Showing posts with label Digital Humanities. Show all posts
A Belated Blogpost: The Digital Humanities Workshop at Presidency
Another year in India and already so much has happened while
I try to keep the ship of Digital Culture Studies afloat. My alma mater
Jadavpur University has launched its Digital Humanities diploma course, more
students now read on tablets and I was even invited to a colloquium on
developing DH in India, quite recently as readers of Ludus Ex will know. For
me, formal academic discussions on DH started off in India with a bang at the
first Indian DH conference held at Presidency University, last year. Jadavpur’s Bichitra project and other key archival initiatives had already
made key contributions to some aspects of the Digital Humanities; the DH
conference was a suitable forum to take this forward on a national and
international level.
Liz Losh on Facebook: 'Me near the home of Thackeray. (And -- yes I have read Henry Esmond, not just VF)'
In keeping with the plan for developing DH in India, this
year I organised a smaller event at Presidency. Three talks on the rather
varied topics of digital archiving, e-portfolios and how DH relates to
hacktivism, feminism and play formed part of the workshop. These were followed
by a question-answer session where many expressed their concerns about and
support for the newly emerging field. The speakers were Elizabeth Losh (from
the University of California, San Diego), Amlan Dasgupta (from Jadavpur
University, Calcutta) and Shiladitya Raychaudhury (from Auburn University,
Alabama). The abstracts can be found here:
Dr Elizabeth Losh. ‘Whose Digital Humanities? Activism,
Hacktivism, Feminism, and Play’
The digital humanities is sometimes called the “digitized
humanities” in Europe and North America, because DH efforts still tend to
privilege print culture and to overlook born-digital objects of study, such as
video games, online video, digital images, or computer programs. National
digital humanities organizations also often ban political engagement or
controversy in funded projects, on the grounds that neutrality is a paramount
value for cultural heritage projects. This talk provides an overview of recent
trends among #transformdh participants, who are bringing more seemingly subversive
practices to the digital humanities field from queer theory, feminism, human
rights activism, hacking, game studies, and critical making communities.
Dr Shiladitya Chaudhury, ‘The role of multiple
representations in building 21st century scientific literacy’
Scientific literacy in the 21st century requires the learner to
master fluency in moving between different representations of information - be
it graphical, diagrammatic, symbolic, numerical, textual or verbal. The
learning sciences offer us some clues on how to structure instruction to best
utilize these representations. Modern technological tools are also making it
easier for learners to both deconstruct existing representations (e.g. a
physics video of an accelerating object) as well as generate their own
representations (e.g. graphs of position versus time of the object). New
forms of assessment, such as ePortfolios, offer a mechanism to allow students
the opportunity to demonstrate competency in these various literacies. My talk
will present a couple of examples to illustrate these points and open the door
for discussion on exploring the different types of literacies that are implied
in mastery of a particular type of content knowledge.
Prof Amlan Das Gupta, ‘THE UNFASHIONABLE SIDE: MUSIC ARCHIVES AND DIGITAL SURROGACY’
Lady Bracknell. [Shaking her head.] The
unfashionable side. I thought there was something. However, that
could easily be altered.
Jack. Do you mean the fashion, or the side?
Lady Bracknell. [Sternly.] Both, if necessary,
I presume.
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest,
1894
The presentation considers the question of digital
surrogacy in archival practice. Does the digital file at some point stop being
a "surrogate" of a physical "original"? If so, when, and
under what conditions? The question seems to be of importance in
conceptualising image and audio-visual archives.
Liz Losh, of course, is a well known name in Digital Culture
circles and I was very happy to get to meet her at last. We went for a walk down
Esplanade all the way up to Free School Street where I showed her William
Makepiece Thackeray’s birthplace (the present-day Armenian College). Liz
proudly announced that (pace all
critics of DH who think we DH researchers haven’t read books) she had not only read Vanity
Fair but also Henry Esmond. I
must confess I haven’t ever ventured near the latter! The conversation veered
on to the status of DH in academia and how she felt that the time of ‘Digital
Humanities’ as opposed to ‘Digitizing Humanities’ (or that understanding of DH
that sees the field as being about creating digital texts only). The issue of
digital surrogacy, brought up by Amlan Dasgupta was also something that came up
a few times. It is important that such questions are being asked in the early
days of DH in India and that our students are beginning to engage with them.
For me, it was a treat to have such a discussion yet again in my home city and
to have experts from the field advise us on how to develop the area further.
