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What We Teach When We Teach DH: What Is Postcolonial DH Pedagogy, and What Is It Doing in Nonhumanities Institutions?

What We Teach When We Teach DH
What Is Postcolonial DH Pedagogy, and What Is It Doing in Nonhumanities Institutions?

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Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Series Page
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. Introduction. What We Teach When We Teach DH | Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki
  9. Part 1. Teachers
    1. 1. Born-Pedagogical DH: Learning While Teaching | Emily McGinn and Lauren Coats
    2. 2. What Do We Want from the Standard Core Texts of the Digital Humanities Curriculum? | Gabriel Hankins
    3. 3. Teaching the Digital Humanities to a Broad Undergraduate Population | Alison Langmead and Annette Vee
    4. 4. Teaching Digital Humanities: Neoliberal Logic, Class, and Social Relevance | James O’Sullivan
    5. 5. Teaching from the Middle: Positioning the Non–Tenure Track Teacher in the Classroom | Jacob Heil
    6. 6. Why (in the World) Teach Digital Humanities at a Teaching-Intensive Institution? | Rebecca Frost Davis and Katherine D. Harris
  10. Part 2. Students
    1. 7. Digital Humanities in General Education: Building Bridges among Student Expertise at an Access University | Kathi Inman Berens
    2. 8. (Hard and Soft) Skills to Pay the Bills: A Both/And Approach to Teaching DH to Undergraduates | Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
    3. 9. Digital Humanities across the Curriculum, or How to Wear the Digital Halo | Scott Cohen
    4. 10. Rethinking the PhD Exam for the Study of Digital Humanities | Asiel Sepúlveda and Claudia E. Zapata
    5. 11. Pedagogy First: A Lab-Led Model for Preparing Graduate Students to Teach DH | Catherine DeRose
    6. 12. What’s the Value of a Graduate Digital Humanities Degree? | Elizabeth Hopwood and Kyle Roberts
  11. Part 3. Classrooms
    1. 13. Codework: The Pedagogy of DH Programming | Harvey Quamen
    2. 14. Community-Driven Projects, Intersectional Feminist Praxis, and the Undergraduate DH Classroom | Andie Silva
    3. 15. Bringing Languages into the DH Classroom | Quinn Dombrowski
    4. 16. DH Ghost Towns: What Happens When Makers Abandon Their Creations? | Emily Gilliland Grover
    5. 17. How to Teach DH without Separating New from Old | Sheila Liming
    6. 18. The Three-Speed Problem in Digital Humanities Pedagogy | Brandon Walsh
  12. Part 4. Collaborations
    1. 19. Sharing Authority in Collaborative Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Library Workers’ Perspectives | Chelcie Juliet Rowell and Alix Keener
    2. 20. K12DH: Precollege DH in Historically Underprivileged Communities | Laquana Cooke and Andrew Famiglietti
    3. 21. A Tale of Two Durhams: How Duke University and North Carolina Central University Are Increasing Access and Building Community through DH Pedagogy | Hannah L. Jacobs, Kathryn Wymer, Victoria Szabo, and W. Russell Robinson
    4. 22. Expanding Communities of Practice through DH Andragogy | Lisa Marie Rhody and Kalle Westerling
    5. 23. What Is Postcolonial DH Pedagogy and What Is It Doing in Nonhumanities Institutions? Case Studies from India | Dibyadyuti Roy and Nirmala Menon
    6. 24. Finding Flexibility to Teach the “Next Big Thing”: Digital Humanities Pedagogy in China | Lik Hang Tsui, Benjun Zhu, and Jing Chen
    7. 25. What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in the Classroom? | Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Contributors

Part 4 — Chapter 23

What Is Postcolonial DH Pedagogy, and What Is It Doing in Nonhumanities Institutions?

