Heptanesian Archives

Schuyler and I just submitted our applications to Asia Source II, which will be held in Sukabumi in West Java, from 22-30 January 2007, organised by the International Open Source Network (IOSN). Schuyler and I first met at Asia Source I, organised by the Tactical Technology Collective outside Bangalore in January 2005. It was as close as I have come to a religious conversion. In tribute to the spirit of Asia Source, here is our over-ambitious proposal for organising a Freemap Workshop on open-source geo-spatial tools and locative media for the participants from NGOs and SMEs in Southeast Asia at the next camp in Indonesia. While we won’t know if it’s been accepted for another month or so, this template can be implemented in a town near you. Give us a call.

I finally gave the new OpenLayers Map Rectifier a serious crash test today, and a few hours later I was still in the same quiet groove, with rosy visions of what it might make possible for historical geography. The rectifier has enormous potential to give users an easy point-and-click interface for geo-referencing and then warping their own flat maps of places, for use as layers in a geographic database. What this means is that I now am within reach of a tool which will allow me to begin creating layers of the various maps of Bombay and loading them as layers in the Mumbai Free Map, as I can now easily warp any image by making a few markers based on common landmarks between the source map and reference map.

This screenshot shows the 1969 Bombay City Guide Map loaded into the rectifier, tagged with a few common markers between the source image on the left and the new layer on the right, now warped according to the surface of the earth. Chris Schmidt helped squash a small bug to get this rendering to work, and I’m hoping that the team can implement the projection system for Mumbai (WGS Datum 84 and UTM Zone 43N) so we can begin serving layers live to the Mumbai Free Map. In anticipation, I uploaded high-resolution maps of Bombay, Salsette, and parts of Thana and Colaba from 1926, 1930, 1933, and 1969. Go to to one of these maps and zoom in on a neighbourhood you know, and load up the satellite imagery in the reference map, and click away.

Days before leaving Boston to attend the Digital Humanities Colloquium at the University of Chicago, I received the fruits of my brief visit to Chicago two weeks earlier, two DVDs in the mail containing extremely high-resolution scans of the 1919 City Survey of Bombay sheets, 12 in total, which were made for me by Chris Winter and Joost Dupont at the Map Collection at the Regenstein Library. While Schuyler and I struggled to even open these huge TIFF plates on our laptops, I left for Chicago with excitement at the possibility of eventually georeferencing and vectorising these sheets to serve as a new layer in the Mumbai Free Map. That project, begun two years ago with the help of Schuyler when he was a hacker and squatter in the Limehouse Town Hall in London, has seen many iterations, both in terms of the project and my close friendship with Schuyler.

For the past six months, the Free Map Server has been running on OpenLayers, which Schuyler develops from his new perch as chief trouble-maker at MetaCarta Labs in Cambridge. OpenLayers now offers a whole suite of tools for geo-referencing maps and turning them into layers. The latest is the Map Rectifier for matching GPS points to images and automating the creation and projection of geo-data. In future it will have a tool for vectorisation, and an interface for annotating maps with other kinds of information stored in a database. This would make possible a web-based geo-spatial toolkit and mapping service, which researchers and scholars could use for everything from blogging about neighbourhood history to mapping the historical geography of urban land use changes. And we now have the raw data to do this, as well as some new tools.

I had the good fortune, then, to meet Jim Nye, the renowned archivist and bibliographer who runs the Southern Asia Collection and the Digital South Asia Library at the U of C, and get into a lengthy conversation about the recent convergence between the old expert culture of geo-spatial analysis and the new media culture of digital archiving and mapping. While the conference was addressed more to humanities scholars and computer scientists, I am more interested in seeing collaboratons between social scientists and web developers. Jim is one of those rare people who understands both the aspects of digital archiving when it comes to working with materials from India and South Asia — both the tools and the content — and he was recently honoured for his contributions at a roundtable in Madison. When I first met him in Chicago four years ago, I was helping to start PUKAR (which was initially funded by the U of C) and he had scanned for us the Bombay City Guide Maps of 1933 and 1969, which we were able to use for teaching and research in Mumbai at CRIT and KRVIA. Here is the 1933 Guide Map in the OpenLayers Map Rectifier.