Digital Humanities Consultation - IISc Bangalore
I confronted that old ghost yet again: that ever worrying
question ‘What is Digital Humanities?’ Like any spectre, this one too is
substance-less yet present. It is like the proverbial trace – the mark that
remains when the thing itself is not there.
A spectre is haunting us; the spectre of (the) Digital
Humanities. Is it here to replace the Humanities or to take away the primacy of
the Sciences? The spectre never ceases to scare. At IISc Bangalore, scholars from all over the
country (well, almost) met for a ‘consultation’ on designing curricula on the
Digital Humanities. It is here that the spectre rose again. For those interested in a more objective account,
There was much discussion about the very origin of research
on digital media and its use in India.
Ravi Sundaram of SARAI spoke about the Sarai mailing list, that
excellent and incessant (later somewhat annoyingly so) resource that filled up
my mailboxes with news of cutting-edge research that would have been impossible
without Sarai funding. He spoke of Media Nagar, where contributors published and
posted online and of his experience, in the early days of digital archiving,
with the Labour History archive. Questions were asked about how we can set up
collaborative networks and research writing through text culture. Nishant Shah
of CIS, on Skype from Germany and after suffering the travails of the digital
incompetence of the Indian passport office, expressed skepticism at the growing
enthusiasm about DH. According to him,
in a world which considers data the sole reality, the time-honoured close-reading
that is part of the Humanities is about to suffer a sad end. This met some
stiff opposition from respondents (including yours truly) who saw close-reading
as always have gone hand in hand with data analysis. Indeed, think of the
concordances and unique tools that have been used since time immemorial by
scholars close reading literary texts.
Messing up the order of the presentations somewhat, I think
I need to mention one of the most hands-on papers of the day. Tanveer and Asha
presented on their four-year project of bringing ICT closer to less privileged
children from schools and colleges in different states in India. It was
interesting how, according to their research, the children and their teachers
were quick to dissociate the digital from the Humanities and how the less
privileged children took to the Humanities easier than those who were more
affluent. A quick point to note here is that the Humanities experience of these
children was digitally mediated anyway (via Facebook, Youtube etc) so the distinction
does not really hold. It is perhaps indicative of a mindset that takes to a
watertight categorisation more easily because of the comfort that such fixed
and finite parameters posit. Ashish of IISc spoke about Digital Ecosystems,
using the Indian Government’s UID (Universal Identity ) or aadhar project as his key example. Jim Nye, of Loyola University,
Chicago reiterated the need to teach people how to handle analogue material
before allowing any digitisation initiatives to be started. He cited the instance
of the destruction of invaluable of archival material in Urdu due to the
ignorance of the team that attempted to digitise these texts. Nye also
expressed the need for DH initiatives in India to link with those elsewhere on
the subcontinent.
However, the major ‘find’ for me was Arun Menon – a fellow
game studies scholar when I had lost all hope in finding a kindred soul in
India (can you believe it!) and someone who, like me, ekes out his living doing
other things while secretly remaining committed to the cause of bringing gaming
to academia. Arun and I will have many occasions to disagree, especially when
it comes to the telos in videogames
and suchlike things. However, there is much synergy in our work and it is
heartening to see people like Arun braving all odds and correcting Masters
papers on videogames written by students from English departments. Arun’s paper
was on the potential risks of digital humanities. He sees in DH initiatives an
intense need to legitimise the Humanities by inserting or adding-on a
statistical rigour and a faux scientism (my phrase). He sees as some kind of
last-ditch response of a Humanities that is in crisis. Because of DH, it is
possible that the traditional Humanities will be taken to task and the support
that could have come to the Humanities as such will shift to DH. Again, a
spectre.
I do not agree with such a conclusion but I think I
understand where this is coming from. Here is some brave and plain speaking
that needs to be respected for what it is. The statistical fetish that DH has
shown since its recent birth and the beeline that many Humanities scholars who
still cannot tell the difference between Excel and excellence have made towards
DH, is indicative of the fact that DH is the ‘in’ thing today. Suddenly my research
on gaming has become respectable and even newspapers are writing about me;
shouldn’t I be a happy boy now! Educational bodies and research councils have started
moving their lumbering girths towards a digital starry-eyed future. Arun is
right: the reason behind the sudden focus on DH is a problem. However, as he
half apologetically says, DH escapes disciplinarity. So what the heck is going
on?
