI 2018 conference along with representative digital interventions beyond the conference’s ambit, and conduct what we may term a “distant reading” of DH in India. We conclude by suggesting the need for a postcolonial pluralistic digital humanities that is deeply invested in cross-disciplinary exchanges and pedagogical innovation—one that interrogates hegemonic assumptions about both postcolonialism and digital humanities.
While DH has been institutionalized for the better part of a decade in Anglo-American settings (Brennan, “Digital-Humanities Bust”), it has been an elusive presence at postcolonial sites. With respect to India, we may take two notable projects to illustrate the point: the difference between them might be said to underlie the history of digital humanities in India. Project Madurai (https://www.projectmadurai.org/), a digitized collection of ancient Tamil classics, is one of the earliest examples of what we now call digital humanities. It was developed as early as 1998 and released its e-texts in TamilScript Code for Information Exchange or TSCII, then migrated in 2004 into Unicode Tamil. The other is the landmark Bichitra project, a digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works created and maintained by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University (http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/).1 The two projects originated in significantly different ways. Project Madurai was developed by a group of independent scholars: conceptualized, built, and disseminated as a scholarly labor in the peripheries of educational institutions. Bichitra, on the other hand, was developed and hosted by the robust network of academics and scholars at Jadavpur University’s School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR). At the present time, the National Digital Library (https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/) is a huge project led by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur; whereas a small community in Rajasthan is indexing, digitizing, and thus preserving Siraiki, a language that traveled during the partition of India in 1947, was almost forgotten, but is now getting a new lease on life.
We start with these two examples to underline that the history of recognizable digital humanities projects (even if they do not self-identify as DH) has had varied institutional, cultural, and independent trajectories. Apart from these, there are also the Indian Memory Project (https://www.indianmemoryproject.com/), the Kerala State Central Library Rare Books Online (http://103.251.43.202/rarebooks/index.php), and a similar site of the West Bengal State Central Library (http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/), all examples of preservation, history, and memory. Beyond South Asian borders, ventures that address South Asian issues (albeit situated in Anglo-American frameworks) are the 1947 Partition Archive (https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/), started at George Washington University, Washington, DC, and now maintained by the Stanford University Digital Repository; and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA: https://www.saada.org/), emerging out of a charitable organization based in Philadelphia. SAFIVA (https://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisch/fachinfo/suedasien/Welcome.html), developed by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), but hosted by Heidelberg University, and the recently launched mobile application Safarnama (Android) covering the historical sites of Delhi, led by Lancaster University, are examples of Indian DH partnered with international universities that are often hosted and located at the latter because of their better digital infrastructure and access.
Among institutions, we see DH-related projects and research in public universities such as Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in its SCTR and Media Lab; the Centre for DH at Savitribai Phule University, Pune; the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad; Presidency University, Kolkata; Aligarh Muslim University; and many of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), such as the DH research group at IIT Indore (https://www.iiti.ac.in/) and India’s first MSc (master’s) and PhD programs in DH at IIT Jodhpur (https://iitj.ac.in/dh/). A few private universities, such as Flame University in Pune, the Srishti Institute of Art and Design in Bengaluru, BITS Pilani, Ashoka University, and Shiv Nadar University, are also engaged in various models of DH studies.
