Reports & Highlights 

On the inaugural day, 10 th December, we opened with Gale workshop with talks on ‘Introduction to Gale, digitisation and Gale as infrastructure’ by Mr. Mark Richardson, ‘Building Sustainable Ecosystems: Using Gale to support Indian Digital Humanities Infrastructure’ by Mr. Chris Houghton, and Gale Lab product demo by Ms. Mickey Mehta. Mr. Mark Richardson introduced the audience to Gale, its missions, and its initiatives. The talk focused on how Gale Digital Scholar Lab as an infrastructure both facilitates and values the infrastructural needs for doing humanities work and bringing communities together. Following that, Mr. Chris Houghton spoke about the challenges of infrastructures—human, structural, and technological—focusing on the importance of archival work, data work, and DH literacies approaches to engage in Gale. Showcasing the role of Gale as a site knowledge production, the workshop ended with Ms. Mickey Mehta demo of the Gale lab’s archival documents and technical tools and softwares available for doing digital humanities research.

The DHARTI Biennale conference 2024 was inaugurated on 10th December at IIT Jodhpur in the presence of all dignitaries. The welcome address was given by Dr Kanak Yadav, the coordinator of Digital Humanities of IIT Jodhpur. The guests were also addressed by the distinguished professor Dr Sampat Raj Vadera, and Head of Interdisciplinary Research Platform (IDRP) Dr Ramesh K Metre at IIT Jodhpur. Mr Mark Richardson Director (SALES) from GALE also spoke a few words on the occasion. Representatives from GALE also conducted a workshop before the formal inauguration and made the attendees aware of the various research tools provided by GALE. The respective dignitaries were also formally welcomed with a planter. The event was then addressed by the President of DHARTI Prof Nirmala Menon from IIT Indore and the Vice President of DHARTI Dr Dibyadyuti Roy from Leeds University. Later, Mr Mark Richardson was felicitated by Head IDRP Dr Ramesh Metre.

The second workshop/talk of the inaugural day was titled ‘Audiovisual Archiving in Northeast India’, which was jointly moderated by Dr. Natasa Thoudam, an Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities, IIT Jodhpur, and Sanskriti, a doctoral research scholar from IIT Jodhpur. The talk was delivered by Dr. Etawanda Saiborne, an Associate Professor at St. Anthony's College, Shillong, and a Board Member of The Northeast India Audio Visual Archive. The center is an audiovisual archive collecting and digitizing the artifacts representing the history, heritage, and culture of Northeast India. The archive, which was established in 2019, is maintained, administered, and curated by the Department of Mass Media, St. Anthony’s College patrons and professors, receiving assistance and fellowship from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan. As a catalyst for creating an indigenous knowledge system, the Centre is excellently bringing artistic and academic communities together to tell an alternative history of Northeast India. Dr. Saiborne provided a comprehensive history on the collaborative projects undertaken by the archive with an attempt to create a community audio-visual library containing newsreels, films, photographs, newspapers, documents, audio recordings, and the akin, The talk focused on The Northeast India AV Archive, its role in preserving cultural, oral, and visual histories, and its collaborative projects. A key highlight was Stories of the Marketplace, an ongoing project documenting personal and oral narratives of traditional marketplaces across Northeast India and Southeast Asia, focusing on Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which will culminate in a comprehensive book. The talk also addressed questions on how the archive is contributing to the formation of indigenous knowledge systems, where its histories of ancient, colonial, and post-independence times could be navigated with a revised set of methodologies leading to decolonized epistemic structures.

The QGIS workshop introduced participants to the core concepts and practical applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using the open-source software QGIS. It was followed by a one-hour hands-on session, where members helped participants in using QGIS and addressed their mapping-related queries. By the end of the workshop, participants were able to design, edit and export maps using the QGIS software.

The MATra-Lab workshop, conducted by Dr. R. Karthick Narayanan & Siddharth Singh from UnReaL TecE LLP, introduced participants to the features and applications of the AI-enabled platform for managing and analysing multilingual audiovisual data. The session included a demonstration and a hands-on segment, where participants learned to use tools for transcription, translation, and content analysis. Dr. Karthick individually addressed participants' queries and guided them in using the platform to process and archive multimodal data efficiently. By the end of the workshop, participants gained basic skills in employing MATra-Lab for managing field and web-based research data.