Before I attempt an answer, I will need to bring in another
person into this gameplay. Amlan Dasgupta’s contribution to DH in India
(together with that of Sukanta Chaudhuri) is of phenomenal import and the
recent Bichitra project or the online
Tagore variorum, completed at Jadavpur University, is perhaps the single
largest such DH project in the world. How they managed to get this done I do
not know … or maybe I do know – my few trips to the School of
Cultural Texts and Records revealed how extremely dedicated and smart their
team was. But I digress – Bichitra deserves
a much more thorough analysis in a separate space of its own. I was about to mention a few key points that
Sir raised in relation to the future of
DH in India. First, he stressed the importance
of teaching Digital Humanists how to handle analogue material (so that no more
archives get messed up!); secondly, he insisted on the importance of developing
and tweaking tools to suit specific operations in DH and finally, he agreed
with me and stated in no uncertain terms that DH is not a discipline but is
rather an ‘indiscipline’ or non-discipline. Arguing that DH has entered its
third-wave, he wondered aloud about digital surrogacy. So, is the Bichitra
archive a digital surrogate? I would think not but the question intrigues
me still. The other major point that Sir made was about the incompleteness of
the archive – the archive is always being added to and there is no single
heroic authorial character here. It is a community at work. Through and
through. And of course, it is not possible to ask whether you are digital or
whether you are a humanist.
(Fig) My Presentation
I will not dwell on what I had to say as I have discussed my
thoughts many times on ‘Ludus Ex’. Suffice it to say that I made a strong claim
that DH is not a discipline and that its fun lies in its being a (non)
discipline. It is possible to teach it as a discipline if one is after
convincing funding bodies but then that’s like creating a Theory discipline in
the same way that we have Film Studies or Cultural Studies. DH, is for me, a
research modality and not a discipline. Whatever it is, it certainly does not
mean digital archiving alone; if it did, we would have called it so. I stressed
the importance of Digital Culture, introduced Game Studies and showed everyone
the splendid microfiction that Presidency students have been creating on
Facebook. I ended with a Youtube of an Indian bureaucrat vehemently insisting
that having data on the Cloud was disastrous as vital datasets could be lost
when the cloud started raining! The moral was plain: DH teaching and research
needs to take into account digital and web 2.0 processes and technology
seriously. An old-guard luddite turned sudden digital humanist will struggle if
he or she is not able to engage with technology. I’m not a techie can be an
excuse for a few days at most but if we want to do DH, then as the Digital Humanities Manifesto says, ‘Let’s get
our hands dirty.’ That is the only way in which I can face the spectre: by engaging with DH and doing so smartly.
The Chainsaw And The Scalpel: Impressionistic Ramblings about Computers in The Humanities
Between conversations, cigarettes and classical music we spoke of chainsaws and scalpels. Nothing was cut, of course - no zombie gore in the dismal corridors of Jadavpur University. We were talking about the role of the digital in the Humanities. The digital, somebody said, is like a chainsaw: it hacks away efficiently at great masses of data. The bigger the archive, the better the number crunching and the data analysis. The data has to be coded, metadata added and very human judgements tagged on to a text-now-turned-into-data. Fascinating stuff and I’m dying to write my SQL to get info out. I’ve done it before on coded interviews, on human voices and on feedback; the chainsaw-queries paring down the database to the shape of my logic. Masses of poetry analysed; unanticipated connections made. Algo-rhythm.
As the chainsaw whirrs non-stop, my doubts begin. I remember Lev Manovich saying in his now classic text, ‘Vertov stands half-way between Baudelaire's flâneur and computer user: no longer just a pedestrian walking through a street, but not yet Gibson’s data cowboy who zooms through pure data armed with data mining algorithms.’ I know what I’ve missed; the flaneur, checking out the streets randomly and the chap that’s not quite in any fixed role of the two mentioned - a Dziga Vertov moving through streets aiming his movie camera often at minute details and recording everything. The camera as scalpel - making small but significant incisions. These can be marked up - lines on a light background. Scalpel. Pale scale.
So when one skips in the ‘in-between spaces’ between hyperlinks, those marked-up words or those not-marked-up words, one carves out stories in miniature. A digital scalpel or a chisel even carving out narratives where one least expected them. The digital is not a tool, neither is it about tools; here’s the game reloaded: the digital is not a tool. Derrida calls it ‘originary technicity’. Technicity as how the technical affects the me. A pacemaker is not just a prosthesis (see Tim Clark’s superlative summary of Derrida’s position); it’s life as well as technology. The same by the way goes for a pen. The pen as an extension of the hand. The number as an extension-technology of the finger - digit. A heightened form of the finger-technology is here with us and is writing in the skies. Digital. Not a prosthesis.