Apart from maps, over the past two years Nikhil and I have accumulated a huge store of primary documents including the Bombay Development Committee Report of 1913-1914, all of the annual reports of Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) from 1899 to 1920, and Samuel Sheppard’s Bombay Place Names and Street Names from 1917 (a classic for local history buffs). All these documents, which I sourced and scanned myself, are stored as PDFs, which must be put to OCR for extracting the text and then making it searchable by place. Gutenkarte demonstrates how this can be done using OpenLayers. I am hoping I can bring Schuyler and Jim into conversation about both helping me with this project to create a historical-geographic database of Bombay. Other interesting collections of digital maps at Regenstein include Chicago in the 1890s and the Imperial Gazeteer of India.

For years now, I have been searching for an open source utility to create PDF files from image files, without having to use Adobe Acrobat. I have been using Acrobat in my department, in conjunction with a scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), to digitally archive thousands of documents, essays, articles and books. And as friends and colleagues will attest, I have come to spend long hours slaving over the scanner, in the service of digital archiving. In recent months my search for an alternative to using Acrobat on Windows had become desperate, especially as I cherished the idea of one day purchasing my own Automatic Document Feeder (Daku and Thiru even suggested getting me one for my birthday, but then quickly recanted on learning of the price of the gift. Bastards.). Apart from the hardware, in order to do digital archiving on my own, I needed a graphical utility, not just a command-line tool, and it had to work with Ubuntu Linux, which is my main operating system. I resented the hegemony of Adobe’s proprietary application over the production of my documents, which must remain free and open. While the Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard, the authoring and production of PDFs is still best done with Adobe Acrobat, which is neither open source nor freeware, though there are numerous PDF viewers available for every operating system. So after years of searching for a solution to this impasse, my belief in the ecology of free software development was redeemed by the discovery of GScan2PDF. Here is the thread on the UbuntuForums in which Jeffrey Ratcliffe answered our wishes. Now I can get to work with compiling all the various materials which have been sitting offline for several years and prepare them for distribution and publication, and make the dream of the Heptanesian Archives a reality.

On 8 August 2003, JACIC (Jindal Arts Creative Interaction Centre) organised a panel discussion on “Radio Beyond Broadcasts”. This panel, held at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai, explored the uses of low-power radio as an inexpensive medium for creative expression in theatre, concert music, heritage walks, street performances, sound installations, and other forms of non-polluting public audio broadcasting. The panel was initiated by Shekhar Krishnan, social scientist and media activist, and Vickram Crishna, CEO of Radiophony India Pvt Ltd, a consultancy dealing in low-cost wireless and radio solutions for mass communications in India. The other panelists were conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah and artists Sharmila Samant and Tushaar Joag of the Open Circle Arts Trust, Mumbai. Following a presentation and talk by Crishna on the potential uses of low-power radio beyond its conventional and legally sanctioned broadcast uses, the three panelists offered their responses and questions, and initiated discussion with the audience on issues concerning urban arts, heritage, tourism, and citizenship. The panel discussion was chaired by Shekhar Krishnan.

Crishna emphasised that despite being one of the cheapest and most accessible technologies for mass communications in the world, and with airwaves not being a limited or expendible resource, radio is generally not seen as something individuals and communities can do by and for themselves. The government’s monopoly over the spectrum has created a situation of artificial scarcity of an otherwise abundant resource in the airwaves, which are rationed out at steep entrance fees through the broadcast license regime. Despite recent liberalisation of this regime — such as through the new FM radio stations broadcasting in many Indian cities for the past year — the airwaves remain mostly under state control, a resource denied to all but a few broadcasters from the corporate entertainment industry, state corporations like All-India Radio, and a handful of elite colleges with campus radio programmes. In contrast to this situation of a small number of commercial stations with fairly homogeneous content, the FM spectrum in India could actually support up to 1.5 million radio stations, ranging in their content, form and scale to suit their communities of listeners and broadcasters, and fostering a much greater diversity of cultural exchange, and creative and political expression.

As part of the panel’s focus on new forms of communication, Tushaar Joag and Sharmila Samant of the Open Circle Arts Trust briefly introduced their group’s recent initiatives in spreading new forms of activism by visual artists, against the rising tide of intolerance and communal violence. Reclaim Our Freedom Week, organised in August 2002, filled railway stations, public spaces and art galleries in South Mumbai with screenings, talks, exhibitions and performances in protest against religious violence, in the wake of the Gujarat riots. The India Sabka Festival, co-organised with Majlis in December 2002, marked the tenth anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition with students competitions and a cultural festival which employed billboard and architectural designs, video and art installations, performances, and fiction writing on the theme of secularism and cultural pluralism. Open Circle has been active in taking art out of the gallery circuit and into public spaces, posing important questions about how public art can promote tolerance and multiculturalism. In this context, Samant described several projects in which radio technology is being used by artists to create new experiences of space through innovative sound installations.