The first session of the DHARTI Conference, ‘Digital Subject/ivities in the Global South’ was Digital Archiving and was chaired by two esteemed faculties of the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, Dr. Suman Kundu and Dr. Natasa Thoudam. The first paper “Privacy, Consent and Representation: Ethical Approaches to Digital Archives of Vulnerable Communities” by Dr. K. Kannan Prasad focused on the lack of consent and understanding of a fluid identity of the LGBTQIA+ in the Queer Archives of India. This was followed by Ms. Neha Singh throwing light on the possibilities of hashtags and tweets in understanding narratives in the paper “Hashtag as History: A Study of Bhima Koregaon Case through Twitter Archives.” The third paper titled “Digital Archiving for Language Preservation and Machine Translation: A Case Study of Low-Resource Languages” was presented by Dr. Urmishree Bedamatta, Mr. Subha Sudarsan Nayak and Ms. Arpita Rathod highlighted the problem of authentic data and the importance of annotations in archiving in the Indian, and specifically Oriya context. The last paper “Preserving Indigenous Languages: A Case Study on Digital Archiving for Endangered Languages” presented by Mr. Rohit Kumar, Dr. Uma Devi M. and Dr. Arul Dayanand. S. highlighted the team’s effort in preserving an endangered language, Irula through the case study of their app LearnIrula. The session ended with a vote of thanks.

The second session on the sub-theme, “Critical Code/Data/Algorithm Studies + Decoloniality and DH + Digital Healthcare and Well-Being” was chaired by DH and computer science faculty member, Dr. Romi Banerjee and DH doctoral research scholar, Ms. Vasundhra Dahiya from IIT Jodhpur. The first presentation, “Open Digital Scholarship and Knowledge Decolonization Challenges in the AI Era”, by Kim P. Nayyer and Parminder S. Basran, focused on the challenges posed by the commercialization and capitalistic nature of AI models to open access scholarship. They emphasized the importance of advocacy for licensing work, creative commons, and collaborative efforts to regain agency and control over knowledge infrastructures. In the second presentation, “Decolonizing Digital Humanities: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Representation”, Akansha Goswami explored the epistemic injustices and systemic erasure prevalent in digital humanities scholarship. By highlighting the use of tools like ISRO Bhuvan and Mukurtu CMS, she brought decolonial methodologies to the forefront of digital humanities. Vardaan Nayar’s presentation, “Relating to the Data Double: Analysing Techno-Humanity in Surveillance Societies”, introduced the concept of the “data double” as a point of convergence between the self and various infrastructures. This concept was used to understand the negotiation of experiences among stakeholders in surveillance societies. The session concluded with Dr. Rohil Oberoi and Ms. Dikumoni Hazarika’s presentation on “Transforming Healthcare Access” through the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, showcasing its role in digitizing healthcare data and improving medical access in India. The session ended with a combined Q&A session and vote of thanks.

The first presentation, “Copy-shops, Cyber-cafes & Copyright violation for fun & non-profit” by Anomitra Biswas, faculty at GITAM, Visakhapatnam, explores the intricate and dynamic intersections between transformative and non-transformative digital networks in the creation, circulation, and consumption of media within India and the broader Global South context. The second presentation, “The Untamed Fandom: South-South cultural conversations/collaborations in fanspace” by Tonisha Guin, Faculty at IIT Jodhpur, focussed on analyzes fan videos of The Untamed (陈情令, 2019) that use Bollywood music to reframe scenes, highlighting this as part of a broader transformative fan practice of reinterpreting footage with extradiegetic music. The next presentation was by Marya Rizwan, PhD student at IIT Jodhpur, titled “Desire, Representation, and Gendered Identity in Transformational Fandom”, which explored transformative fandom as a predominantly female space that empowers marginalized individuals to express repressed identities and sexualities, using characters to explore belonging and identity as both readers and creators. The last presentation of the session, titled “Locating methodologies to study Regional Fandom(s) of Northeast India” by Sanskriti K, PhD student at IIT Jodhpur, examined how fandom in India’s Northeast is shaped by its borderland identity, ecological ties, and local knowledge systems. It proposes new analytical categories—‘geographical history,’ ‘border,’ and ‘archives’—to study Global South Indigenous fan communities, drawing on theories like Kuan- tsing’s Asia as Method, Tsing’s Friction, Appadurai’s Grassroots Globalization, and her fieldwork in Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Manipur.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

Plenary Talk 1 - Locating A New Historiography for India: Digital Archives and Public History by Dr. Maya Dodd

Dr Maya Dodd discussed the new conceptions of producing archival research via community collaborations. With representation of voices of marginalized communities' with initiatives like pari network and milli archives, she shared how community knowledge archiving and digital affordances can provide new ways of doing history. 

