South Asia and the

Digital Humanities

Roopika Risam

Salem State University

@roopikarisam

Defining Digital Humanities

• Engaging with computational or

digital tools for humanistic inquiry

and using humanistic tools to

understand digital media and

technologies.

What Does That Look Like?

• Cultural heritage projects

• Digital archives

• Quantitative analysis of corpora

• Geographic information systems

• New media studies

Why Digital Humanities?

• Theoretical: Digital spaces are

political

• Practical: Digital tools enable a

range of methods for analysis and

representation of data

Projects from South Asia

Bichitra Online Tagore

Variorum

Allama Iqbal Cyber Library

Nitartha Digital Tibetan

Barriers to DH in South Asia

• Epistemological separation

between humanities and sciences

• Uneven distribution of global and

national resources

• Suspicion from local communities

DH in the Diaspora

South Asian American

Digital Archive (SAADA)

1947 Partition Archive

Cultural Atlas of Global

Blackness

Barriers to DH in Diaspora

• Funding

• Diasporic politics

• The literary canon and academic

politics related to ethnic studies

Pitfalls of Doing DH

• Acceptance of scholarship by

academic community

• Legibility of digital humanities as

scholarship to tenure and

promotion or hiring committees

• Value of collaboration

Possibilities for DH

• Public scholarship

• Blurring boundaries between

academic and public spaces

• Accessibility of scholarship

• Quicker pace of scholarly

communication

Getting Started with DH

• Bamboo DiRT (dirtdirectory.org)

• Demystifying DH (dmdh.org)

• Digital Humanities Summer

Institute (dhsi.org) and HILT

(dhtraining.org)

• South Asia DH mailing list