Organic Name Reactions for the students and aspirants of Chemistry12th.pptx
South Asia and the Digital Humanities
1. South Asia and the
Digital Humanities
Roopika Risam
Salem State University
@roopikarisam
2. Defining Digital Humanities
• Engaging with computational or
digital tools for humanistic inquiry
and using humanistic tools to
understand digital media and
technologies.
3. What Does That Look Like?
• Cultural heritage projects
• Digital archives
• Quantitative analysis of corpora
• Geographic information systems
• New media studies
4. Why Digital Humanities?
• Theoretical: Digital spaces are
political
• Practical: Digital tools enable a
range of methods for analysis and
representation of data
9. Barriers to DH in South Asia
• Epistemological separation
between humanities and sciences
• Uneven distribution of global and
national resources
• Suspicion from local communities
14. Barriers to DH in Diaspora
• Funding
• Diasporic politics
• The literary canon and academic
politics related to ethnic studies
15. Pitfalls of Doing DH
• Acceptance of scholarship by
academic community
• Legibility of digital humanities as
scholarship to tenure and
promotion or hiring committees
• Value of collaboration
16. Possibilities for DH
• Public scholarship
• Blurring boundaries between
academic and public spaces
• Accessibility of scholarship
• Quicker pace of scholarly
communication
17. Getting Started with DH
• Bamboo DiRT (dirtdirectory.org)
• Demystifying DH (dmdh.org)
• Digital Humanities Summer
Institute (dhsi.org) and HILT
(dhtraining.org)
• South Asia DH mailing list
Editor's Notes
First off, what is this “digital humanities” that has been getting so much attention lately? The definition itself is subject to debate, but I favor the umbrella definition here: engaging with computational or digital tools for humanistic inquiry and using humanistic tools to understand digital media and technologies.
Some examples of what that looks like would include using computational software to analyze a large number of texts at once, creating digital archives to remediate archival silences, engaging with visualization tools for literary research, using mapping tools to visualize spatial data in a text or geographic, cultural heritage and preservation using digital tools, and even engaging with new media studies – for example, Pramod Nayar’s work on digital dalits or Radhikha Gajjala’s scholarship on how subalternity operates within cyberculture.
Why would we want to use digital humanities methods for South Asian literary studies? The answer to this question is about both theoretical and practical dimensions of our work. On the theoretical side, digital spaces are rife areas of study for thinking about power, representation, globalization, subalternity, and other categories that are relevant for South Asia. By now, I’m sure we all realize that digital spaces aren’t neutral and are subject to the forces that govern offline space. Even beyond the question of neutrality is the vast network of relations that digital technologies enable and the troubling labor politics – whether matters of visas and immigration or exploitative labor practices in the development of technologies and infrastructures – that subtend these technologies.
In terms of literary analysis itself, digital tools allow us to do things with texts that we can’t accomplish with close reading, deconstruction or the theoretical methodologies alone. For example, an important part of digital humanities methods is the understanding that the act of building – whether it’s building a database or creating a map or developing a new archive – itself is a way of knowing. There are critiques to be made of the idea of building, such as uneven distribution of resources institutionally and around the world – but if we think about building in the broadest sense of making something new, ones does not need to have built a million-dollar National Endowment for the Humanities grant-funded project – building can thought of in terms of scale. Creating a data layer for a map is act of building that generates knowledge. We can think of the ways of knowing that emerge from making something akin to the ways we engage with theory. Under the best circumstances, we are building theoretical frameworks for interpretation and our ways of knowing come from that act.
Bichitra is a project housed at Jadavpur University and provides an online compilation of Rabindranath Tagore’s writing. The project has over 47000 manucript pages and over 91000 pages of books and journals digitized. They have text transcriptions, you can search Tagore’s work by a word, you can compare different versions of texts, they have timelines – it’s a fantastic project.
