Practices of Digital Humanities in India Learning by Doing

Introduction 1

MAYA DODD AND NIRMALA MENON

PART I  Digital Pedagogy 11

1 People’s Archive of Rural India: The Material in the Digital 13

PRATISHTHA PANDYA

Technology-Emphasized Indian Classrooms 22

MAYURAKSHI CHAUDHURI AND CHIRANJOY CHATTOPADHYAY

3 Digital Archiving on the Intersections of Academia and Activism 43

FARAH YAMEEN AND BHANU PRAKASH

4 The Archive as a Crucible: Experiments With Pedagogy Through an Archive 53

VENKAT SRINIVASAN

5 Visualizing the Cultural History of South Asia 69

ARJUN GHOSH

PART II  Tools 97

6 Digital Assessment of Conventional Lexical Analysis of the Urdu Marsiya With Sketch Engine Software 99

SANIYA IRFAN

7 Dictionary of Colloquial Terminologies: An Open Database Research Platform for Archaeology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Digital Humanities 107

SAYAN SANYAL

8 Mapping India’s Linguistic Diversity and Exclusion in the Indian Census 121

SHIVAKUMAR JOLAD AND AAYUSH AGARWAL

9 Digital Methods in the Collection, Management, Reuse, Sharing, and Circulation of Indian Heritage Data 145

NEHA GUPTA, G. S. ABHAYAN, SHARMISTHA CHATTERJEE, AND S. V. RAJESH

10 The Promise and Perils of Bot-Based Public History 164

SRIJAN SANDIP MANDAL

PART III  Community Projects 175

11 Khidki Collective: Reflections on Academic Method Beyond the University 177

SWATHI SHIVANAND, C. YAMINI KRISHNA, AND CHAVALI PHANISRI SOUMYA

12 Participatory Engagement and Methods in Digital Humanities 194

MEDHAVI GANDHI

13 Archiving India Through Food: A Personal History of the Journal On Eating 212

KUNAL RAY AND SUMANA ROY

14 Digital Fever: Reflections of a Queer Archive 222

SIDDARTH S. GANESH AND SHALOM GAURI

15 Jewish Calcutta, Recalled: Lessons From Building a Digital Public Memory Resource 237

VINAYAK DAS GUPTA

16 Unveiling Digital Narratives: Understanding (In)visibility and Resistance of Adivasi Women From Jharkhand 247

LIPI BAG

Biography

Maya Dodd currently serves as the Director of the FLAME Centre for Legislative Education and Research at FLAME University, Pune, India. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and subsequent post-doctoral fellowships at Princeton University and JNU, India. She teaches digital cultures in the Department of Humanities and has pioneered teaching Digital Humanities (DH) in the liberal arts at the undergraduate level, and also supervises doctoral students for DH study in India. Through the Ownership of Public History in India grant from the British Academy, she has been exploring tools for cultural archiving via techniques from DH. She serves as an editor for the Routledge series on Digital Humanities in Asia. In collaboration, she is currently developing a new project on digitizing Pune’s Architectural History from 1920 to 1980. She serves on the global advisory board of the University of Rochester’s Humanities in the World program and on the editorial boards of the journal, Public Humanities published by Cambridge University Press and the Edinburgh University Press IJHAC: A Journal of Digital Humanities. She is a founding director of the India based section-8 non-profit firm, Milli Archives Foundation. Since 2018, she has served to build digital humanities scholarship via the DHARTI collective, an ADHO constituent member since 2023.

Nirmala Menon is Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Discipline of English, IIT Indore, and Chair of the newly established Jaya Prakash Narayan National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities (jpnnationalcentre.com). She leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore, India. Menon is the author of Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality (Peter Lang Publishing, Germany, 2014) and Remapping the Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine, Retranslate (Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2017). She is the coeditor of the first multilingual volume of e-literature published from India, Menon, N., T, S., Joseph, J. and Sutton, D., 2023. Indian Electronic Literature Anthology: Volume I. Indore, India: Indian Institute of Technology – Knowledge Sharing in Publishing. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.57004/book1) and also “Making Open Scholarship More Equitable and Inclusive” Publications 2023, 11(3), 41; https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11030041. Menon is the project lead for KSHIP (Knowledge Sharing in Publishing), an IIT Indore digital humanities project in multilingual open access scholarly publishing in India. She is widely published in numerous international journals and speaks, writes, and publishes about postcolonial studies, digital humanities, and scholarly publishing.