In “Digital Humanities in India: Pedagogy, Publishing and Practices,” Nirmala Menon and Shanmugapriya T. conduct a survey of more than fifty public university programs and their curricula, and develop a data visualization of these courses of study. They conclude that
The data visualization shows that established mainstream courses are occupying large spaces such as English, economics, psychology, politics, philosophy and so forth. Other interdisciplinary courses such as history–economics–political science, political science–history–local self-government, social work–economics–political science, and so forth are pushed to smaller spaces. However, these kinds of interdisciplinary courses have only been recently implemented in a few universities. If we closely analyse the data, we can see some courses are aligned with computer, such as history–economics–computer application, history–political science–computer application and so forth. The graduate students learn fundamental features such as introductions to computers, input and output devices along with some tools such as Adobe Photoshops from these courses. Even in the few crossover programmes and courses, we see more of applied humanities and social sciences, and not fields like literature or philosophy or cultural studies. (Menon and Shanmugapriya, “Digital Humanities in India,” 94)
As Menon is one of the authors of the present chapter, we can share that the above study threw up some other interesting findings. While digital humanities as a subject, program, or course was rare, the use of technology in various economics, sociology, literature, and other humanities departments was quite prolific. There was also both interest in, and engagement with, digital tools among the students with whom we spoke. In short, institutionalization of digital humanities as a formal curricular term is absent, but institutional projects at the intersection of computation and humanities were visible. To categorize a translucent representation of works and projects (translucent because we place them under the rubric of DH but they seldom self-identify as such), we must note the lack of consensus over using the disciplinary appellation of digital humanities.
We would therefore contest the assumption that DH is “still relatively new within South Asian” studies (Risam, “South Asian Digital Humanities,” 161) in terms of its pedagogical potential, its practices, and even its superficial optics. We argue that the assumption comes from the invisibility of digital humanities work in English and related departments, which have traditionally been originary locations for Anglo-American DH. In fact, we would argue that it is precisely the superficial optics that remain elided whereas the pedagogy and praxis thrive in different but vibrant local configurations of DH. Our interaction with disparate and diverse projects during the inaugural DHAI conference reveals that there is a tangible resistance to owning digital humanities as an umbrella term. DH has not, at least not as yet, become a term of “tactical convenience” (Kirschenbaum, “What Is ‘Digital Humanities’?”) in India. Therefore, trying to understand the overt indifference toward digital humanities in India must begin with a consideration of the always already in crisis status of humanities programs in this country.
The emergence of universities and postsecondary education in India from a colonial arrangement that was “set up primarily for conducting examinations and awarding degrees, and not for undertaking research or even teaching” (Béteille, “Viable Universities”) has resulted in a system that some have termed educational apartheid: developing and sustaining the “ominous social pressure: [of] the idea that good students study science. Studying humanities is frowned upon as intellectually demeaning” (Gangopadhyay, “All Is Not Well with Higher Education”). This ensures that most public funding for research is pumped into the STEM fields, while the humanities must make do with the crumbs. This in turn means that humanities departments in universities often cannot access even disciplinary innovations in DH theories, methodologies, and tools, let alone advanced training for faculty members. It is easy for a university administrator to understand that researchers in, say, the life sciences need lab equipment for their work, but a humanities faculty member or research scholar would be hard put to make a convincing case for comparable funding. In an already resource-crunched ecosystem, cost thus becomes a major determinant for advancing or advocating such work in the universities. It stands to reason therefore that some of the progressive research programs in digital humanities, digital cultures, or digital studies (digital humanities, as mentioned earlier, is hardly a consensus term for such work in India) have been housed in some of the elite IITs, IIMs, and renowned public universities.
Hence, while the activities recounted above have actualized both the building and the theorizing potential of digital humanities, scholars and practitioners alike remain skeptical of the relevance of DH in India. The “critical mass of participants, publications, conferences, grant competitions, institutionalization (centers, programs, and advertised jobs), and general visibility” (Liu, “Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” 410) that has legitimized digital humanities in Europe and North America remains elusive within the South Asian milieu. There are some digital initiatives in India that unfold the current development of a digital society, such as the Digital India Programme of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bengaluru.2 Nevertheless, for humanities scholars, “[while] the growth of a culture of free and open access to knowledge to some extent has helped facilitate work in the humanities . . . the lack of access to funding, expertise, and of course adequate and advanced physical and technological infrastructure . . . often limits the kind of work that can be done with digital artifacts” (Sneha, Mapping Digital Humanities in India).