Abha Narain Lambah, conservation architect, discussed several scenarios in which low-power radio could be used to promote tourism, as well as increased awareness of heritage and local history in urban neighbourhoods and culturally significant regions outside cities. Whereas heritage conservation in India has remained an elitist pursuit — concerning itself mostly with the tangible and physical dimensions of buildings and urban precincts — the more intangible qualities of cultural identity, memory, and community have been ignored in debates on heritage. The connection between buildings and landmarks, and their cultural and historical references in the memory and traditions of local communities could be bridged through radio walks and tours in urban villages like Khotachiwadi, or Pali Hill in Bandra — whose neighbourhoods mark the lives of important directors, musicians, and other personalities of the Bombay film industry. As each building or street has a story to tell, low-power radio broadcasting combined with cheap headphone receivers provides heritage enthusiasts and cultural activists with the media beyond the picture postcards and coffee-table books that we associate with heritage. Low-power radio could also be used by communities to share and promote intangible heritage, such as local musical and story-telling traditions, as well as assist communities in organising around civic and infrastructural concerns and improving their environments. Like physical space and the built environment, the airwaves are a space in which cultural values can be shared and made meaningful for the community.

Recent debates in the mainstream media in India have focussed only on the failures of the present license regime to encourage competition and profits in newly liberalised FM markets. While the Central Government is revising its licensing policies to increase its own revenues, and further commodify the radio spectrum, Radiophony India views the airwaves as a commons and public space, in which the battle for communications rights and media democracy must be waged by organised communities and activists, artists and creative and media practitioners, and concerned citizens. Crucial to this battle is control over the means of broadcasting by communities themselves. Radio walks in heritage precincts could quickly become another kind of elitism, if it is only understood as a tourist technology — which turns living communities into art objects, like in a gallery or museum, subject to the voyeuristic gaze of the radio-enabled consumer. However, if communities themselves control the programming and content of the broadcast, and access is not restricted either to the state or a few large commercial players, the potential for new creative uses of radio beyond broadcasts are as vast as our imagination — and the airwaves — permit them to be.

For more information, visit Radiophony India and Open Circle Arts Trust, or e-mail Vickram Crishna, Abha Narain Lambah, and Open Circle Arts Trust.

Originally published in Art India, 14 August 2003

It is a well-known cliché that today, all of us deal with information in much greater abundance and intensity than ever before. The Internet, the sign of this new economy, is a huge repository of information, with signs, images and stories flowing through its ever expanding networks. Any creative and critical engagement today also means learning to deal with such enormous archives and flows of information, and understanding how they are created. While on the one hand the world around us is increasingly mediated by new technologies and media forms that shape our perceptions acutely, on the other hand most of us do not have access to these technologies, nor are we encouraged to shape the mediated reality around us.

Any critical pedagogy today must address these questions, raised by the advent of new media practices, and the increasing importance of information and communication technologies to our everyday lives, especially in cities in India. The response of mainstream educational institutions has been primarily defensive, to shore up their role against a weakening state and an aggressive market — with the introduction of new diploma courses and degree programmes catered for lucrative careers in the corporate media, such as the Bachelors of Mass Media (BMM) courses in Mumbai. The responses from individual teachers and scholars, media producers and activists, and other groups and organisations is still being debated.

The technical complexities of computing and media production — or simple aversion to machines — have often negated the enhanced role and importance of the imagination in a time of mass mediation and increasing connectivity. With regard to education, this paradox is reinforced by a generational divide which is both social and technical. Many school and college students today have been socialised into the use, abuse and appropriation of sophisticated technologies and media from a very young age — unlike their teachers, parents, and mentors, who often find the learning curve much steeper. We underestimate the enhanced cultural and social literacy of a generation of kids raised on cable television, e-mail and chat rooms, and cheap mobile communications.

