Yes, this post could be mundane beyond doubt, for some. And yet, to me, the shades that I have been able to witness in the IITGN sky over the past one week have been just the colours that I needed, to inspire and record my thought processes. There are a couple of explanations needed here, and I will try to be as categorical as possible. Abstractions suit me just fine but blogs are also about being read! This one was just to share these pictures with all of you, but you probably need a context as to why they matter so much to me.
Why I call it the IITGN sky is because I haven’t had time to step out. My view of the sky for the past week has been afforded by my walks between the hostel area and the Academic Block, and am I grateful for those walks! You see, the one colour that our Delhi NCR sky offers most, is grey. The colour is standard, non-fussy, monochromatic grey, and the word that we all have been using for quite some time now, is common too: dystopic (@khemkaayushi certainly agrees!). So when I arrived at IITGN, the first moments were spent at gasping at the sky, for as many minutes as I could spare. I’ve always been a huge fan of the different colours that the sky changes into, during sunset. It had been quite some time that I got to sit and stare at the sunset, which is my favourite thing to do. So these evening walks from the Academic Block to the hostel area have really been my favourite times of the past few days. And while on those walks, we think of colours, skies, the greens, beautiful silent spaces, strange and fascinating red buildings (the Lal Minar in particular) and of course, the common thread that has brought us all together: Digital Humanities!
When I first started thinking about the emergent field of Digital Humanities around three years ago, I could not get very clear answers about what such a combination would connote. I attended sessions on a wide range of topics from pilot archival projects (e.g. Chinsurah Dutch Cemetery Project: http://dutchcemeterybengal.com) to video game representations, and understood the specificities of those particular projects. However, I still had a hard time comprehending if and how DH promised something more than Culture Studies or Media Studies. Was it simply a phase of coining new names as in the case of Commonwealth Literature/New Literatures/Postcolonial Studies? Was it a formulation that sounded fancy but would die down quickly? Much as I read around seminal writings that attempted to clarify what DH meant (“The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0”, in particular https://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf), I went back from my first Winter School hosted by IASE, Pune, with a feeling that I needed to read and understand a lot more, and more importantly, that I would not be able to incorporate these new methods into my field of study. I found myself back at IASE, Pune, a few months later, presenting on the changing notions of art in the context of digital creation and consumption. I had purposefully moved away from thinking about DH but it certainly had not let go of me.
When I applied for a Ph.D. programme at IIT Delhi, I had initially decided to work on digital violence, and had significant reservations about calling it a DH project. As my Research Plan moved along a couple of drafts and assumed its final shape, I realized that I had finally taken the plunge into DH research, and along the way, perhaps understood a little bit about what it could mean. Being here for WIDH, IITGN, I have spent a week thinking about DH and have been able to formulate an important question, even if not gather concrete answers.
The seminal question in my mind at the moment is that of the questions that we scholars of Humanities and Social Sciences ask ourselves, while conducting our research. We have spent considerable time at WIDH, discussing the seductive trap that digital methods and tools offer. Entering the world of visual data could not only change the way we interpret data, it also has the potential to make us reformulate our research questions. A relevant question that we have been discussing in this regard is whether we are limiting our research questions to those that computers are capable of answering. This could lead to significant shifts in the research that Humanists and Social Scientists pursue. The trap is further complicated when we obsess over digital methods only to provide conclusions and findings that are painfully obvious. Pretending that these are radical observations dilutes the quality of research and leads to considerable waste of time and various other resources.
The only possible solution seems to lie in trying to strike the right balance between qualitative and quantitative research, in pursuing distant as well as close reading, using both to supplement each other. We need to ask questions that still provide valuable insights into social and cultural aspects of human existence, but perhaps expand the scope of our research, given that technology enables us to study large chunks of data before making our observations. Or maybe, we need to change the kind of questions we are asking, radically so. Maybe we, as scholars of Humanities and Social Sciences, need to reformulate the questions that we ask and attempt to answer, in the light of Digital Humanities and what it promises.
Winter Institute in Digital Humanities 