It may be worthwhile here to also parse out the contextual relevance of the “making” versus “talking” debate raging across Anglo-American DH sites. We locate this debate in a conflict of a “digital humanism of computational technologies” versus “humanities-based research into the digital” (Parry, “Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism,” 434) and see it as particularly productive in postcolonial spaces. Indeed, trying to essentialize DH in India (or South Asia) on one side of such a binary model may be tone-deaf and anachronistic, since the decision to “make” or “build” a technological tool for DH often rests on the resources available in a particular institution or in the scope for harnessing interinstitutional collaborations. Thus, the act of claiming (or accessing) those resources for self-identified DH scholars often involves theoretical justifications of these projects provided to institutional authorities through a model of “tactical” talking.3 Since humanities scholars in postcolonial spaces are most often understood to be based in discursive rather than technological epistemes, “making” and “talking” may not be opposed functions for DH in India. Indeed, our research shows that most collaborative projects that may self-identify as DH (like those discussed below) emerge from a synergy between the two.
We also argue that, in order to view the postcolonial DH terrain as an “array of convergent practices” (Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0) and not as a unified field, definitions of South Asian digital humanities (if we even agree to call it that) need to be decolonized and uncoupled from privileged markers to do justice to the disparate projects, the multilingual discursive space, and the digital frictions and fissures in national conversations. In particular, we do not take lightly the technological challenges of working in Indic languages. Rather, we contend that the theoretical vocabulary of global digital humanities today often does not consider the impact of work in non-Western languages. Paola Monella highlights how digital practices “have mostly been developed in the USA and the West and are based on the principles of western print,” and have distinct social and political implications. For example, the Devánāgarī script,
[where a] vowel can be positioned below, on the right or on the left of its consonant . . . contradicts the Gutenberg principle of unidirectionality. . . . The ASCII and the Unicode encodings ignore this distinction of status. Today, a Devánāgarī word is simply converted to a unidirectional sequence of numbers (“code points”), all equivalent. (Monella, “Scritture dimenticate”)
To decolonize digital humanities, we must therefore think beyond the Euro-American episteme of the humanities and the digital, which would allow DH practices to emerge in postcolonial spaces as a “collective singular” (Schnapp, “Short Guide to the Digital Humanities,” 2). Anglo-American discourse on digital humanities is framed in multiple ways from the “collective singular” to “intersectional identities” and many others. What we in India realize is that these templates are rooted in their Western contexts and may or may not be useful starting points. Developing an epistemological vocabulary requires theorizing from the lessons learned from concrete projects in a way consciously distanced from presupposed outcomes, methodologies, or philosophies.
It is thus imperative to step back from the current global discourses on digital humanities, which often uncritically use the Anglo-American experience as a model for both doing and theorizing in the Global South and postcolonial spaces. Acknowledging the seminal work of Indian DH practitioners like Puthiya Purayil Sneha, who query the “association of the term [DH] with a specific history in the Anglo-American context . . . [and] the uncritical embrace of technology” (Mapping Digital Humanities in India), this chapter interrogates the “functional and symbolic” (Liu, “Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” 410) role of digital humanities in postcolonial spaces. The self-reflective stance taken here, we believe, leads the authors to ontological questions: Are Indian digital performances consistent with the trajectory of humanities education in postcolonial spaces? If not, what is the value in grouping disparate Indian computation-based projects arising from humanistic inquiry under the disciplinary identity of digital humanities? How different are the theories and methods of these projects from self-identified DH work in traditional Anglo-American epistemic locations?
A recent panel intervention at the DHAI 2018 conference by Venkat Srinivasan, scientist and archivist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, and Aalok Khandekar, assistant professor at IIT Hyderabad, sought to address some of these questions. They talked about how the affordance of digital technologies for humanities-based disciplines enables “the possibility for enabling multiple interpretations and creative representations of data” (Srinivasan, “Ways of Seeing”). But more importantly, their scholarship highlighted the need to interrogate the term “digital” itself, which most often gets co-opted within “local academic traditions and the predominant disciplinary models” (Priani, “Humanidades digitales en la India”): a facet most expressly manifested in the suspicion about coding within humanities academia in India. In the following section we briefly contextualize this debate before discussing three related DH projects as representing the diverse pathways of coding and trajectories for DH work in India.
