OVERVIEW.
The application of digital tools and methodologies to humanistic inquiry is currently an established and often indispensable aspect of scholarship in disciplines such as literature, history and philosophy all over the world. With the proliferation of digital technology and its use in every field of academic, cultural and pedagogic activity, scholars and teachers can no longer produce quality work or indeed access and comprehend a significant amount of the cutting edge work produced in their own disciplines without the knowledge of digital practices and possibilities.
Familiarity and ease with digital technology is still inadequate among teachers and students of the humanities. Many humanities scholars remain unaware of and often indifferent to the possibilities of digital technology to enhance the study of the existent imaginative variety of material cultural expression, whether in archival text , image, music, film or other allied arts.
The use of digital technology is still largely limited to word processing software, and the awareness of research and teaching possibilities with the use of digital tools is confined to data entry for most humanist scholars in this country still. As all humanities projects based on digital tools worldwide illustrate, the challenge for the humanities is to use machine language and capacities to deal with cultural material that is not easily quantified or processed. By creating structured models out of the necessarily irregular and disparate data of the humanities, students of the digital humanities learn to judge how the application of computing can be made to produce significant results and also to learn how these analytical and practical processes can throw new light on the object of study.
A common and general misconception about digital humanities which keeps humanities scholars away from this endeavour is that knowledge of computing is essential for any kind of intervention in this field. This is patently not the case. While an acquaintance or even skill with computer programming and coding is desirable, it is by no means necessary for the generation of research questions and classroom teaching material. Computer scientists and programmers are the closest allies of digital humanists in this aspect, because they are responsible for developing the tools that humanists require to study their material. However, this dialectic between the computer scientist and the humanist is impossible if they lack the vocabulary with which to communicate needs and evaluate possibilities. This gap is being addressed all over the world in a proliferation of workshops, summer institutes, graduate diplomas and courses. Introducing technological interventions in graduate study courses has contributed worldwide to an emerging group of future humanists who can work with the theoretically unlimited and exciting possibilities of an increasingly technologized world.
IMPORTANCE.
The increasing importance of digital tools in humanities research cannot be overemphasized. It is no longer enough in today’s world for the humanities scholar to merely have a nodding acquaintance with data entry or word processing programs.
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The first misconception that this workshop will help to dispel is that only electronic data entry, basic image editing and word processing constitute the range of technological intervention in the humanities. By introducing participants to concepts such as qualitative data analysis, data mining, data visualization, data workflows, database management, geospatial analysis, computational text analysis, and textual encoding and rendering, this workshop will provide participants with the wide overview of possibilities of digital interventions in humanities research.
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The workshop will offer participants, through case studies and demonstrations, insights into ways in which humanists can collaborate rewardingly with computational scientists to generate meaningful knowledge about their object of study.
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It will offer scope for participants to explore possibilities of using the tools and techniques introduced in it in their own research or teaching. Although we cannot provide intensive technical training, a balance of techniques and theoretical debates will allow participants to conceptualise and articulate their own academic and pedagogic activities with confidence and clarity.
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By interacting with experts and practitioners of the field, participants will have the opportunity to initiate dialogues which may lead to future collaboration.
OBJECTIVES.
The objective of the proposed workshop is to provide faculty and research scholars of the humanities and social sciences in the TEQIP mapped institutions with an introduction to the vibrant field of digital humanities. The term and the field of scholarship is extremely broad and is often confusing for newcomers to grasp. Even active practitioners of the field are often hard put to provide a limited definition of what the term signifies. At the pedagogical/philosophical/theoretical level, therefore, the workshop will aim to provide students with ontological, nomenclature and taxonomic meta-debates about the field in general. At the practical level it aims to provide information about tools and software that are usable by individuals without a technical or computational background.
As such it will reveal project and teaching possibilities, discuss theoretical positions about dealing with technological interventions in the humanities, introduce cutting edge software, standards, and best practices and offer basic literacy in some softwares and languages with limited hands-on experience. It will impart some skills and conceptual clarifications in connection with the field. It will also delineate processes and workflows in the conception and execution of digital humanities research projects and proposals, particularly those incorporating an archival element. It will offer participants knowledge about generating digital data from material objects and records (oral/visual/textual), managing the generated data, and generating metadata for such datasets. It will offer insights into theoretical issues and debates about the semantics of cultural texts (audio/video/image) which are often emotionally charged and politically fraught and the ethics of managing them with the help of technology.​
SCOPE and OUTCOMES.
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Acquiring basic understanding of the many ways in which electronic tools and digital technology can be used in a particular field of study.
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Gaining acquaintance with the various theoretical issues and debates currently being vigorously discussed around the idea of digital humanities worldwide.
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Getting familiar with key terms and acquiring skills and techniques used in the field.
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Getting basic hands-on experience working with a limited but important set of digital tools.
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Acquiring knowledge about workflow and data management that would enable participants to conceptualise, execute and disseminate a digital project of their own.
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Envisaging ways in which digital tools can be used to help augment classroom teaching.
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Interacting with experts and practitioners to ideate upon possible collaborative future projects. This would be of crucial importance given the wide variety of oral, visual and other cultural materials available in the NE which are yet to be documented.
ABOUT the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Guwahati is a centre for research and teaching composed of academics from eleven different disciplines: Economics, English, Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, History, Archaeology, Political Science, Geography, Development Studies. With its varied range of research interests and expertise, the department promotes interdisciplinary work in humanities and social sciences, offering projects, supervision and fellowships aimed to attract students and researchers from diverse academic and cultural backgrounds. Apart from its undergraduate B.Tech taught courses which include uniquely designed content offered by members of the faculty, the department offers highly interdisciplinary areas of expertise and investigation in its MA and PhD programmes. The MA in Development Studies is a multi-disciplinary programme initiated in the year 2009 and is designed to provide an advanced understanding of the cultures, conflicts and discourses in issues involving development in ideological as well as real social situations, through innovative course work and supervised research. The PhD programme of the department promotes dialogues across different disciplines in humanities and social sciences, offering expert supervision in eight different areas of study as well as funded fellowships to selected full-time researchers. The department collaborates with related Indian as well as international institutions in projects and workshops in order to promote and produce cutting-edge work in humanities and social sciences. Placing a high premium on research output and outreach, the department consistently publishes academic articles, project reports and monographs which corroborate the quality of work undertaken by its faculty, fellows and researchers.​​
ABOUT TEQIP III.
TEQIP was conceived in pursuance of the NPE-1986 (revised in 1992) by the Govt. of India under the Ministry of Human Resources and Development as a long-term programme, to be implemented in phases, for quality enhancement and resource sharing among technical institutions in India. The Knowledge Incubation Cell for TEQIP (KIT), established at IIT Guwahati under the 2nd phase of TEQIP, functions as a multi-disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary Innovation Incubation Centre with a focus on imparting knowledge, infusing innovation and forging the path to academic excellence. TEQIP III started from 2017-18 as a Central Sector Scheme with a focus on the Low Income States (LIS), the Northeast, the Hill States and the Islands. The programme is conducted by IIT Guwahati's Centre for Education Technology.
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