DHAI2018 Conference: DH in India: Contestations, Connections and Collaborations

View Call for Papers and Sessions here.

The DHAI2018 conference, DH in India: Contestations, Connections and Collaborations, was held on 1 and 2 June 2018 at IIM Indore and IIT Indore. Jointly organised by the Indian Institute of Management Indore and the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, with support from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, it was the inaugural conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI), the organisation that would later become DHARTI.

The conference sought to question dominant assumptions about Digital Humanities and ask what DH might look like when situated within India’s particular technological, institutional, cultural and historical contexts. Its theme, “Contestations, Connections and Collaborations,” emerged partly in response to critiques of the Anglo-American dominance of DH and the need to recognise diverse and locally situated forms of digital humanities practice. The call for papers specifically asked how postcolonial digital practices might diverge from Euro-American methodologies and raised questions about access, digital pedagogy, new knowledge archives, cultural heritage, digital genealogies and the relationship between the digital and social justice in South Asia.

The two-day conference attracted more than 50 national and international delegates from 16 Indian states and five countries, making it an important early gathering for the emerging Indian DH community.

Day 1: 1 June 2018

The conference opened at IIM Indore with a formal inauguration attended by Prof. Paul Arthur, Chair of Digital Humanities and Director of the Global Studies Centre at Edith Cowan University, Australia; Puthiya Purayil Sneha (P. P. Sneha), Digital Humanities Practitioner at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru; Prof. Nirmala Menon, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Indore; Prof. Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Director of IIM Indore; and Prof. Ashok Thorat, Institute of Advanced Studies in English, Pune. Prof. Dibyadyuti Roy, then faculty at IIM Indore and Conference Coordinator, welcomed the participants.

The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Paul Arthur (Edith Cowan University, Australia) on “The Tyranny of the Digital: Being Human in the Digital Age.” The day then featured three panel discussions:

• Digital Humanities and Social Justice in India
• Lived, Perceived and Conceived Digital Spaces and Digital Pedagogies
• New Media Literacies and Scholarly Publishing

The day concluded with a keynote by Prof. Chaz Evans on “Fidelities of Context in Global Video Game Production.”

Day 2: 2 June 2018

The second day opened with a keynote by P. P. Sneha (Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru) titled “New Contexts of Humanities Practice in the Digital.” Drawing on her research mapping Digital Humanities initiatives in India and her work on digital cultural archives, Sneha’s keynote examined the growth of digital corpora and their relationship with teaching, learning and humanities practice in India’s emerging digital landscape.

The day’s sessions continued with discussions around:

• Digital Infrastructure, Archives and Architecture
• Digital Practice and Pedagogy
• Making Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Projects
• Reading Digital Humanities

The conference concluded with a roundtable on “Decolonizing Knowledge, Decentralizing Discourse,” moderated by Prof. Dibyadyuti Roy (IIM Indore) and Prof. Nirmala Menon (IIT Indore). The roundtable brought the conference’s broader concerns with situated, postcolonial and locally responsive DH practices into a final collective discussion.

The beginning of DHARTI

The conference also has particular significance in DHARTI’s institutional history. According to DHARTI’s current account, DHARTI came into existence at a town hall meeting on 2 June 2018, held amongst the participants of the inaugural DHAI conference and in the presence of its keynote speakers Prof. Paul Arthur, Prof. Chaz Evans and P. P. Sneha. The organisation continued under the DHAI name initially, with the name Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI) being formalised by its Executive Committee in 2019.