To C(ode) or Not to C(ode)
The debate about whether advanced programming or coding skills need be a prerequisite for forays into digital humanities has been a substantial concern globally. While international communities like 4Humanities claim that the DH community has a “special potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy,” precisely because of the presumed expertise of DH practitioners in “making creative use of digital technology” (4Humanities, “Mission”), scholars such as Miriam Posner posit that we must be cautious about exhorting everyone to code, since “middle class white men are more likely to have been encouraged to engage with computational technology at a young age” (Posner, “Some Things to Think about”). However, even before acknowledging the intersectional problems and privileges associated with coding in general, we need to grapple with the sociocultural ramifications of technology and technical expertise in postcolonial spaces such as India.
Technology seen as coterminous with modernity led to the evolution of “the idea of India as a nation, . . . not a negation of the colonial configuration of territory and its people but their reinscription under the authority of science” (Prakash, Another Reason, 7). This “authority of science,” transferred into the postcolonial Indian landscape, sees technical expertise (often understood as synonymous with coding skills) as emerging from specific locations, primarily engineering colleges. Not surprisingly, the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) currently accredits over 10,000 engineering colleges as degree-granting institutions, besides a large number of polytechnics turning out “diploma engineers,” ranked somewhat lower than “degree engineers” in the hierarchy of expertise. This entire body of institutions, churning out over 1.5 million engineers every year, has been seen for some time as providing the most inviting career options for a majority of young Indians.
The rationale behind this perception lies in the recruiting mechanisms of the Indian Information Technology and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) sector, a $154 billion industry that hires close to 300,000 engineering graduates every year.4 These technocrats are absorbed into organizations like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, or Cognizant—to name three of the largest—where coding is a required professional expertise to handle the outsourced work of US multinational companies. Although such writing of “outsourced code” seldom involves heavy intellectual investment, the Indian social imaginary ordains entry-level positions in software engineering as a marker of academic and professional success. Hence it can safely be asserted that the implications of “coding skills” within the Indian social imaginary are manifestly different from the coding skills referred to by 4Humanities.5 The misperception about coding that informs the Indian social imaginary sees advanced programming or software skills not as exercises in critical and logical thinking but only as corporate problem-solving tools with a narrow focus on immediate outcomes. Of course the latter does not imply an absence of logical thinking, but suggests a lack of emphasis on critical evaluation. In other words, while the logic is impeccable, it does not include creative decoding of the architecture of the codes themselves. As a natural corollary, humanities education is seen as the nontechnical counterpart to vocational disciplines like engineering, “something that must be left for the weak students while most of us [sic] are busy studying Mathematics and Science” (Kaur, “Neglected State of the Humanities”).6
The dismissive attitude toward humanities education ensures that most students joining humanities programs such as literature, history, sociology, and political science perceive coding or computing as a synecdoche for the IT industry. Such an outlook ensures that any “digital humanities moment” (Gold, “Digital Humanities Moment,” ix) within the Indian context that could possibly allow coding to be seen as building must involve an uncoupling of computing expertise from its instrumentalist purpose. Much like the questions and conversations started by the 2014 Critical Code Studies Writing group, which interrogated intersectional issues in coding by asking “What is feminist code? What is feminist coding?” (Risam, “South Asian Digital Humanities”), the DH moment in India must begin by asking questions like: What does coding in the Humanities imply? Can there be postcolonial coding? Is coding inherently a site of accruing Anglo-American cultural capital?