Case Studies from India

Dibyadyuti Roy and Nirmala Menon

Speaking at the 2013 multidisciplinary consortium on digital humanities (DH) for Indian higher education, Vishnu Vardhan, program director at the Centre for Internet and Society, remarked that “one could be doing digital humanities work in India without actually realizing it.”1 Vardhan’s comment is a crucial cue toward understanding the rhizomatic teleology of DH in postcolonial India, in which “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be . . . very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.”2 Therefore, the act of becoming DH in the Indian landscape, for both research and pedagogy, is primarily achieved through self-identification and not through previous affiliations to an existing big tent. What makes such acts of self-identification particularly challenging is the pervasive social imaginary of Indian humanities classrooms, which often align digital tools, techniques, and objects with their colonial legacies: the imperialist associations between rationality, technology, and the scientific imagination.3 Therefore, authoritatively defining “postcolonial DH pedagogy” would ensure a flattening of the complex genealogies and overlaps among the cultural connotations of postcoloniality, the material processes of decolonization, and indeed the various local configurations of DH arising at these interstices.

This essay does not attempt to do this. 

Instead, our intervention shows how the clear demarcations between DH pedagogy and DH research—demanded by a scholarly edited collection (such as this one) and meant primarily for academic audiences—are not immediately visible within the overall landscape of Indian DH. In highlighting the reasons for these entanglements, our contribution emphasizes that postcolonial DH is neither a stable site for solely envisioning an anticolonial pedagogy nor an exclusive location for legitimizing neoliberal techno-positivism. On the contrary, within a context “where . . . hierarchies of access and usage, transition from analogue to the digital, and the notion of ‘digitality’ itself need to be defined and understood better,” the case studies that we present epitomize a postcolonial DH pedagogy that questions why “the term [digital humanities is aligned] with a specific history in the Anglo-American context . . . [and] the uncritical embrace of technology.”4 We expect our definitional position on postcolonial DH and DH pedagogy in India to provoke further questions, and our essay is an attempt to catalyze these productive contestations. Since the foundations of postcolonial teaching are built on acknowledging difference and liminality, our operationalization of postcolonial DH pedagogy leverages Indian DH practices that challenge Western (and colonial) models of institutionalizing humanistic knowledge, its production, circulation, and legitimation.5 With an eye toward postcolonial digitality, which we define as the contextual realization of digital affordances in postcolonial spaces, we foreground that while postcolonial DH pedagogy in India can and should be many things, it should not be a checklist, a test, or yet another way to exclude people whom major structural forces already exclude. 

Before we expand on the premises of our argument, it is important to contextualize the higher education landscape of India. Most universities and colleges in India are public and funded primarily by the government of India. While the number of private colleges has grown in the last decade or more, a majority of students continue to attend public universities and colleges. Along with 41 central universities, there are close to 340 regional universities that are recognized by the University Grants Commission. These institutions collectively serve approximately twenty million students across India. Apart from the institutions already mentioned, the central Ministry of Education has a separate category of Institutes of National Importance (INIs) that includes the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), Indian Institute of Science and Engineering Research, Indian Institute of Science, and Indian Institute of Space Technology. Despite the names of these institutes, all of them have vibrant humanities and social science schools or departments. Given their stature as INIs, they are better funded and more supportive of innovative research and pedagogy when compared with their university counterparts. They are also independent from the centralized University Grants Commission, allowing the INIs to have independent academic governing bodies, which can approve and accredit research programs.

What we want to underline here is that all these factors—governance structures, funding, and a culture of interdisciplinary research—often make the humanities departments in consideration here fundamentally divergent from not only traditional Indian humanities departments but also Anglo-American trajectories of humanistic inquiry and pedagogy. We see these factors as providing more germane conditions than traditional Indian literary and humanities departments for encouraging digital humanities centers and courses as well as programs that promote a decolonized curriculum, as the central tenet of postcolonial DH pedagogy. We want to emphasize that since the academic currency of DH (research and pedagogy) is still predominantly limited to Euro-American institutions, the case studies represented here show how DH pedagogy in postcolonial spaces, while vibrant in terms of engagement, is “possibly unpredictable” and resists a convenient linear mapping through Western paradigms.6 As the title of our essay suggests, we take seriously Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s argument in “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” where he lays out some of the core reasons that English departments are hospitable homes for digital humanities in the United States. However, as postcolonial DH pedagogues as well as the founding members of the Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations, an India-based DH collective, our experiences indicate that unlike in the Euro-American context, in India traditional humanities or literature departments are not the only natural habitat for DH scholarship and pedagogy. Instead, DH pedagogy in nontraditional sites (like the INIs) in India—freed from the ontological positioning of the literary studies classroom—offers us new avenues to challenge the reductive binary of humanistic inquiry as either pedantic elitism or vocational education. This implies that the nature of the various DH programs described here, combined with the diversity of students who elect to do these courses and programs, ensures that DH pedagogy in India is organically transdisciplinary in nature and multilingual in its aspirations. We see this emerging multilingual pedagogy as crucial for developing and nurturing a sustained praxis for decolonized DH curricula in India.