What we must recognise is that this conjuncture — of technophobia on the one hand, and of generational difference on the other hand — represents a significant reversal of standard pedagogic approaches. Vocationalisation has been one response to this dilemma, reflective of the weak institutional conditions prevailing in many colleges. Narrow technical instruction, by simply satisying the desires of the job market, cannot substitute for the work of the imagination — which makes technical skills and tools useful and exciting outside both the clasroom and the workplace, in the public sphere of citizenship and civic action. The decline of the traditional arts and humanities courses, and their replacement by career-centric education, while a complex phenomenon, also presents new opportunities for pedagogic experiments outside the space of the curriculum and classroom. In the next two sections, I describe one such extra-curricular experiment, the PUKAR Monsoon DOC-SHOP, which attempted to recognise and build on some of the paradoxes and insights outlined above.

PUKAR Monsoon 2003: “On Cities, On Water”

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research), a cross-sectoral collective of researchers and professionals based in Mumbai, has been deeply concerned with various concepts and practices of documenting urban spaces and environments since its inception two years ago. PUKAR views documentation not simply as a passive act of recording reality, but an active, imaginative process that allows us to participate in the construction of the reality around us. Similarly, our view of the city is not one of static forms or stable structures, but of a constantly changing urban processes in which the city is better understood as a nodal point in mobile flows of people, money, images, and resources.

We annually organise the PUKAR Monsoon —  a series of occassional lectures, workshops, presentations and activities from May to August every year, in which undergraduate college students in Mumbai address a specific urban theme through a variety of approaches. The theme chosen for this year’s PUKAR Monsoon was “On Cities, On Water”. Water as substance and as medium has been central to the urban experience throughout human history, particularly in coastal and port cities like Mumbai. In the context of globalisation, other dimensions of water, and of the relationship between cities and water are becoming increasingly visible and contested in the public arena — notably through the privatisation of water resources and infrastructure.

Our aim in the PUKAR Monsoon has been to enable young people to develop a critical understanding of these and other relationships between cities and water, and the cultural and political implications of these connections. The theme of water becomes a useful pedagogic device to explore new understandings of cities and urban life in the context of globalisation. Traditional approaches to understanding cities have often treated the urban environment as an static object of inquiry, with fixed boundaries and a coherent set of technical and social indicators related to infrastructure, population, and employment. The flip side of this technocratic understanding of the city has been sentimental imagery of the heritage conservationists, of beautiful colonial buildings and monuments, which objectifies the contemporary city as an irretrievable picture postcard.

As opposed to these geographies and imageries, which are based on fixed and static conceptions, a more mobile and process-oriented pedagogy recognises that neither cities nor water ever stand still, and are characterised by constant motion and flows. The attempt at documenting these flows of water — which spill out and extend across regions beyond the city and even the nation — reminds us that the formation of contemporary mega-cities like Mumbai is as much a local as a global process, linking the city in complex and unequal relationships with its local, regional and global environments.

PUKAR Monsoon DOC-SHOP

The PUKAR Monsoon 2003, timed at the beginning of the college year in Mumbai, thus provided us the context to explore some of our related concerns with new forms of pedagogy, documentation, and understandings of cities, in relation to the theme of water. The first event in the PUKAR Monsoon 2003 was the DOC-SHOP, in which we attempted to connect these concerns with new media technologies and practices to create new knowledge about the city.

DOC-SHOP — shorthand for “documentation workshop” — was a week-long series of intensive sessions that fostered a critical and intellectual engagement with the terms and practices of documentation through reading, discussion, and lectures, while also encouraging hands-on learning of technical skills in digital and print media. Twenty  six undergraduate students from arts, science, mass media, and architecture courses participated, almost all of them from Mumbai.

The DOC-SHOP was conducted by the PUKAR Associates, along with resource persons ranging from video editors, sound recordists, and new media artists to engineers, anthropologists and community activists. The structure of the DOC-SHOP was to combine a morning of lectures and interactions with practitioners, followed by an afternoon of shooting, recording, photography or other documentation of water in the city, and evenings spent in editing or reviewing the documentaries produced by the students. Five separate days were devoted to distinct media forms — video, photography, text, sound, and the web — followed by four days of production work on small multi-media documentary projects.

