The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise. Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques. South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a 'homelanding' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise. Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques. South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a "homelanding" for South Asians within it, while positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

This book explores the emergence of digital humanities in the Indian context. It looks at how online and digital resources have transformed classroom and research practices. It examines some fundamental questions: What is digital humanities? Who is a digital humanist? What is its place in the Indian context? The chapters in the volume: • study the varied practices and pedagogies involved in incorporating the ‘digital’ into traditional classrooms; • showcase how researchers across disciplinary lines are expanding their scope of research, by adding a ‘digital’ component to update their curriculum to contemporary times; • highlight how this has also created opportunities for researchers to push the boundaries of their pedagogy and encouraged students to create ‘live projects’ with the aid of digital platforms; and • track changes in the language of research, documentation, archiving and reproduction as new conversations are opening up across Indian languages. A major intervention in the social sciences and humanities, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of media studies, especially new and digital media, education, South Asian studies and cultural studies.

The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge. New Digital Worlds traces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon.

This book explores the use of digital humanities (DH) to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literary and cultural texts, which circulate in digital forms — in manuscripts — and as oral or musical performance. Drawing on the linguistic, cultural, historical, social, and geographic diversity of Indian texts and contexts, it foregrounds the use of digital technologies — including minimal computing, novel digital humanities research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance — for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which will facilitate comparative readings. With contributions from DH scholars and practitioners from across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more, this book will be a key intervention for scholars and researchers of literature and literary theory, DH, media studies, and South Asian Studies.

In pre-modern religions in the geographical context of Asia we encounter unique scripts, number systems, calendars, and naming conventions. These can make Western-built technologies – even tools specifically developed for digital humanities – an ill fit to our needs. The present volume explores this struggle and the limitations and potential opportunities of applying a digital humanities approach to pre-modern Asian religions. The authors cover Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism and Shintoism with chapters categorized according to their focus on: 1) temples, 2) manuscripts, 3) texts, and 4) social media. Thus, the volume guides readers through specific methodologies and practical examples while also providing a critical reflection on the state of the field, pushing the interface between digital humanities and pre-modern Asian religions into new territory.

"This book traces the role of technology in shaping, curating, disseminating and archiving knowledge and life in South Asia. It focuses on empirical studies of transformative social processes unleashed by technological intervention in colonial and postcolonial contexts, which have changed our everyday lives and created new sites of domination and resistance, new archives of history. Unravelling technology as an indicator of South Asia's encounter with modernity, the essays in the volume interrogate how technology was witnessed in the production of culture, historicizing, preservation of the past, and maintenance of the heritage sites. In addition to examining the critical role of creative and commercial networks in establishing language and script preference, the volume also scans the significant contribution of technology in bringing a digital revolution that changed the face of tourism, changed its relationship with society and its sociological approaches. The volume also highlights how technology in the colonial context was used as an element of imperial domination and investigates technology as a mode of knowledge production. Revealing the inevitable and recognizing role of technology in shaping our past, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of science and technology studies, digital humanities, South Asian studies, modern history, tourism and architecture"--