A great cause of the apathy regarding digital humanities as a disciplinary field is India’s pernicious colonial history, which saw the do-it-for-me (DIFM) attitudes fostered by British colonial rule percolating into social and educational spaces. The clear dichotomy between DIFM and do-it-yourself (DIY) that exists in postcolonial India is further complicated by India’s caste politics, which sees upper-caste Hindu men (and women in some cases) as adverse to an agenda of “building” or “making.” In fact, as Gopal Guru puts it, this hierarchy seeps into the humanities and social sciences in India, which harbor
[a] cultural hierarchy dividing it into a vast, inferior mass of academics who pursue empirical social science and a privileged few who are considered the theoretical pundits with reflective capacity which makes them intellectually superior to the former. (Guru, “How Egalitarian Are the Social Sciences?,” 5003)
Not surprisingly, unlike Anglo-American settings where digital humanities has been traditionally housed in English departments owing to its epistemic and ontological links with literary studies, linguistics, textual criticism, and cultural studies (Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities?”), Indian digital humanities, while having links with traditional English departments, has rarely found curricular legitimacy within them.
This can be attributed to the fact that except in a few elite institutions, English departments across the country are still seen as sites to impart the linguistic, social, and cultural capital needed to succeed in the workplace. In other words, the apparent “openness of [Anglo-American] English Departments” (Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities?,” 60) that allows them to house and sustain DH is not a uniform characteristic of English departments in India. Additionally, the very nature of DH in India assumes a multilingual space: a look at various projects makes that abundantly clear. The way forward for DH in India is perhaps in forming digital hubs within universities and institutes, bringing together faculty from various departments across the humanities, social sciences, computer science, linguistics, literature(s), history, and so on. Recent encouraging trends such as the Interdisciplinary Research Platform at IIT Jodhpur (https://iitj.ac.in/academics/index.php?id=IDRP&&prog=phd), which forms the ontological and epistemic setting for its master’s and PhD programs in DH, would suggest that the social imaginary for humanistic inquiry is moving beyond rigid demarcations, and that the humanistic research question is gaining primacy as opposed to the specific methodological domain through which it is to be addressed.
The inaugural DHAI 2018 conference, we believe, offered us some representative insights into these aspects by introducing us to projects like the NCBS’s Thirteen Ways of Seeing, and IIT Hyderabad’s Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) initiative, which will be discussed in the following section. Finally, we will look at IIT Indore’s Knowledge Sharing in Publishing (KSHIP) as representative of ventures that problematize open access and peer review, while offering further avenues to explore the possibilities of digital humanities within postcolonial spaces.
Thirteen Ways of Seeing
In a conversation with Dibyadyuti Roy (August 13, 2019), Venkat Srinivasan, currently chief archivist at the NCBS and a former materials researcher at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), revealed that his interest in archiving (and by extension in DH) was first sparked by an innocuous object, a champagne bottle. Srinivasan explained that the commonplace tradition of celebrating an achievement had met with an idiosyncratic twist at SLAC, where the labels of these bottles were inscribed with the details of the technical or scientific milestone, indexed, and then archived. This phenomenon led him to ponder three primary questions, namely: (1) How does science get narrativized? (2) Who are the agents that decide on the archival objects through which science is narrativized? (3) How can archival objects be imbued with multiple levels of interpretation that allow messier (read “nontraditional”) narratives to emerge and exist alongside the dominant narrative of a scientific discovery or invention?
Venkat’s initial foray into archives that illuminate context and process led to the “Thirteen Ways of Seeing” exhibition that owes its name to Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The exhibition was built around crafting multiple ways to contemplate and assemble the history of the NCBS, a premier research institute in India. In discussing his motivation behind the project, Venkat noted:
We see it [the function of databases] differently. If anything, the database and the narrative are natural conspirators. One cannot exist without the other. Meaning-making happens on the two-lane highway between database and narrative. It is true that archival records sitting in a database are often decoupled from the stories that generated them. They gather dust or, worse yet, are found in set narratives. But an archival record is not static. Every archival record is a consequence of narratives. It has many ways of seeing, and it should be catapulted back into newer stories. (Venkat Srinivasan, personal interview given to Dibyadyuti Roy, 13 August 2019)
Venkat, who sees the primary purpose of an archive as “enabling stories,” is a self-taught archivist who believes that archiving standards are intrinsically tied to the spaces and settings where the archives are located. As an “occasional digital humanist,” Venkat is agnostic about the disciplinary moniker of digital humanities but is an ardent believer in the need to diversify archives (both who stores them and what is being stored), and is an advocate of DH projects that are “useful, sustainable, and can help generate new methodologies and knowledge” (Murray and Wiercinski, “Design Methodology”). Fundamentally, Venkat sees the act of archiving as an act of futurity, which allows the intersection of four pursuits—scientific research, history, society, storytelling—underlining that creative coding, exemplary engineering, and scientific research together are the metadata that enable both the metanarrative and the minor narratives to coexist not hierarchically but as planar coefficients.
Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography
Aalok Khandekar and his research group at IIT Hyderabad began with the questions: Where in an ethnographic workflow is collaboration possible, and what structures are needed to scaffold different kinds of collaboration? How can ethnographic collaboration be (digitally) hosted, recognizing (via Derrida’s Of Hospitality) its inherent double-binds? In an email conversation in April 2020 with Nirmala Menon, Khandekar says:
PECE is an intensively customized, open-source content management system that can be freely downloaded at GitHub and installed locally to support different kinds of projects. We think of it as a triptych, with space for archiving, analysis, and crafted expression of ethnographic insight. Importantly, the middle space—for collaborative analysis—is where we’ve focused and invested most.
It is especially in this “middle space” that “collaborative hermeneutics” is being worked out.
PECE emphasizes that digital multimodal ethnography does not wish to merely express or represent research. It is a place to conduct and experiment with data and thus become a space to reflect on knowledge production as a process. The crucial point about such a project is to understand that from the conceptual moment, the project envisages the lay user, the visitor, and the researcher as its target community. What this means is that the archivist imagines the analyst and the researcher, and creates a platform for their collaboration and conversation. This does not mean that the platform is born perfect but it does avoid the regular pitfalls of projects that have a technologically determinist approach.
In some ways, both PECE and KSHIP (below) emphasize the development of infrastructures at both the micro and the macro levels. The PECE platform has collaboration, both present and future, at its architectural core, whereas KSHIP has collation and conversation at its architectural imagination.
Knowledge Sharing in Publishing
KSHIP (https://iitikship.iiti.ac.in/), the open-access scholarly publishing project at IIT Indore, identifies a basic infrastructural challenge leading to two scholarly imperatives: first, an open-access environment as crucial for research accessibility; and second, a platform for multilingual scholarly publishing with emphasis on Indian languages. KSHIP was born from deliberating on these crucial issues that scholarly publishing in India has to confront.
KSHIP recognizes a gap in the available research infrastructure and underlines a philosophy of open access as crucial for a network of cooperative global knowledge production. In its initial pilot phase, KSHIP included (1) a Multilingual Literature Research Database (MLRD), which started with three languages and will, it is hoped, become a crowdsourced platform with more languages added soon; and (2) a consciously multilingual publishing house specifically promoting scholarly monographs and translations into Indian languages and inviting scholars to host journals in multiple languages. As Shanmugapriya, Arora, and Menon have pointed out:
If archives are repositories of power, databases are the digital pathways to that power and in the case of literatures, also the road to canonicity. The awareness about databases as a digital site for research and knowledge production is reflected in the digital transition of bibliographic indexes and creations of databases across Humanities areas of research. (Shanmugapriya, Arora, and Menon, “Developing Database for Scholarship”)
KSHIP is an ambitious project, combining a philosophy of open-access scholarly publishing with the creation and curation of a multilingual relational database of scholarship in more than one regional language of India. It is a project still in its initial stages, struggling with outreach and funding. It has a long way to go before acquiring credibility and developing metrics for the journals and monographs it plans to undertake in the future.