Plenary Talk 2 - Digital Humanities for Non-Normative Engineering Education by Dr. Setsuko Yokoyama

Dr Setsuko Yokoyama shared her pedagogical philosophy, challenges, and practices on teaching critical technical thought to engineering and DH students. By drawing on experiences of her pedagogical journey, she refers to anecdotes where she uses critical inquiries rooted in critical race theory, intersectional feminism, postcolonial theory, and disability studies to invite students for reflections on different technologies. 

Plenary Talk 3 - Mathematization of the Arts by Dr. Vinayak Dasgupta

Dr Vinayak Dasgupta goes to locate the origin of Digital Humanities to mathematical imagination & computational thought as a way of repositioning disciplinary discourse of DH. He emphasizes on revisiting the contemporary essence of doing humanities computing (and by extension DH) that focuses on mathematical thinking rather than computers to conceptualize the discipline.

The special talk by Dr Sajan Pillai focused on UX design of software applications. Dr Pillai introduced the topic and further elaborated how different aspects such as demographics, culture, user behaviour, localisation, technology access, etc. plays an important role in the user experience while navigating any software application. In his talk, he explained the concept of User centered Design (UCD) process and how it should be tailored while designing global products. The talk was followed by discussions among the resource person and the attendees.

Plenary Talk 4
Title: The Future of DH is not DH: Anxieties, Affordances and Approaches in the Age of AI By Dr Dibyadyuti Roy
Dr. Roy focused on the trajectories of Digital Humanities as a discipline, its liminal stature, and its methodological conundrums. The talk emphasized that challenging instrumentalist imaginaries around algorithmic affordances is imperative to humanistic inquiry. Highlighting why Digital Humanities needs Critical AI and vice versa, the talk ended with an imperative turn to decolonize epistemic structures around Digital Humanities by reconceptualizing its building blocks of digitality on the values of inclusive infrastructures. 

Plenary Talk 5
Title: Building Sustainable and Accessible Knowledge Infrastructures for Scholarly Publishing in India By Dr Nirmala Menon
Dr. Menon’s talk advocated decolonizing knowledge infrastructures by building a sustainable, and multilingual scholarly publishing ecosystem in India, which addresses the concerns of affordances, access, and equity. Dr. Menon, the Project Director for KSHIP (Knowledge Sharing in Publishing), an Open Access Publishing platform, underscored one of its strategic goals is to initiate and sustain a multilingual scholarly publishing platform. She slso deliberated upon how multilingualism has rendered a distinct trajectory to the field of Digital Humanities in India, and how a sustainable publishing model should be accomodative of regional and local imagineries of the Global South. 

Plenary Talk 6
Title: Formalizing Concepts in the British Colonial India Corpus: A Computational Modeling Approach By Dr. Shanmugapriya T.
Dr. Shanmugapriya’s talk foregrounded the importance of building contextualized models for different types of texts using examples of various corpora. She further deliberates upon the most effective approaches for identifying multifaceted concepts within the non-standard British  colonial India corpus through models and how these concepts can be formalized using formal models. She proposed proficient concept-based models to formalize heterogeneous concepts from the non-standard British colonial India corpus using computational models, and subsequently, to establish metamodels through experimental methods for the construction and analysis of analogous corpora.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

The session was chaired by Dr R Karthick Narayanan and had five papers with two online and three offline sessions. The online papers were:  From Mudras to Manuscript: A study on Translating Kathakali’s Visual Signs into text form” by the Research Scholar Gouri VB from International school of Dravidian Linguistics  Challenges in Translating Low-Resource Languages to English: A lexical-level analysis of Malayalam Machine Translation by the Research Scholar Hanna CH from NIT CALICUT   The three papers which were presented offline were: Resolving Do-So Anaphora and Gapping in the Konkani Language using a Rule-based Method by Poonam Navelkar who is a Research Scholar at Goa University and an Assistant Professor at Sridora Caculo College of Commerce and Management Studies  From Rock to Date: Digitizing the Ashoka’s Prakriti Inscriptions by Mehak Sejwal, a Research Scholar at IIT Jodhpur  Innovations and Challenges in Parallel Corpus Development for Low Resource Languages: A Review by Himanshu Sihag, a Research Scholar at IIT Jodhpur. The session was followed by a question and answer session by the chair.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

