Exploring Digital Humanities in India: Pedagogies, Practices, and Institutional Possibilities

225 Pages·2021·2.518 MB·English

by  Maya Dodd, Nidhi Kalra (editors)

EXPLORING DIGITAL
HUMANITIES IN INDIA
This book explores the emergence of digital humanities in the Indian context. It looks at how
online and digital resources have transformed classroom and research practices. It examines
some fundamental questions: What is digital humanities? Who is a digital humanist? What
is its place in the Indian context?
The chapters in the volume:
• study the varied practices and pedagogies involved in incorporating the ‘digital’ into
traditional classrooms;
• showcase how researchers across disciplinary lines are expanding their scope of research,
by adding a ‘digital’ component to update their curriculum to contemporary times;
• highlight how this has also created opportunities for researchers to push the boundaries
of their pedagogy and encouraged students to create ‘live projects’ with the aid of
digital platforms; and
• track changes in the language of research, documentation, archiving and reproduction
as new conversations are opening up across Indian languages.
A major intervention in the social sciences and humanities, this book will be of great
interest to scholars and researchers of media studies, especially new and digital media,
education, South Asian studies and cultural studies.
Maya Dodd received her PhD from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.
Subsequently, she received postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University, USA, and Jawaharlal
Nehru University, India. She also taught in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton
University and in English departments at Stanford and the University of Florida. Currently, she
is Assistant Dean of Teaching, Learning and Engagement and is a part of the Department of
Humanities and Languages, and she teaches Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University,
India. Her research interests include Indian law and cultural studies, and her teaching is focused
on the digital classroom and archiving practices in South Asian cultural studies.
Nidhi Kalra is a doctoral candidate working on affect and conflict at the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay and is also Assistant Professor in the Department
of Humanities at FLAME University, Pune, India. She has taught at the English Department in
Savitribai Phule Pune University and Gargi College in the University of Delhi, India. Nidhi
received her MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi, for which she worked
on problematising Holocaust memoirs. Her research interests include memory studies, trauma
studies, oral history, digital humanities and children’s/young adult literature.

EXPLORING DIGITAL
HUMANITIES IN INDIA
Pedagogies, Practices, and
Institutional Possibilities
Edited by Maya Dodd and Nidhi Kalra
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Maya Dodd and Nidhi Kalra;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Maya Dodd and Nidhi Kalra to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978- 1- 138- 50319- 9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 34793- 2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 003- 05230- 2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of figures viii
Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
Maya Dodd
PART I
Digital histories 15
1 Digital infrastructures and technoutopian fantasies: the
colonial roots of technology aid in the Global South 17
Dhanashree Thorat
2 A question of digital humanities in India 30
Puthiya Purayil Sneha
3 Historians and their public 40
Rochelle Pinto
4 Mapping change: possibilities for the spatial humanities
in India 55
Karan Kumar and Rahul Chopra
vi Contents
PART II
Digital institutions and pedagogies 65
5 Museum collections in India and the digital space 67
Joyoti Roy
6 Processes of pluralisation: digital databases and art writing
in India 78
Sneha Ragavan
7 Digital humanities in India: pedagogy, publishing and practices 91
Nirmala Menon and Shanmugapriya T.
8 Digital humanities, or what you will: bringing DH to
Indian classrooms 105
Souvik Mukherjee
9 Decolonising design: making critically in India 124
Padmini Ray Murray
PART III
Subaltern digital humanities 139
10 Ethics and feminist archiving in the digital age:
an interview with C. S. Lakshmi 141
Nidhi Kalra and Manasi Nene
11 Designing LGBT archive frameworks 155
Niruj Mohan Ramanujam
12 Fieldwork with the digital 165
Surajit Sarkar
PART IV
Digital practices 175
13 Digital humanities practices and cultural heritage:
Indian video games 177
Xenia Zeiler
Contents vii
14 Notes from a newsroom: interrogating the transformation
of Hindustan Times in a “digital” space 186
Dhrubo Jyoti and Vidya Subramanian
15 Did digital kill the radio star? The changing landscape of
the audio industry with the advent of new digital media 197
Mae Mariyam Thomas
Index 203
FIGURES
6.1 AAA Bibliography website 78
6.2 Data visualisation on the AAA Bibliography website 84
6.3 People view, data visualisation on the AAA Bibliography website 84
6.4 Places view, data visualisation on the AAA Bibliography website 85
6.5 Clusters view of languages, data visualisation on the AAA
Bibliography website 86
6.6 Cluster view of reference type, data visualisation on the AAA
Bibliography website 87
7.1 Data visualization of humanities programmes from well- known
institutions around the country 93
8.1 The entry on Doorga Moni Basu in the Scottish
Cemetery Archive 114
8.2 Map showing the places to which those buried in the
cemetery were connected and also the distribution of their
professions, causes of death and the biblical inscriptions
on their tombstones 116
CONTRIBUTORS
Rahul Chopra is currently the coordinator of a climate education project (TROP-
ICSU) of the International Council of Science, based at the Indian Institute of
Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India. He is the former Chair
of the Centre for Earth and Environment at FLAME University, Pune, and was
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies there. His interests are multidisci-
plinary and include curriculum development in earth and environmental studies,
the use of satellite-d erived remotely sensed and in situ data to evaluate our chang-
ing environment, field-b ased geological and environmental studies, and the use of
high- resolution chemical analysis instruments and data to study various earth and
environmental processes. He received his PhD in Geophysical Sciences from the
University of Chicago, USA.
Maya Dodd received her PhD from Stanford University in Modern Thought
and Literature. Subsequently, she received postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton
University, USA and Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She also taught in the
Department of Anthropology at Princeton University and in English departments
at Stanford and the University of Florida. Currently, she is Assistant Dean of Teach-
ing, Learning and Engagement and is a part of the Department of Humanities
and Languages, and she teaches Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME Univer-
sity, India. Her research interests include Indian law and cultural studies, and her
teaching is focused on the digital classroom and archiving practices in South Asian
cultural studies.
Dhrubo Jyoti is a journalist working with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi,
India. They write on national affairs at the intersection of caste, gender and sexual-
ity and divide their time (unequally) between being queer and being Bengali. They