Internship 2021

Anant is a student of Philosophy, History and Languages at Ahmedabad University. He is interested in the movement of ideas across space and time, and it's philosophical implications. For this project he worked on Correspondences. Correspondence offers insight into a person’s character and, in the case of Sir Pattani, into the diverse roles a person performs as a visionary administrator holding office during tumultuous times. How best to represent these letters and what they mean? As an experiment, I have used the interactive storytelling device of hypertext, using the software Twine, to create discrete repositories of information surrounding a single letter. Readers of the archive are given choices in the form of hyperlinks to navigate through contexts of their choice till they arrive at the exhibit. Depending on which branch they choose to follow, the readers construct a unique context that enriches the reading of the final exhibit. Readers can also choose to ignore the contexts and navigate the archives directly. 

Nishitha is a student of history at Ahmedabad Univerity. She primarily worked with port reports during her internship. 

A port report exchanged between an MIT graduate, a navigator, and Bhavnagar's Dewan in 1946 forms the entry point into her enquiry that is concerned with the following question: Why did princely ports emerge as sites of contestations between the Bhavnagar State and the Government of India (GOI) during late 19th to mid-20thC? This research culminated into a digital booklet that closely examines the research question while weaving in themes like sovereignty, geography and politics of indirect rule. Using these themes as a theoretical lens, she traces the factors that moulded the discourse between the Bhavnagar State and GOI over princely ports. 

Taarini is a student of Social and Political Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She has a keen interest in art which motivated her to work upon building narratives around the sketches and blocks found in the Archives of the Pattani Family. She spent a lot of time reading and taking interviews with people from the family and other historians to build  a connection between sketches from the Late Renaissance and the Pattani Family. One of her major takebacks has been  that while trying to understand a piece in history, try to understand the origin of the piece, the thought of the collector and your ideas to it, which will add to the entire idea. 

Kalki is an engineering student of Information and Technology at Ahmedabad University, whose Undergraduate Research Program encouraged her contribution to The Pattani Archives Project. But she is profoundly connected with Indian History. She worked as an intern for the Digital Dissemination of Archival Collections at Pattani Archives. She is also proficient in arts and wants to pursue User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UI) Design for enhancing the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). She has applied her design skills for building the official website and social media posts of Pattani Archives. Being an engineering student, she has also utilized her coding skills for broadening the limited functionalities offered on New Google Sites. She coded the required interactive HTML-coded elements and embedded them into the website. Her technical writing skills enriched the content of the website. She has worked on coloring the black and white images, editing the pictures, improving the image quality, adding watermarks, and much more, as seen on the website and social media of Pattani Archives. 

Nandini is a B.Tech student at the Ahmedabad University with majors in Computer Science and Engineering. Her area of research during the internship was digital dissemination of the archival collection. The digital collection is intended to provide online access to meaningful subsets of the archives, to promote awareness of the archival collection, and, primarily to bring these materials to the attention of historians, researchers and academicians. She has contributed to the project in two ways- one, creating a website and the other, creating content for social media. Through these contributions she realized how web based technologies have revolutionized the ways of historical research by providing a renewed approach to preserving archives. The internship provided a valuable experience in witnessing the immense scope of an interdisciplinary approach to history and technology. At the intersections of both lie exciting opportunities of new, unconventional learning methods. 

Smit is a student of Computer Science at Ahmedabad University. He has worked on library cataloging, secondary listing and data visualization during his internship. Technology based approach to history is the one that allows communities to access and participate in re-telling of histories, creating autonomous frameworks that are long-lasting and democratic. Historically done with manual aid such as typing machines, multi-level archiving practices have come a long way with the technology and internet revolution. According to a contemporary Greek scholar Spyridoula Arhthymou, “over the course of the last thirty years, the archival profession has been challenged and inspired by the development and evolution of new technologies.” While archiving and digitization are complex processes that still rely on traditional methods to some extent, new technologies provide different platforms for disseminating information.