Without ignoring the fact that DH pedagogy in India currently exists primarily within privileged and elite institutions, we are hopeful that the case studies presented here suggest a growth trajectory for democratic humanistic inquiry. Possibly the best exemplar of one such trajectory of DH pedagogy would be an emerging focus on archives within classrooms and courses that can be notionally perceived as DH spaces. P. P. Sneha, in her seminal work Mapping Digital Humanities in India, notes that the archive becomes central to Indian DH discourses around both research and pedagogy “since the archive as a space [is] not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of [collaborative] knowledge creation.”7 Therefore, Indian DH pedagogical practices are often guided by research institutions such as the Centre for Internet and Society, accounting “for the fact that much of Indian DH occurs in sites complementary to but outside of University spaces.”8 A recent project from the Centre for Internet and Society called Pathways to Higher Education involved independent workshops organized for undergraduate students “on social change and collaborative learning” and highlighted some of the best practices of postcolonial DH pedagogy by teaching students to “look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement.”9 Before moving on to describing our case studies, we would like to emphasize that postcolonial DH pedagogy also emerges within spaces that allow for significant debate and discussion on DH in the Global South and its related issues. For example, we see the conversations, connections, and collaborations that emerge on various social media channels of Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (such as WhatsApp, Slack, and Facebook) as inherently pedagogical since critical DH pedagogy of any form, particularly in the postcolonial context, is operationalized “by contributing to the epistemological, ontological and axiological stances we take in the production of knowledge.”10 This argument is also reflected in the assertions of fellow DHer from the Global South Ernesto Priani, who states, “Digital humanities does not stop at . . . development and application within academia . . . but also by organizing those who see themselves as digital humanists.”11 In the next section, we map contemporary Indian DH pedagogies through a case-based methodology that locates representative institutionalized degree-granting DH programs, short-term diplomas and certificates in DH, and individual courses within its rhizomatic scaffold. Our sample shows the divergent signified for the signifier DH in postcolonial classrooms, where “the idea or meaning being expressed by . . . [the] signifier . . . is flexible, constructed, and changeable.”12 We conclude by reflecting on the local conditions at these institutions that influence DH pedagogy within them and by emphasizing how DH pedagogy in postcolonial sites must focus on the development of digital intellect as opposed to digital intelligence.13

Mapping Postcolonial DH Pedagogies

In her 2011 article “Hacking the Field,” Lauren Klein describes multimodal student projects that were created in her classroom “with off-the-shelf and online tools, supported by free and open-source publishing platforms, and constructed by students over the course of one semester, [as] models for theoretically grounded, practical digital humanities scholarship and pedagogy.”14 Using Klein’s paradigm, this section of our essay is a case-study-based discussion of DH pedagogy in Indian higher education institutions over the last decade or so. We also draw on Lisa Spiro’s arguments in “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,” where she notes, “Rather than debating who is in and who is out, the DH community needs to develop a keener sense of what it stands for and what is at stake in its work.”15 We see this as being particularly germane to the values for DH pedagogy in India, where the “how” is less important than the “why” for classroom practices, and the latter frames the hermeneutic for exploring DH pedagogy in postcolonial spaces. 