DOC-SHOP activities ranged from scripting of short films, writing poetry and short expressive essays, recording sounds of water captured from city streets and markets, to photographing the city’s waterfronts and public fountains, and developing web-based presentations to link different elements of video, text, sound and images about water and the city. The discussions in the DOC-SHOP included reflections on the digitalisation of still and moving images and the changing role of video and photo documentation, the history of state and market control of the FM airwaves and the idea of low-cost community radio, and understanding the changing nature of the archive and artistic and expressive practices in the age of the Internet. The emphasis throughout the DOC-SHOP was on combining practices of documentation in various media forms — through the use of digital cameras, recording devices, and computers — with a creative approach to the urban environment, using the city’s constantly changing and mobile landscapes as a medium for a new kind of engaged pedagogy outside the classroom.

The eight days of DOC-SHOP activities culminated in the DOC-SHOP Review on 27 May 2003, a public exhibition of short videos, photo essays, edited sound recordings, web art, and other small documentary projects produced by the students (a web archive of these projects, designed and built by one of the DOC-SHOP students, can be seen at http://www.pukar.org.in/doc-shop/). The DOC-SHOP Review concluded with a two-hour public discussion featuring film encyclopaedist and cultural studies scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, oral historian and feminist scholar C.S. Lakshmi, of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women), Mumbai, and documentary film-maker Madhushree Datta of Majlis, Mumbai.

A New Pedagogy?

Pedagogic interventions are important to a new generation of urban youth, whose critical understanding of society is mainly formed in the space of colleges, and through the world of the mass media. The PUKAR Monsoon — now in its second year — was conceived in a spirit of engagement with younger voices, which are often neglected as sources of serious reflection on our city and society.

While we are used to according to young people the role of creative social agents, and address both their imaginations and aspirations as future citizens, we are still unused to regarding them either as technical experts, or real producers of knowledge. How often have we heard the lament that post-liberalisation generation have shorter attention spans and are more apathetic than ever before? Everything from lack of political awareness, to mindless consumerism, to disinterest in reading long books, has been blamed on the alienation of today’s youth.

What these comments reflect is our inability to recognise the potential of new media practices to unleash new ways of learning from our information and media-saturated environments, particularly in cities. This technological shift necessarily disrupts the institutional moorings of mainstream education, creating new spaces outside the classroom for innovative pedagogic practice. Vocationalisation — and other forms of “dumbing down” in the media and public culture — are only one, rather weak, response to this new conjuncture. As opposed to vocationalisation, recently many pedagogic initiatives have intervened directly through the curriculum — taking advantage of the weak institutional conditions prevailing in many universities to introduce new courses and means of certification. While this has largely resulted in the proliferation of degree courses which narrow the scope of undergraduate education, it has also opened a space of opportunity for bold curricular initiatives such as those at the Centre for Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore (which now offers certificate and distance education courses, as well as PhD certification, in cultural studies).

The PUKAR Monsoon, while only in its second year, has based itself on a different kind of extra-curricular practice which uses the city as a pedagogic device for the creation of new knowledge. Through the DOC-SHOP, we realised that digital technologies are lowering the barriers of access to the means of producing new social imaginations, and more than ever before young people have the tools to build new and imaginative forms of creative reflection and civic engagement. What is left is to articulate a new pedagogy — and institutional forms appropriate to this practice — which gives young people the space and the equipment to create these new worlds and act on them, not just as good students or workers, but as confident citizens.

This essay draws on text prepared by Rahul Srivastava and Vyjayanthi Rao for the PUKAR Monsoon, and its argument is inspired by the work of Arjun Appadurai.

The PUKAR Monsoon DOC-SHOP was made possible through the participation of Rahul Srivastava (PUKAR), Paromita Vohra (PUKAR), Gauri Patwardhan (film editor), Neeraj Voralia (film editor), Rajesh Vora (photographer), Abhay Sardesai (PUKAR), Sadaf Siddique (film editor), Vickram Crishna (Radiophony India Pvt Ltd), Beatrice Gibson (new media artist and researcher), Indu Agarwal (SPARC), Hansa Thapliyal (Majlis), Qusai Kathawala (Transmit Audio Lab), Mukul Deora (Transmit Audio Lab), Ashish Rajadhyaksha (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore), C.S. Lakshmi (SPARROW), Madhushree Datta (Majlis), Shahid Khan (Apple Computer), Girish Menon (PUKAR) and Shonali Sarda (PUKAR).

Originally published in Humanscape Magazine special issue on Learning Beyond Teaching, edited by Shilpa Phadke, August 2003.