Concept Note

Undergraduate humanities education in India has historically trained students within single-disciplinary silos. The engagement in the field of humanities has transformed with the advent of the digital tools and the interlinked spaces, breaking disciplinary boundaries and connecting, overlapping teaching-learning and research. This summer school proposes to address the possibilities of the ever expanding and evolving field of the humanities. Through the introduction to tools of computation, data, and digital media, the workshop model focuses on equipping students with understanding, defining, and engaging with the gap created through boundaries. Global humanities scholarship, from platform studies to computational narratology to digital archiving now routinely draws on methods once considered outside the purview of humanistic inquiry, and Indian higher education, pushed further by the National Education Policy 2020’s emphasis on multidisciplinary and holistic learning, expects the same from the next generation of undergraduate students.

Introducing Digital Humanities at the undergraduate level matters precisely because it is early. A student who encounters text encoding, data visualisation, or computational text analysis alongside literary theory in their undergraduate years does not experience DH as a late add-on to a humanities identity already formed — they build that identity as interdisciplinary from the outset. This is a different, and more durable, outcome than retrofitting DH literacy onto scholars trained entirely within one discipline.

The urgency is sharpened by what is already happening to research and, before that, to reading itself: cultural narratives increasingly circulate on platforms, through games, and through AI-mediated tools that traditional humanities methods may not equip students to analyse and build on with criticality. This DH Summer School that reaches undergraduates while their disciplinary habits are still forming is positioned to shape how the next cohort of Indian humanities scholars works — not only as literature students, but as humanities scholars for whom moving across disciplinary boundaries is a natural consequence of their scholarly inquiries.

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