We have a keen awareness that this survey is by no means comprehensive, but rather an explication of postcolonial DH pedagogy that is characterized through its multiplicities, which make it inherently “anti-genealogy [and] that does not necessarily originate from a point but rather comes from something bigger.”16 Pedagogical instances discussed in this chapter demonstrate how postcolonial DH pedagogy actively resists a techno-positivist paradigm, while emphasizing a decolonized curriculum. Thus, while overlaps will be observed between postcolonial and other contexts in the use of particular tools or platforms, we surmise the positioning of that technology in the classroom creates a key measure of difference for postcolonial DH pedagogy, which cannot be reduced to classroom projects and practices. Instead, by challenging the binarism created between technological and humanistic paradigms, Indian DH classrooms become sites that provide “details of what students and others [teachers and institutions] might do together and the cultural politics such practices support.”17 This aspirational model of critical pedagogy is central to the decolonized DH curricula envisioned in postcolonial spaces. For the same reason, we noted earlier how the central concern of postcolonial DH pedagogy remains not how the pedagogy is implemented but rather why certain teaching practices find relevance.

Our first case study is the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR) at Jadavpur University, primarily known for one of India’s first major digital projects, Bichitra, an online variorum of the first Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s artistic outputs. The school was established in 2004 and has been spearheading similar projects ever since. Apart from the certificate course in “editing and publishing,” the school has instituted training programs and short-term courses on digitization projects. SCTR’s expertise is in processes, workflows, and methods of digitization, and it continues to house extensive projects developing repositories and digitization projects that are a crucial database and research resource for students and scholars alike. It is natural that when other institutions look to develop their programs, researchers and students naturally veer toward extending SCTR’s work and developing new niches and programs. Thus, SCTR’s work with Bichitra has become an example for the potential of DH to amalgamate both scientific and humanistic resources in the development of an archive. Similarly, the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research group at IIT Indore was established in 2014 as a way to formalize research collaborations between the faculty members from humanities and computer science and to explore initiating a dual MS (research) and PhD program in digital humanities. The MS (Research) program at IIT Indore with a DH track allows students to pursue more ambitious projects at the intersection of humanities and the digital.

An interdisciplinary research group at an IIT is usually a way of cohering areas of research to further be developed into a center or department that can then offer courses and programs. For coursework, graduate courses for the MS and PhD, Postcolonial Theory (Digital Humanities) and Introduction to Digital Humanities, taught by Menon, have significant digital components. The structure of the courses allows students to connect the dots between theory and praxis in a meaningful way even as they grapple with the fundamental question of “What is digital humanities?” Courses in the IIT system are characterized by the L-T-P model, which means that there are lecture, tutorial, and practical components. This course is a hybrid model, with the 4 credits distributed as 2-0-2. The assessment model for a course like this includes tinkering with tools and hands-on workshop classes interspersed with theory lectures, which allows students an appreciation of their classmates’ strengths and empathy for each other’s anxieties around technology and its relationality with humanistic inquiry. Course reading includes studying exemplary DH projects, and students complete a final assignment—developing a small project and a complementary report. Over the last four years, this assignment has often made students anxious: the humanities students who take the course are worried about the tools, and the engineering students who opt for the elective are intimidated by the narrative requirement. But the instructors have come to view this as productive anxiety, since both sets of students most often submit promising work. Projects have included “Mapping Flood Relief in Bihar through Google Ngram” and “A Time Lapse Visualisation Project on Water Tables in Madhya Pradesh,” to name two very interesting ones. Collaboration and cooperation become essential tools for students to complete these projects.