Allama Iqbal Cyber Library is the first digital library of Urdu literature. It’s hosted by the Iqbal Academy in Pakistan and was aiming to be the Project Gutenberg of Urdu. The project houses nearly 800 digital Urdu books, ranging from Urdu classics, to Urdu poetry to the work of eminent poet Muhammad Iqbal
Nitartha Digital Tibetan was a project designed to preserve rare Asian texts and art, primarily Tibetan. They host digital versions of traditional pecha text format, translate classical Buddhist texts into English, developing Tibetan language word-processing and data analysis software. The bulk of the work on the project takes place in Kathmandu where there’s a center training young people in computer technology.
Digital humanities in South Asia – particularly India and Pakistan - is one of those funny things – many people are doing it, no one is calling it “digital humanities.” The reason for this is largely tied to the nature of the education system (look this up – e.g. specializing early, separation between humanities and sciences). Another barrier, of course, is the unequal distribution of resources globally – there is a world of texts to be digitized, digitization tends to replicate structures of print knowledge, in the sense that it’s relatively easy to find Anglophone texts by US or UK writers, not so much Anglophone writing elsewhere. Within South Asia, too, there are regional politics to the distribution of resources for this kind of work. Additionally, another barrier is local communities who either have no interest in digital preservation of cultural heritage or are suspicious of it. And, frankly, who could blame them. ***also add about collaboration with other institutions in us, etc. and the possibilities of neo-colonial influences and power dynamics
This is an example of a project of mine, a cultural atlas that traces representations of blackness in globally. Pinpoints on this map generate entries on literary texts, important thinkers, and radical activist groups. This is a sample entry of the Southall Black Sisters organization. A lot of the data was actually generated by my students through class assignments and what I want to do in the next phase is make it publicly available and make it particpatory – so anyone who is teaching texts that engage with blackness or anyone just interested in the subject could contribute entries. I also want to add historical map layers and a timeslider, plus better searching options through tags, and across texts.
Within diaspora, one of the most significant barriers is funding. In general if you take a look at fellowship or grant awards, they tend to favor more canonical topics. Innovative work on canonical topics, for sure, but there’s stiff competition among ethnic studies for representation. This is another area where the dynamics of Western academic hegemony are visible. With South Asian digital humanities in the diaspora, projects that are very advanced are often funded by donations – this is the case for SAADA and 1947 Partition Archive. As for my map, I’m lucky if I can get $1000 a year and a graduate research assistant from my university but the project is intentionally scaled small because I have a sense of the financial limitations.
It would be completely irresponsible for me to not raise some of the obstacles that someone who wants to do digital humanities work will encounter. One issue that I have definitely encountered on the side of postcolonial studies is that I don’t think digital humanities scholarship is taken seriously yet. I know I haven’t mastered how to negotiate that gap yet. Because I’m pre-tenure, the way I’ve circumvented that is publishing my work in journals that I know are receptive to digital humanities. Imagine the fun of trying to explain to my colleagues why I’m publishing in new media or history journals instead of literary ones. I usually mumble “interdisciplinarity” and promise to send out something Amitav Ghosh, and then they leave me alone. And that’s just articles *on* digital humanities. On top of that is the whether digital scholarship itself – like my map or the digital critical edition I’m co-editing – will be viewed as “scholarship” by both academic communities and tenure and promotion or hiring committees. There aren’t that many options for getting a digital scholarship peer reviewed – yet. (I keep saying yet because I do believe this is change, it’s just that change is slow). And I’ve actually become my university’s test case for whether digital scholarship counts for tenure – the good news is I’m in the middle of a full reappointment process and my departmental, chair, and dean reviews all acknowledged that the digital scholarship was in fact scholarship. I figure if I can get them to keep recognizing it in writing on a yearly basis, the tenure and promotion committee will have to consider it. And in the meantime I’m doing a lot of work on the ground to educate people about digital humanities. It bears mentioning that digital humanities projects take work. If you can find ways to collaborate – whether with your students as in the case of my cultural atlas – or with other universities, scholars, that helps. But then collaboration isn’t exactly valued in the humanities so there’s more explaining to be done around that too.
So, if there are all these problems, why bother? Something I feel strongly about is being public about scholarship, and blurring boundaries between academic and public spaces. Doing digital humanities motivates me to produce work that is open to both academic and public audiences – by contributing to knowledge online, and using language that is accessible. It has also given my work more exposure, so I get more immediate feedback than with journal articles alone.