So I was digital at the very outset; I am digital, a finger-hand-nerve machine; wired and rewired. So am I a chainsaw or a scalpel? I cannot choose as a becoming-machine. As an originary machine that is in process still. So Chainsaw/ Scalpel is media-specific. Digital Humanities research in many cases seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Chainsawing through database forests leaves splinters everywhere and one walks on them. The broken are pieced together as stories and they reload as other stories. Kate Hayles sensibly points us to media-specific analysis. To club everything that is computer-mediated into the crammed all-encompassing category of the digital is neither fair nor plausible. In analysing the narratives, we often miss the stories. Employing our chainsaw logic gates is great; we, however, miss out the cultural assemblage that is inextricably plugged into the text-crunching assemblage. The analysis needs to be flexible and to adapt. The amount of data does not matter. What matters is the process - whether this is about designing queries to analyse data or about constructing narratives in the leerstellen.The digital is not one tool; it is … media-specific and it is many. An assemblage.
Let’s not oversimplify. Tool / app / plugin is part of the digital assemblage. Your chainsaw suddenly turns into a swiss knife. Or even better, a swiss knife in becoming. In the context of originary technicity, we are neither originary chainsaw or originary scalpel: we are both and simultaneously none of these. Instead of tools, let us think of mindsets, of methodologies and of thinking through this. Mindsets and methodologies.
I haven’t written my customary conference report about the MARG conference so this’ll have to suffice. At the moment, the hotly debated area of Digital Humanities is struggling to carve out definitions - with chainsaw or scalpel. What has emerged with each incision or each hack is at once a chipping-away and an addition. The Digital Humanities are a multiplicity. It’s like those five blind people trying to figure out an elephant. It’s an elephant get it. The leg-assemblage connecting to the trunk-assemblage and to the tail-assemblage: get it? A multiplicity.
As I walk the vast stretches of the Mojave Wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas, a left mouse-click makes my chainsaw whirr furiously in the emptiness of data. Comforting - but I’m still unsure. Much depends on how one looks and where. Plug in the chainsaw-assemblage to a precision plasma rifle assemblage and to many others. Now that’s comforting. Well, as comforting as it can be for a lonely traveller in a wasteland.
Dublin Diary: Another After-Action Report
Back to the hot Delhi summer and temperatures that do not seem ever likely to drop. The peacock cries outside my Greater Noida home sound jarring after when I remember Temple Bar in Dublin from the last three or four days. I was at the SHARP 2012 conference in Dublin - a brief respite from the heat and dust. Now, unusually jetlagged, I am wide-awake with the memories of the last few days floating in my head.Yes, I was speaking about after-action reports and other videogame paratexts; Dublin with its history of literary innovation was the best venue one could have asked for. After all, this is the place where the 'after-action report' of a day in the life of a certain Leopold Bloom is set...
I've long argued that the narrative element in videogames is of crucial importance for an understanding of how stories work. The burbling of Rushdie's 'sea of stories' with all its multiple potential stories developing all at once and yet with paradoxical difference is encountered in the medium of the videogame. So to Dublin and the 'Battle for Books' Conference organised by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing. My aim was to speak to a wider audience than just the community of game studies researchers and to reach out to literary critics, scholars, book historians, librarians and publishers with this message:
Videogames tell stories and they tell them interestingly; however, the stories are multiple, ephemeral and much of the storytelling occurs within the performance itself. It is, therefore, not easy to analyse these stories or even to recognise them as such using traditional methods of narrative analysis. To ignore them, however, would be to turn away from the complex ways in which storytelling occurs.
Difficult as it is to analyse such ephemeral texts, using Gerard Genette's framework of 'paratexts' it is possible to approach the textuality of the ephemeral videogame-stories and to freeze individual sessions of gameplay for analysis. Paratexts such as walkthroughs, after-action reports and 'let's play' are helpful in this. My paper was an attempt to establish these as serious objects of research and (may I be so bold) narrative analysis.