IIT Jodhpur was the first institute in India to launch full-fledged PhD and MSc programs in digital humanities. The DH program is housed not in one department but on an interdisciplinary research platform cutting across humanities, social sciences, basic sciences, and engineering disciplines. As their website notes,

This doctoral programme offers unique opportunities to redraw conventional disciplinary boundaries among the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, technology and engineering, and the natural sciences. Doctoral students opting for this program are expected to contribute towards integrating disciplinary approaches of the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences, and computer technologies, with cross-disciplinary theorising and research that can be avant-garde to the field of Digital Humanities. Examples of research emphases may include (but are not limited to): Digital Cultures/Cultural Practices—Past and Present; Digital Societies; Digital Heritage (Preservation, Conservation, Restoration, Recreation); Thematic Computation Reading of Novels; Multimodal Data Analytics; Digital Epistemologies and Methods.18

Going through the list of subdomains for the program points to a clear pedagogical vision where there is, in “project formulation, selection of tools, and curation[,] . . . the chance to rethink traditional humanities scholarship and to render the maker as agentive in relating technology and authorship.”19 Since this program has only just begun, we are excited about the prospects of this initiative for DH to emerge in other public universities in India. A recent interaction with the lead faculty of the program at IIT Jodhpur underlined the same strategically ambivalent approach that we mention earlier as symptomatic of Indian DH: a careful recognition of the still-unclear markers, the willingness to take ontological and epistemic risks, and most importantly a commitment to a “no tent” approach to DH.20 Notable DH courses at Jodhpur that are designed with the challenges and context of Indian DH in mind include Introduction to Digitization (with a workshop model that is cross-listed for master’s and PhD students) and Archiving and Publishing at more advanced graduate levels. It is important to underline here that it is not a coincidence that the aforementioned research institutions that have reasonable access to material resources have been the first to establish these programs with some amount of success. Further, the collaboration and sharing of these resources with other universities and students through project associateships and internships becomes a way of expanding awareness about DH and its pedagogies across other spaces.

We will discuss some more examples from other institutions that may not have fully developed DH programs but are equally exciting in terms of the unique intersections that each program finds between the digital and the humanities. Not surprisingly, the courses discussed that have been offered and taught in the last decade have been harbored in a range of departments: from communication and liberal arts to the more traditional English literature and computer science. In many cases these courses do not self-identify as DH, due to reasons that range from institutional cultures that do not have interdisciplinary programs or courses to considerations regarding student awareness (or lack thereof) about the field. The courses discussed here exemplify how “incorporating DH methods into non-DH classrooms” shows a praxis for not only helping “undergraduate students learn digital literacy skills” but also operationalizing DH pedagogy to discuss issues of “class [or caste], disability, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality.”21

We see some of the foregoing assertions being particularly salient in a course titled Media Literacy: Discourse and Power in the Digital Age, taught at the Indian Institution of Management Indore (IIM Indore) by Roy during his tenure as a faculty member there between 2016 and 2021. Offering this course at a premier Indian business school might seem contrary to the institutional requirements as well as student expectations. However, this course was offered as an elective from the Department of Communication to students in the Integrated Program in Management: a unique liberal-arts-focused, five-year integrated degree program, which has as its mission the development of “socially-conscious managers, leaders and entrepreneurs.”22 Offering this course under the umbrella of media studies allowed Roy the opportunity to leverage the value granted to digital literacy in the business school curriculum while also implementing the substantial pedagogical overlaps between media studies and DH pedagogy: an intersection that also finds considerable purchase in contemporary DH scholarship.23 A declared objective in this course was the ability “discern the social, political and cultural implications of different forms of media,” which allowed Roy and his students the opportunity to advance “new modes of scholarship [that] extend the boundaries of humanistic inquiry in meaningful ways.”24 For example, group project submissions during one iteration of this course in 2017 saw students develop multimodal projects on how Indian fundamental rights are currently mediated in the online public sphere. Some of the projects that emerged from this exercise included an Instagram story–based interpretation of how minority identities are subsumed under the tripartite legislation about fundamental rights; an Omeka-based project that created a dynamic news feed of Indian media reportage on fundamental rights; and a traditional blog that exposed Indian citizens’ concern with the “Right to Privacy” after the introduction of Aadhaar, a unique identification number–based biometric archive through which the Indian state seeks to enumerate and track all its citizens. Roy’s course and the student projects are emblematic of what we see as one of the primary goals of an “accessible . . . small-scale and not resource-intensive” postcolonial DH pedagogy: one that teaches students “how to critically sift through the data to find what is meaningful and valuable” and become critical curators of knowledge in the digital age.25

