Open Access, the Digital Humanities and Liberal Arts in India

The issue of the digital humanities is related to evidence and often relates to the question of archiving. This paper shall discuss the pedagogical implications of the public’s right to information in India legalized since 2005. The digital humanities are as much a function of open access to information as they are to the creation of new liberal arts colleges in India. The archives of the state opening up --namely, the Films Division, All India Radio, Open Government Data (OGD), to name a few and have democratized access to state-controlled information and invite reflection. In pedagogical terms that offers archivists the “past” in all kinds of sense--sounds, maps, stories, images etc. By accessing some of these archives in my classes at FLAME University--one of the new liberal arts institutions of India--we are embarking on a pedagogical challenge in the classroom that spans state and private archiving efforts. In times of such open access, we are also witnessing the rise of crowd sourced and peer-enabled creation. Sites like P. Sainath’s People Archive Of Rural India (PARI) support popular efforts at archiving personal memories, just as the Indian Memory Project. These new ventures underscore the need for improved cataloges to enable easier access and several efforts are ongoing to using online subscription bases toward improving archival access for all in India. I shall discuss some student efforts in this domain (anchored at southasianculture.wordpress.com) and the turn to digital humanities in since the rise of liberal arts in India