Abstract
This research seeks to digitally preserve cultural histories and artifacts, which are practiced/produced in the underserved indigenous spaces of rural eastern India. This paper is a case study of co-developing Sangraksha—a digital humanities application. The application seeks to facilitate the process of writing history from the below by underrepresented populations at the margins. The villages in this research were geographically remote and socio-economically underdeveloped. The research populations represented individuals who possessed low levels of literacy, limited language proficiency in English and mainstream Indic languages (e.g., Hindi and Bengali), as well as limited familiarity with computers and computing environments. Grounded in long-term ethnographic engagements in the remote Global South, this study explored a range of cultural, aesthetic, and contextual factors that were instrumental in shaping and co-generating digital humanities solutions for under-researched international populations. On one hand, the research initiative sought to co-create a culturally meaningful and welcoming digital environment to make the experience contextually appropriate and user-friendly. On the other hand, grounded in visual and sensory methodologies, this research used community generated imageries and multimedia (audio, photographs and audio-visual) to make the application inclusive and accessible. Moreover, the application-development attempt also paid close attention to intercultural, local-centric, community-driven co-design aspects to make the approach socially-embedded and sustainable in the long term.
Highlights
Scholars, practitioners and policy-makers are paying more attention to culture, and preservation of cultural heritage and historical narratives (Brown and Nicholas 2012)
The scholarship of digital humanities calls for multilingualism, decolonization of knowledge, and cultural diversity (Fiormonte 2017). This call is relevant for the underserved contexts of the global South, where the erosion of historical resources and cultural expressions are severe
Embracing the values of plurality and ecology of culture, this research initiative (‘sangraksha’) explored the avenues to writing history from the below through addressing and overcoming cultural and communicative barriers that operated in the indigenous spaces of rural eastern India
Summary
Scholars, practitioners and policy-makers are paying more attention to culture, and preservation of cultural heritage and historical narratives (Brown and Nicholas 2012). In its Sustainable Development Goals towards making the world a better place by 2030, The United Nations emphasized cultural aspects (both tangible and intangible ones) for the first time (United Nations 2018) Such accentuation of culture and its preservation is relevant to the underserved contexts of the global South, where cultural and historical narratives are continually and severely eroding (Turin 2012). Questioning and challenging the existing form of representation and knowledge production in digital spaces, they talk about legitimizing marginalized voices in cyberspaces (Thorat 2015) Such attempts, according to these scholars, would encourage participation and collaboration of underserved communities as well as facilitate sustainable practices of storytelling for the purpose of ensuring preservation, plurality and ecology of voices and knowledge production (Risam 2018). We (indigenous villagers and I) attempted to co-develop a digital humanities application—Sangraksha (a Sanskrit word, which means careful preservation and protection) in a remote, underserved region of eastern India
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