Digital humanities in India

Abstract

This chapter begins with underlining the need to reimagine the humanities undergraduate student’s curriculum to equip the humanities researcher of tomorrow. We survey the programmes and courses offered in a few prestigious public universities in India to determine whether there are any interdisciplinary courses offered that have digital humanities studies or its equivalent as a component. The result shows a certain dearth of digital humanities pedagogy courses in the universities’ curriculum except a few institutions which recently implemented digital humanities studies in their programmes. We then highlight some of the reasons for this lack of diversity in programmes including the expense of accessing digital tools. We also accentuate the necessity for more open-access resources in publishing; databases as well as open source tools that can initiate scholars on a discovery of these resources and its usefulness in humanities research. We give a short but important list of such available tools in a section we call the “Digital Humanities Tool Box”. Lastly, we offer a small overview of a digital publishing project at Indian Institute of Technology Indore that is a Digital Humanities Project which attempts to put into practice the principles of open access that we believe are crucial to Digital Humanities as a discipline and philosophy.