Maitrayee

This is a work-in-progress. And comes as a researcher and facilitator in the areas of Information Systems / ICT-D / Management. Five days, 12 talks and around 12.5 hours of workshops introduced the different facets of digital humanities as an area of scholarship and research. In the following table, I try to put forth my key takeaways and insights, trying to map the talks in terms of their parent disciplines, and the role of digital. The purpose of doing so is to glean at the end of 15 days, the possible set of knowledge/ perspective, skill (both technical and non-technical) and attitude (including values) that scholars of digital humanities / digital studies should try to learn and imbibe.

Sl No	Title of the Talk	Anchor Discipline	Digital Artefact/ Role	My Key Takeaway / Insight
1	From Print Culture to a Digital World: The Case of Odisha (Jatindra Kumar Nayak )	English Literature	None	The necessity of anchoring DH/DS in a base discipline to understand the concerns, perspectives, approaches, methods and tools. Transitional challenges of digital immigrants for self; digital natives as co-learners and peers (attitude); Within the departments of humanities and social science, the challenge of negotiating the “digital turn” in scholarship
2	GIS, Digital Cartography, and History (Jim Clifford)	History	GIS. Instrumental use of technology as a tool	Within humanities, while literature took the lead in embracing the change in terms of creation of archives and study of text, maybe history took the lead in terms of applications – collecting data from various sources, analysis, presentation and dissemination
3	Diversity and the Digital Humanities (Barbara Bordalejo)	Gender	,-	Looking at DH as an area of practice. The talk was important in terms of articulating the perspectives / attitudes/ values that needs to be imbibed and taught Neutrality of technology; Algorithms as “logical steps” and as tools of discrimination, operation, inclusiveness and design/behavior of tech artefacts
4	Towards Critical Media Pedagogies: The DiverCity Webarchives (K.P. Jayasankar )	Media Studies	Technology as tool (video) and technology artefact as the end product (the web archives)	The blending of the mediums and methods; co-learners and co-producers; the web archives as technology artefact that can be used for further research. Critical perspectives, traditional research and analytical skills, making videos
5	Embodied Ageing, Culture and Media: Sociological Insights from India (Tannistha Samanta )	Sociology / Gender	Facebook Groups (area of research); Online surveys (tools)	Technology artefacts (apps) and technology mediated social interactions as new areas of research using traditional frameworks, approaches and methods like content analysis;
6	Textual Scholarship (Peter Robinson )	Literature	Archival technology as an artefact	The techniques of Evolutionary biology (transdisciplinary)
7	Encoding Digital Primary Resources (Barbara Bordalejo )	Literature	Archival technology as an artefact	The many possible interpretations of written text while converting to digital. Granularity Vs Precision Collaboration / Credit sharing as a value in the field of digital humanities
8	Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Cognitive and Rehabilitative Technologies (Uttama Lahiri, IIT Gandhinagar)	Computer Science and Electrical Engineering	Assistive Technologies as technology tool and technology artefacts; Sensors, virtual reality, apps etc.	Technology to address “human problem”, dipping into other disciplines – medical science, clinical studies and maybe psychology; More of multi-disciplinary in nature than interdisciplinary
9	Power and Pitfalls of Digital-Transnational History (Jim Clifford)	History	Technology as a tool	Traditional research skills in digital space; Assessing sources, data and their interpretations Skills and basic statistical knowledge of that students of humanities should learn – charts, frequency clouds and bars, tableau etc. (demonstrates how the “digital turn” can be negotiated for history)
10	The Rhizomatic Web: Educators and Learners in the Digital Era (Atanu Bhattacharya)	English language	Technology (blogs) as a tool (for educators) ; interactions and impact as new area of research	Demonstrated how the digital turn can be negotiated for English language. So while use of computer for language learning lab is a very institutionalized process, the “residual content” as data for research in English language. The possibilities of new areas of study on impact of technology on learning outcomes in multiple context. The blending of English with concepts from sociology and technology studies
11	Empowering the Next Billion People with Technology (Junaid Hashmi )	Information Products / Information System	Technology as artifact and technology as tool	Amply demonstrated the need for a critical political economy perspective on technology, privacy and regulations.

Considering that in India, graduate and post graduate level of courses in humanities and many social science areas (other than psychology and to some extent sociology) rarely have any component dealing with numbers (read statistics) or technology as a tool for methods (social network analysis, text mining and analysis), any humanities or social science departments (and for that matter departments of management and mathematics) might want to equip learners and researchers with following:

Knowledge / Perspective

Skill (methods and tools)

Attitude / Values

Data and Information Literacy

Discipline specific perspectives and research concerns (mastering the old to negotiate/ develop the new)

“neutrality of technology”, “notions of empowerment thru technology” “role of the state” “privacy, rights and regulations”, “algorithms as organizing logics”

Technology as an instrument or as an artefact has an associated history (people, organizations, strategy) and maybe politics associated with it (people it enables, people it excludes)

Basic Statistics

Social Network Analysis

Text Mining and Analytics – the simplest one being the word cloud

Tools for Data Collection, Organization, Analysis (statistical, networks), Visualization and Dissemination, Archival

Creative and Critical thinking – conceptualization, problematization and execution

Inclusiveness, genuine empathy,

Understanding of privileges

It may take anywhere between 5- 10 years before digital humanities and digital studies develop as an independent, interdisciplinary area of research – primarily because it would need to create its own eco-system whereby the graduates and doctoral students can visualize their fit (in terms of jobs/careers). While the necessity to be interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary in perspective and approach is a much appreciated and recognized academic value, other than very-very few places, it offers very little space to “fit”. A safer bet would be to anchor self in a base and mother discipline and then embark on the journey towards becoming a digital humanist by exploring the tools, taking up problems that gets generated as a result of technology – social, virtual spheres, or producing the artefact.