Panel 2 of the DHARTI × IIT JODHPUR, Digital Humanities conference was attended by Saradindu Mandal and Shrinath Dhumale, Msc-DH students at IIT( ISM) Dhanbad. This was chaired by IIT JODHPUR faculty member Dr. Rachel Philip. This was an interactive and insightful session where the audience had discussions among themselves and with the presenters. It explicitly talked about the anxieties of the students in digital humanities courses focusing on the job market and the misinterpreted impression of the digital humanities classrooms.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

Dr. Kanak Yadav chaired the fourth panel at the DHARTI conference, which was titled "Exploring the World of Digital Storytelling: E-Lit and Beyond." Ms. Akansha Goswami delivered a talk on "Electronic Literature (E-Lit): Innovative Forms and Challenges". She highlighted diverse types of E-Lit, ranging from immersive fiction to narrative video games, which combine art and literature. She highlighted the difficulties encountered in E-Lit, both in terms of accessibility and creativity, as well as strategies for overcoming them.  Ms. Bhavya Rattan gave the second lecture, which was titled "Digital Life Writings: Identity, Memory, and Challenges in the Digital Age." She examined the ways in which the stories shared by individuals on social media platforms like Instagram can be treated as forms of digital life writing. She argued that we can determine the authenticity of these digital life writings by comparing their social media posts over time.  Srishti Yadav gave the final presentation, "Digital Representation of Indo-Caribbean Culture." She highlighted the role of digital platforms in archiving and thereby preserving the history and culture of Indo-Caribbean diasporic communities.  There was a Q&A session after each presentation. Dr. Kanak Yadav, the panel's chair, offered a vote of gratitude to end the session.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

The eighth session on the sub-theme, “Digital Arts & Aesthetics” was chaired by two senior research scholars, Sanjay K Bissoi and Amit Gupta from IIT Jodhpur. The first presentation, “Redefining Female Body in a Digital Discourse: A Study of #100daysofdirtylaundry by Kaviya Illango” by Bhawna Rattan, a research scholar from University of Delhi, explores how the digital discourse around the female body is reshaped and by analyzing its impact on societal perceptions and gender norms. In the second presentation, “Braiding Aesthetics: Probing the Relevance of Rasa Theory in Computational Creativity” by Riddhima Seth, a doctoral scholar from University of Delhi, focused on how it investigates the intersection of traditional Rasa Theory, which explores emotions in art and aesthetics, with computational creativity, examining its relevance in enhancing AI-generated art. A faculty member from IIIT Hyderabad, Sushmita Banerji’s presentation “LSD and Anukul: An account of what it feels like to live in the early 21st century”, explored how the films “Love, Sex aur Dhokha” and “Anukul” depict the emotional and societal complexities of living in the early 21st century, reflecting themes of modern relationships, technology, and human adaptability. The last presentation of the session was titled as “Aesthetics in Flux, or, The Digital as the Site of the Fragment” by Rini Dasgupta, a master’s student from Jawaharlal Nehru University, examined how digital spaces serve as fragmented landscapes of aesthetics, where the fluidity and impermanence of digital forms challenge traditional notions of art and representation.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

