Heptanesian Archives

I arrived in Chicago last night to spend a day at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, and await the arrival of other friends and colleagues in the windy city on their way to the Madison South Asia Conference this weekend. I am appearing on a panel on Digital Humanities in South Asia in which I’ll be making a small presentation on the Crisis of the Database along with people from Chapati Mystery and the Land of Lime. The panel is Sunday 22 October from 10.30 a.m. to 12.15 p.m. — which might be considered the worst possible slot had there not also been another slot even earlier in the morning on Sunday.

My friend Manan Ahmed at the University of Chicago is co-organising a panel on digital archiving in South Asia at the Annual Conference on South Asia hosted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I haven’t been to the conference in three years, and Manan was kind enough to ask me to present something about my work with digital archiving and mapping, though I only just gave him my abstract for my presentation on The Crisis of the Database: Independent Research and Pedagogy in India Before and After the Digital Revolution:

This presentation will examine the recent history of networked research and pedagogic practice by voluntary initiatives, academic organisations and freelance researchers in India, and consider their consequences for organised scholarship in the humanities and social sciences of South Asia.

Over the past five years, the research landscape in India presents a strange paradox. At the moment when new technologies have enabled the emergence of vibrant new spaces such as mailing lists, blogs and wikis, and a remarkable vitality is shown by the formation of new collectives of researchers, media practitioners, and activists, higher education and university research has been sufffered institutional crisis and precipitous decline in India. While previously isolated communities of independent researchers have become increasingly connected, and new technologies promise to lower the barriers to online pedagogy and collaborative research, the response of traditional academic institutions to these changes have been primarily defensive. As higher education is privatised and vocationalised, organised research in the social science and humanities has become marginalised within India, or has shifted to foreign universities where, it is now widely assumed, serious students must go to receive training in formal research practice. This is a sad commentary on the history of the vast institutional complex in the social sciences built up by the postcolonial state, in which most of today’s senior scholars of South Asia received their training and pursued their careers as historians, sociologists and economists. These developments raise important questions about the future organisation and practice of pedagogy and research both within India, as well as in academic communities concerned with the study of South Asia in America and Europe.

While the crisis of these institutions posed by new forms of mapping, publishing and archiving online is apparent, we are still articulating the institutional forms appropriate to the new research practices and communities forming today. These forms include the emerging structures of collaboration in the era of large distributed databases such as geographic information systems (GIS), archives and repositories of digital texts, images and media; the connection between navigation and management of archives with new techniques of online pedagogy and self-education; and the role of non-academic research groups and institutions in sharing and exchanging data. This presentation will review the contemporary history of non-governmental organisations concerned with documenting, collecting, and training independent researchers in India on human rights, labour, gender, and the environment, and the legacy of the voluntary sector in organising and networking a vast archives of materials through small documentation centres whose history precedes the emergence of today’s networked technologies. This vibrant sphere of activist archiving and publishing, developed over the past thirty years outside of formal academic structures, is our most significant resource for thinking through the pedagogic consequences of digital technologies in the humanities and social sciences of South Asia.

Lecture at the Future Academy Symposium at the Edinburgh College Art School of Architecture, March 2005, later published in Geetha Narayanan, ed., Tana Bana: Srishti School of Art Design & Technology Bangalore at Ars Electronica 2005 in Linz, Austria, August 2005<

Two distinct but inter-related phenomena have been dramatically reshaping the environments of academic institutions in India over the past five years. The first phenomenon is the widespread dissemination of networked media and information technologies, and the challenge this poses to large centralised structures, such as academic institutions and state bureaucracies. The second phenomenon is the decline of the traditional arts, humanities, and social sciences in the social prestige and market value they once commanded, and the erosion of the principle of liberal education and citizenship they represented. Taken together, these two technological and cultural shifts necessarily disrupt the institutional moorings of arts education, creating new spaces both inside and outside the academy for new pedagogic practices, which the academies of the future must seize on.

With regard to the first phenonemonon, virtual and networked forms of self-education, enabled by new media and information technologies, will soon have the potential to supersede the classroom and campus as an environment for learner-driven pedagogy, beyond the confining institutional frameworks evolved by the modern state (colonial and national) in its drive to standardise and certify graduates in the disciplines. Today, new technologies are lowering the barriers of access to the means of producing 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, discipline and the equipment to create these new worlds and act on them, not just as good students or workers, but as confident citizens. Most teachers and college administrators are unprepared for these social and technical shifts for a variety of reasons — social and generational gaps in computer literacy; the technophobia sanctioned by academic culture; and the general crisis posed to academic hierachies and recruitments by open source models of intellectual property, publishing and archiving.

With regard to the second phenomenon, at least in India, historic biases in higher education towards technical education — and a decade of retrenchments and vocationalisation in arts colleges — have effectively destroyed what was left of the old arts-humanities-social sciences disciplines at the undergraduate level. The response of mainstream colleges to these changes in India has been primarily defensive, shoring up their role against a weakening state and an aggressive market — with the introduction of new vocationalised courses and degree programmes. 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, both inside and outside the curriculum and classroom. However, our imagination of academic institutions is still dominated by the sedentary imagery of the residential campuses and territorial enclaves of the elite universities, gated against the ‘real world’ outside.

Institutions have never been static forms or stable structures, but are constantly changing processes, better understood as nodal points in flows of people, ideas and resources which are always in motion. The residential campus, gated against or located outside the city, can no longer enforce its separation from the outside world, if it ever could. Today’s academy can neither be an ivory tower nor an exam factory, but must engage with its outside, the public spaces and arenas for civic action with which many artistic and cultural initiatives are now concerned. Similarly, the increasing mobility of students, faculty, and administrators across borders — whether driven by cultural curiosity or commercial necessity — is a fact in our era of globalisation. The question is not whether to be sedentary or not, but how we can evolve new pedagogic practices which creatively harness this increased mobility, making movement itself into a vital principle of learning.