Similarly, a course titled Codex to Hypertext at IIT Delhi, a premier technological institution, is described online as looking at “the history of print, authorship, the book distribution, copyright, censorship. It will study forms of digital representation of art, intellectual property in the digital domain, creative commons, networked art.”26 The instructor offering this course, Arjun Ghosh, recently presented at the Humanities Commons Twitter Conference on his experience of teaching this course through a presentation titled “Teaching DH in India: Online/Offline.”27 We would like to draw attention to the following tweets from his presentation that show the continual purchase of the “hack versus yack” debate in Indian DH pedagogy and its specificities within postcolonial classrooms:

Students who know programming can work on projects that create interactive texts by adapting existing texts or on text mining. Students who do not have coding experience, can work on projects using available DH tools, combing them with close reading #HCTwitterConf2019.28

Beginning 29 July, I will be teaching an online version of the course at https://swayam.gov.in/nd1_noc19_hs54/preview. 16/n #HCTwitterConf2019.29

Ghosh’s tweets indicate that the course’s intent was to welcome students with and without programming skills, and the course is a vindication of our earlier claim that DH pedagogy is therefore often a “specific configuration . . . [of] multitudes that makes sense for a given institution, given its faculty, staff, and students” and their “unique mission and areas of strength.”30 Ghosh offered an online version of the course on Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM), which is the government of India’s open-access massive open online course platform. On being asked by the authors about his motivations for extending the audience of his course beyond the IIT Delhi classroom, Ghosh noted that his intent is to “attain a critical perspective on production, distribution and reception of digital texts [in the overall Indian landscape],” which suggests a view that there is, in Brett D. Hirsch’s words, often “no better way to stabilize a field than through pedagogy.”31

In a similar vein, the Department of English at Aligarh Muslim University, another major state-funded public institution, is planning to introduce a course titled Literature and Digital Space that will focus on “developing an understanding of how the Digital Medium and Literature have impacted each other by looking at hypertexts, interactive fiction, digital role-playing games, networked literature and other digital forms.”32 The introduction of such a course at a prestigious public university augurs well for the future of Indian DH pedagogy even in traditional humanities departments. By emphasizing the transmediality of cultural knowledge, the course description challenges the print-based colonial imaginary of the humanities and denotes an attempt to bridge the gap between the humanities and the digital in terms of different modes of engagement: the digital or “technology as a tool, study object, medium, laboratory, and activist venue.”33 We see courses such as Literature and Digital Space as being a crucial node in the rhizomes that populate postcolonial DH pedagogies through acknowledging that any act of humanistic scholarship must consider the materiality of digital spaces as key sites where human relationalities are being negotiated.

In his essay “The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities,” David Berry points out that “computational technology has become the very condition and possibility required in order to think about many of the questions raised in the humanities today.” Berry quotes Richard Hofstadter’s differentiation between intellect and intelligence and calls for a digital “intellect” as opposed to a digital “intelligence.”34 Pedagogical “intelligence” at this point in Indian DH means underlining and teaching the disparate and diverse ways of understanding the extant tasks that fall under the rubric of digital humanities. These tasks and their solutions may not yet provide the needed connectedness or conceptual mapping for a reliable set of theoretical paradigms.35 Embedded in our pedagogical practices should be the message that this seeming absence of a reliable theoretical vocabulary is a necessary and valuable space. The metatheoretical vocabulary will be more reliable if it is developed gradually and emerges from the diverse experiences of doing, tooling, or writing. Our case studies demonstrate that in the process of building and tooling, these projects develop an individual intellect that emerges from the intelligent task at hand. Rather than rush to work in borrowed theoretical metaphors that may or may not work across the postcolonial space of Indian DH pedagogy and training, we should simply let diverse projects develop their narrative intellect. These varied intellects will in time give us a theoretical and conceptual vocabulary that is organic and will invest the pedagogy in the coming decade with much-needed clarity and connection.

