Conference on Digital Humanities

Issues, challenges and opportunities discussed

The department of Liberal Arts of the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT-H), and Sahapedia jointly organised a two-day interdisciplinary conference on challenges in Digital Humanities in relation to Arts, Knowledge and Critique in the Digital Age in India, on November 28 and 29.

The conference aimed to understand how the creation of digital content for Social Sciences and Humanities in India can reconstruct the nature of knowledge, its production and representation and explore possibilities like thought emerging strategies into production of digital content and its information architecture.

Speaking about the role of Digital Technology in reconfiguring the relation between information and everyday life in the Indian subcontinent, founder and CEO of Indigital Mikaela Jade said, “India has already forayed into the digital realm with a massive task of securing democratic access to knowledge and preserving language and practices of its diverse communities. It is the scale of this task that will make the digitisation of arts and knowledge in India a globally unique enterprise.”

The major objective of the conference was to outline the issues, challenges, and opportunities that an inter-disciplinary enterprise can uniquely identify within the creation of digital content in the arts, languages, indigenous rights, and heritage, and to critically appraise the digital practices of vulnerable communities in India to organise and reproduce themselves as knowledge creators.

“I think it is important to first map and identify the way in which computation, media and digital, is being probed and prodded by different data creators in India. We should describe our practices and then think about ways to theorise the trajectory of our digital history,” said assistant professor of anthropology, department of Liberal Arts, Chandan Bose.

The perspective is to guide discussion about the potential of indigenous knowledge-mapping exercises undertaken by local and vernacular historians, regional and urban artisans, grass-roots organisations and workers through digital platforms and its dissemination through online and offline databases.

Apart from focusing significantly on the contribution that digital media and online platforms can make, the conference also took into consideration the role of Digital Technology in historiography, aesthetics, language, culture and heritage, contemporaneity and thought, community and knowledge, locality and environment, language, texts and pedagogy and life and democracy.