The tenth session of the DHARTI Conference ‘Digital Subject/ivities in the Global South’ was Digital Pedagogy and was chaired by Dr. Shanmugapriya T. The first paper “Developing a Digital Learning Ecosystem for Police Training: A Model for Institutional and Individual Capabilities” was presented by Ms. Anupama J. Anand. She focused on how the Indian police forces are receiving modernized training. She focused on a digital framework combining institutional infrastructure and individual skill development using AI, MOOCs, and blending learning for comprehensive security education. This was followed by Ms. Rashmi Shaju’s showing how AI tools enhance peer-assisted learning for engineering students in India. The paper titled “AI meets PAL: Improving Writing Skills in Engineering Education” used shared light on how automated feedback with human tutoring improved writing skills across linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The third paper in the session was “Bring me back home! – Traversing Experiential Landscapes of Online Portuguese Heritage Language Learners in Goa, India during the Covid-19 Pandemic” presented by Ms. Jeanette Camilla Barbosa Noronha. This focused on how the Goan diaspora increasingly studied Portuguese online during COVID-19 and how this pandemic isolation or digital convenience motivated this heritage language learning connection. Mr. Amit Chawla, then presented the paper “Preserving the Past: A Digital Approach to Script Learning” where he discussed his script-learning app that teaches the user ancient scripts like Brahmi to revive ancient writing systems. The last paper was Dr. Poulomi Das’ “Digital Pedagogy and the Evolving Ethics around Academic Integrity in the Context of India’s Tertiary Education: Productivity versus Plagiarism” where she discussed how higher education must redefine pedagogy and academic integrity for the AI era, especially in post- colonial contexts where Western standards often overshadow indigenous knowledge systems. The session ended with a vote of thanks.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

Synopsis awaited from moderator.

The fifth Panel for the DHARTI Conference, ‘Digital Subject/ivities in the Global South’ was Reflexive Pedagogy: Practices and Praxis of Teaching Digital Humanities in India. It was chaired by Ms. Sharanya Ghosh and focused on the unique experiences and challenges of teaching Digital Humanities in India through the pedagogic practices of instructors. The panel began with Dr. Madhavi Jha’s paper “Practices of Syllabus Making: From Teaching History to Teaching Digital Humanities in the Global South” where she discussed the challenges of teaching Digital Humanities, contrasting it with History syllabus making in postcolonial contexts. It analyzed historical practices in creating a syllabuses in India, with a special reference to JNU, since the 1970s. She critiqued the influences of Global North and pressed the need to avoid romanticizing “Indian-ness.” She proposed the use of History's contextual practices as a foundation for DH syllabus design. This was followed by Dr. Shanmugapriya T.’s paper “How I managed teaching DH: Transitioning between Instructor and Student Roles” where she discussed her journey in the transition of becoming a teacher and finding the right path to teach the “Introduction to Digital Humanities” course at IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. Her paper highlighted the challenges she faced while balancing personal expertise and the vastness of DH and discussed aspects of how she designed the syllabus and developed teaching strategies, tool usage, and pedagogical insights, aiming to foster broader conversations on improving DH instruction and learning from peers. This was followed by a discussion with the audience and ended with a vote of thanks.

The Dharti Biennial Conference 2024 concluded with the Vote of Thanks, marking the end of a four-day event that featured over 80 participants, parallel sessions, workshops, and industry talks. Dr. Rajdeep Konar conducted/moderated the ceremony. The event was preponed to post-lunch, before the other events.

Acknowledgments:

• All participants, session chairs, and presenters were thanked for their active engagement and contributions, which made the conference meaningful.

• Plenary speakers—Dr. Vinayak Dasgupta, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, and Dr. Shanmugapriya—were presented with mementos as a gesture of gratitude by the organising committee members Himanshu, Sharanya and Supreet.

• Sponsors, including Gale, UnReaL TecE (MATra Lab), and the Centre for Continuing Education, were acknowledged for their financial support, which enabled the event.

• IIT Jodhpur’s leadership, including Director Prof. Avinash Kumar Agarwal, Distinguished Prof. Vadera, and Head IDRP Dr. Ramesh Metre, were thanked for their support and encouragement.

Organizing Efforts:

• The DHARTI Governing Body members, including Dr. Nirmala Menon, Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy, and Dr. Arjun Ghosh, were recognized for their role in conceptualizing the conference.

• Student volunteers, who played a key role in ensuring smooth execution were honored, with special mention of the core committee members Himanshu, Sharanya, Barun, and Supreet for their efforts during planning and implementation.

Special Mentions:

• Dr. Tonisha Guin’s contributions to the planning were acknowledged, along with wishes for her speedy recovery.

• Dr. Kanak Yadav was recognized for managing administrative tasks, and Dr. Sunil Lohar was thanked for stepping in during Dr. Guin’s absence.

The session concluded with a poem by PhD student Sanjay K. Bissoi, translated into Hindi by Dr. Jayanarayan Tripathi, bringing a reflective tone to the close of the conference.

The Dharti Biennial Conference 2024 was marked by collaborative efforts and a shared commitment to knowledge exchange.