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What made it more interesting and easier was that I spoke as part of a panel on New Media forms of the book. Professor Alexis Weedon, the chair, had already established the strong links with older narrative media here : the other presentations were on screen adaptations and the much-neglected importance of the practice; and on the transmedial textuality of the videogame Muddle Earth with the books and films telling the same story and with other texts across various media. The first by David Moorehead, a PhD scholar from the University of Bedfordshire, was key in setting the tone and showing how all adaptations link to each other and how the media-specificity of each should not be neglected. This was followed by Claudio Pires Franco's talk on tranmediality. Claudio is the gaming and research consultant at Dubit Limited and as a designer cum academic bridges some massive gaps between the two arenas. Claudio's was an interesting take on how important the story is in games and with a clear introduction to the game narrative, game engines and in-game limitations (such as the lack of slapstick humour due to budget constraints of the producers), he made it much easier for me to ground my presentation in the discourse around transmediality and take off from there.
Anyway, here's a preview for those interested. The slideshow's too big to upload but I'll work something out soon (a pdf maybe)
On the Digital Humanities in India or What You Will
Two weeks ago, I was standing in front of the Las Meninas at the Prado after having played truant at a videogames conference. Mesmerised by the little girls looking at me from within the incredibly lifelike canvas and by that man in the staircase, I felt as if I were in a videogame. Was it art or was it a videogame then? Almost immediately, I remembered the session that I run away from: 'are videogames art?' Eleven years ago, it seems such a long time now, I had asked the questions 'are videogames stories?' and 'can stories be played like videogames?' to a bemused audience of postgrads and academics in an Indian university, my alma mater. These questions haunt me even today, after writing a doctoral dissertation on the subject and many more academic debates and discussions, some of them articles and book chapters. Are videogames art? A rather irate blogger wishes to go back in time and tie Roger Ebert's hands so that he never could type his dictum on videogames not being art. I wish I could too. Tying Ebert's hands is, however, not going to solve my Las Meninas problem. Is my experience of videogames affecting my experience of the Velazquez masterpiece? Digital technology has changed how we experience the world - undoubtedly so. That includes art, literature, culture and you-name-it. So what happens to the pre-digital categories that we comfortably brought to our universities and taught our students? Problems, I say. Problems.
Part of these problems is something called Digital Humanities. For some, it is the answer to the problems that the digital technologies have caused to all those academics who were snug in their Dickens Chairs, their Aristotelian sofas and the like. Naturally, everywhere in Europe and the US, universities have started Digital Humanities courses. They all seem to know what it is and they have some great definitions. This is the good part of the story.
Now, for the not-so-good part: I am back in India again after a good seven years and when I mention Digital Humanities, I see the same bemused faces that I saw after my presentation on videogames those eleven years ago. It’s different, however. Videogames and this whole digital business is not uncool anymore. The whole world is doing Digital Humanities and India is not to be left behind. There’s a small problem though and let’s again bring in Ebert and his tied hands to illustrate this: Indian academics haven’t heard of Roger Ebert and most haven’t the foggiest idea of what videogames are. A large percentage aren’t on Facebook and although many bewail the loss of gigapedia’s free library, the common mainstays of European or American education such as VLEs and e-assessment haven’t reached their office computers. Of course, they don’t tweet; don’t know about Prezi (as opposed to Powerpoint) and would rather create their bibliographies manually rather use Zotero. I met one who did know Zotero but thought it was a note-taking software and she has covered her Kindle (one of the few that you can see around here) in cellophane totally oblivious of the magic sun-proof screen that Amazon prides itself on. Maybe, she just reads it in places where there is no cellophane reflection. Perhaps this is me being mean – so let’s go beyond my little world of web 2.0 for education and research towards the big developments that are purportedly happening in Indian academia. There is the Centre for Internet and Society that does some very important work in the area of digital cultures; there are other places that have a scattered presence in the mainstream academia. However, bigger institutions such as central and state universities have recently started showing interest in Digital Humanities. Here is the second problem: many of these institutions have got their definitions of the area from the zillion different ones in universities the world over. Instead of capitalising on the latecomer's advantage of researching the concept more thoroughly, some of these places have sought (and found) easy ready-to-hand versions more to their liking.The result is that some end up thinking that this is all about digitizing books, some think about law and the digital world, some think fancy and some confused. Kind of like the story of the blind men and the elephant they miss the forest for the trees. The main uniting factor, however, is that they all consider this an area of promise.
