Practices of Digital Humanities in India: Learning by Doing

This book represents examples of innovations in digital humanities (DH) efforts across India while theorizing disparate challenges and its negotiations. It examines DH projects that have spanned private and public efforts, institutionally sanctioned lab-work, and crowd-sourced programmes of public significance and shows how collectively they demonstrate the potential paths of DH in India.

The essays in the volume highlight the two fundamental challenges for DH – acts of curation of new scales and the creation of platforms that can assist in the collation and analysis of these digital archives – and changes in learning behaviour. They examine the transformation of the university, and the opening up of new relationships between knowledge and audience in concomitant spaces of scholarship such as libraries, archives, and museums. The volume brings to the fore citizen efforts to document, record, and preserve as well as create new avenues of study and forge networks of scholarship that look very different from those of traditional academia. It also foregrounds the challenges of location and addresses the questions of how DH should be taught in India and how to build digital infrastructures.

A go-to guide for DH efforts in India, this book will be an essential text for courses on digital humanities, library and information sciences, and the future of experiential learning.

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.