Digital humanities pedagogy in India is a journey, a data point that is part of a cosmic but networked chaos. As scholars who work in the intersectional identities of the digital and humanities, those data points are marked with support, mentoring, and learning. As we pointed out before, many courses and projects identified as digital humanities are concentrated in research institutions and select established public universities. But a recent study on university courses across small and medium-sized universities conducted by IIT Indore showed us that even in these institutions, faculty were exploring ways of including DH topics while often sidestepping the moniker itself. The survey suggests that many small universities are also recognizing the need to introduce digital humanities courses as primers for their undergraduate students.36 This is testimony to the fact that the benefits of teaching DH are being increasingly recognized across liberal arts departments.

We are enthused and optimistic to see the diverse work being carried out in the discipline by scholars across India. Currently we find ourselves in an in-between stage of voicing and nurturing a theoretical vocabulary that reflects the DH praxis in India. We believe it is important to develop, deliberate, and engage critically on the disparate corpus of work that is emerging before we settle on an epistemological foundational language for DH in India. We envisage digital humanities in India as a rhizomatic network that fosters a conversation among all of these interesting nodes. Digital humanities in India is in the making, mapping, doing, and theorizing all at the same time; DH pedagogy therefore has to reflect that seeming chaos and the absence of a clear “methodological commons” as a productive, complex network of ideas.

Notes

  1. 1. Morais and Panigrahi, “Digital Humanities.”

  2. 2. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 7.

  3. 3. Prakash, Another Reason.

  4. 4. Sneha, Mapping, 3; Spiro, foreword, 1.

  5. 5. See Greedharry, “Is There a Teacher?”

  6. 6. Morais and Panigrahi, “Digital Humanities.”

  7. 7. Sneha, Mapping, 35.

  8. 8. Dodd, introduction, 2.

  9. 9. Morais and Panigrahi, “Digital Humanities.”

  10. 10. Mclaren, “Future of Critical Pedagogy,” 1244.

  11. 11. Priani, “#RedHD.”

  12. 12. Media Texthack Team, Media Studies 101, 16.

  13. 13. Berry, “Computational Turn.”

  14. 14. Klein, “Hacking the Field,” 37, our emphasis.

  15. 15. Spiro, “‘This Is Why,’” 17.

  16. 16. IAAC Editor, “Deleuze and Guattari.”

  17. 17. Simon, “Empowerment,” 371.

  18. 18. Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, “Digital Humanities.”

  19. 19. Dodd, introduction, 2.

  20. 20. See Svensson, “Beyond the Big Tent.”

  21. 21. Kennedy, “Long-Belated Welcome,” abstract; Hirsch, “</Parentheses>,” 27.

  22. 22. Indian Institute of Management Indore, “Social Placements.”

  23. 23. See, for example, Sayers, ed., Routledge Companion.

  24. 24. Klein, “Hacking the Field,” 37.

  25. 25. Kennedy, “Long-Belated Welcome,” paragraphs 14, 17.

  26. 26. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, “Codex to Hypertext.” See also Ghosh, “HUL340.”

  27. 27. Ghosh, “Teaching DH in India.”

  28. 28. Ghosh, “Students.”

  29. 29. Ghosh, “Beginning.” See also Nowviskie, “On the Origin.”

  30. 30. Cordell, “How Not,” 461.

  31. 31. Ghosh, email; Hirsch, “</Parentheses>,” 13.

  32. 32. Chakraborti, “Literature and Digital Space.”

  33. 33. Svensson, “The Landscape.” See also Svensson and Goldberg, introduction.

  34. 34. Berry, “Computational Turn,” 2, 7–8.

  35. 35. See Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence.

  36. 36. T. and Menon, “Infrastructure and Social Interaction.”

Bibliography

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  2. Chakraborti, S. Literature and Digital Space (BA 6th Semester, Paper 3c, Discipline Centric Elective). Adopted by the Board of Studies, Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, May 28, 2019.
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  24. Nowviskie, Bethany. “On the Origin of ‘Hack’ and ‘Yack.’” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 66–70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu.
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