Of course, the magic word ‘digital’ ticks the boxes of interdisciplinarity and opens up possibilities of shaking hands with our richer colleagues in the IT faculties. ‘Digital’ also has a cool factor about it – like a male academic’s ponytail or even a metaphorical Lamborghini. Anyway, perhaps in search of this ‘coolness’, in Indian universities there is a rush helter-skelter to grab some expert on the digital humanities (or the so-called New Media), to analyse Facebook, get some surveys on gaming culture and especially on the game (sic!) called Second Life. However, this hasn’t solved any problems for the Humanities departments. Their focus remains limited and the course plans are confused. This is mainly because of the lack of engagement with previous research in the area and a haste that has perhaps stemmed from their earlier attitude to treat the area lightly. As they say, old habits die hard. I only know a couple of people who have expressed an active interest to read up on the area and of them, one is already quite well aware of international discussions and debates on many subjects. The rest seem to be content with their euphoric ‘yay digital’ mantra. It seems to me that some people are trying to do too many things too fast. Call me a purist, but at least as far as Game Studies is concerned, I strongly insist that my students read up their Espen Aarseth, their Ian Bogost and the many other rich discussions on videogames. I also insist that people who talk to me about videogames be willing to experience these games for themselves. If I were to write about Shakespeare, as I once did, I would be expected to have read up everything under the Shakespearean sun from A.C. Bradley to my girlfriend’s latest article on the bard and not to know the plays would be criminal, of course. Even Film Studies professors at least deign to watch the films they talk about. It is not surprising, therefore, that one might expect people who wish to analyse videogames, to at least have a feel of the medium itself.
However, I must not digress. Okay, so what else do I have to offer besides a massive whinge? My own understanding of the term ‘Digital Humanities’, perhaps. Make no mistake, I am and have always been concerned with researching videogames as a storytelling medium. Over the last decade, after having been pushed around under the banner of New Media (which tag I have always protested against) and now being walked into the DigiHum club, I have had to come up with a notion of my own to guarantee my academic sanity. For me, the rapid digitisation of social interaction, entertainment and cultural affects leaves its trace (in the Derridean sense and therefore also a rupture) on traditional understandings of Humanities. It exposes at the same time what was always there in the Humanities but nevertheless unknown; it also points to the close connection that the so-called new media has to the traditional notions. Let us say this in simple words. Digital media do not cause traditional concepts to be replaced by the new and the never-known-before; instead, they point out facets that problematise prior conceptions and renew the process of enquiry.
For example, we know videogames tell stories. Anybody who says that digital games are about to replace storybooks is, however, an idiot. The videogame narrative is multiple and with its saves and reloads presents an uber-complex temporality. However, to say that because videogames do not present the traditional plot structures that we often take as givens, does not mean that they cannot tell stories. Remember Borges’s forking paths, Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Calvino’s castle? Similarly, when people argue about the relationship of the ludic and the narrative, any scholar of narratives or even any random reader will remember how stories often play games with us. We just haven’t been able to study this aspect. At least, not until now. Enter Digital Humanities, Game Studies or call them what you will. Suddenly there is another shake-up of whatever we had taken for granted.
Studying that and facing that challenge in our research is what this discipline (or indeed, indiscipline) is about. Not scanning the obscure letters of a Mr Oldham and keeping them under a password-protected login. Which brings me to another vital thing about the digital world: sharing. Sharing increases the reach of an idea; so what would you say about sharing with millions of computers at unimaginable speeds? Academic culture is changing all over the world. People want to talk to each other across the globe and to listen. The dumb academic gets left far behind - by millions of tweets and facebook posts. If you are an academic going into Digital Humanities research, stay miles away from cliques and do not start by thinking of about competition. Write a blog, share your research with others, take their ideas on board and although I know you must publish your monographs and articles, but leave some free stuff on Scribd or somewhere. Share your thoughts with people not just those peer-reviewed journals.
Digital Humanities, or whatever you call it, is not a new discipline. It is a major cultural shift and it is here to stay and to problematise the stereotypes and the conventions. As game-designer and scholar Richard Bartle has said about coming to terms with videogame culture, the message here is : ‘drown or learn to swim.’ In a world, which can brook challenges and which can share solutions, I do not think we need to keep anyone’s hands tied. I would then untie Roger Ebert’s by now famous hands and take him in front of Las Meninas. Maybe he will revise his comment; maybe he will leave us with more problems. Either way, that’s the fun. Here’s to a great beginning to Digital Humanities in India and many more years, my masters.
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