But its struggles as a pilot project, as well as the enormous challenges of both technology and epistemology, underline the challenges that similar projects across universities should address as endeavors in digital humanities. This task in turn calls for institutional recognition of the intellectual labor and practice that go into creating and making these projects. Only in this way, through resultant pedagogic and curricular exercises, can we nurture the “DH practitioners” of the next generation—who will have, at the very least, a theoretical and technological repertory of ideas and tools to find customized solutions for the challenges of their locations. Digital infrastructures have to be part of the “making” and “imagining” of DH in India: neither function can be served in greenhouse-like isolation farms with controlled temperature. Instead, they must interact with their milieu and get messy. More than a few weeds will sprout and have to be pulled out later. But an ecosystem will emerge that will foster far more creative projects in the future.
What the above examples demonstrate is that the diversity of disciplines, projects, and motivations constituting, we argue, the digital humanities landscape in India makes it organically transdisciplinary, promising “the methodological and social diversity” found wanting in Anglo-American DH (Liu, “Digital Humanities Diversity”). We have cited only a few examples from the numerous projects spanning history, economics, literature (especially translation studies), artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), and other fields. If digital humanities (taken as an umbrella term) is to play a role in India, it must be one of documenting, harnessing, and facilitating these kinds of works and projects, as well as empowering their access to resources—both capital and academic—to ensure that engagement with the digital is rewarded and incentivized within academia at large. The labor and intellectual rigor involved in developing digital archives and repositories have to be recognized as legitimate research output and not merely as appendages or ancillaries to “real humanistic thinking.” “Making” involves “theorizing” and “doing”: these components are inseparable if we are to understand the complex networks of the digital, the analog, and the human.
Notes
These projects, which may be understood as belonging to the “first wave” of digital humanities projects of this phase, are distinguished by their focus on “[the] quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays” (Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0). Roopika Risam notes other South Asian digital projects such as the Nitartha Digital Tibetan Archive, the Allama Iqbal Urdu Cyber Library, Rekhta, and the South Asian Literary Recording Project (“South Asian Digital Humanities”). However, while these projects subscribe to the umbrella definition of digital humanities that entails “work [which] gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study” (Lopez, Rowland, and Fitzpatrick, “On Scholarly Communication”), they seem to have stopped short of the function of first-generation digital humanities projects to galvanize and “facilitate the formation of networks of knowledge production, exchange, and dissemination that are, at once, global and local” (Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0)
The main vision of Digital India Programme is digital infrastructure and digital empowerment; similarly, digital pluralism is one of the aims of the CIS. Digital humanities is also under the domain of Computation of IMPRINT which recognizes it as a field for preserving heritage in the country such as languages, dialects, art forms and architectural structures, and social and ethnic practices that shows a significant growth in the domain of digitization.
Our understanding of the tactical is derived from de Certeau’s formulation of the strategic as being a “gesture of scientific, political, or military modernity” that manipulates a place to make it susceptible to the dominant discourse. Tactics, on the other hand, emerge and are developed in alterity and otherness. De Certeau notes that “Tactics has no place except in that of the other. . . . It must vigilantly utilize the gaps . . . in proprietary power. It poaches there. It creates surprises. It is possible for it to be where no one expects it. It is wile” (“On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life,” 5).
This is largely because a substantial reserve organizational bench strength is often a prerequisite for securing such projects from multinational firms. Therefore, we see these huge numbers of engineering graduates placed in that pipeline.
There are exceptions, as in the IITs and to some extent the National Institutes of Technology (NITs), where the average undergraduate student is required to engage with humanities courses and often works in interdisciplinary projects where coding is meaningful and independent—not merely an instrumental act that plugs a bug in a larger project across the world that the student has no connection with or understanding of.
On a related note, game-studies scholar and digital humanist Souvik Mukherjee (“Playing Subaltern”) asks: “How is it that a country that supplies millions of software engineers to companies all over the world, has not produced a single noteworthy game or a game-designer?” Mukherjee’s remarks are symptomatic of the malaise that pervades computing proficiency in India: it is seen as a merely functionalist tool toward a secure career, not as an avenue to explore how digitality can be an enabler of humanistic values, or how it might even enter into nontraditional pursuits such as video-game development.
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