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 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.

Nirmala Menon leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore, India. She is Associate Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), IIT Indore. 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.