Do you want to stay informed about this journal? Click the buttons to subscribe to our alerts.
Digital archives are spaces for managing collections and providing online access to heritage material stored in museums and archives. In India, conventions on preserving cultural heritage in combination with the national agenda of ‘Digital India’ influence recent projects on digitizing collections and creating online repositories. Looking at ‘Virtual Museums’ and ‘Euro-Indian Paintings’ as two projects initiated by the Indian Ministry of Culture, this article sheds light on the dynamics involved in digitizing Indian cultural heritage: the visions, implementation, and use of the digital collection. The projects represent substantial efforts at creating modern collection management systems that would assemble heritage information in a single, online accessible space. In practice, however, it is not only information and communications technology for development that drives the creation of digital archives but also bureaucratic habits, reluctance, and impediments to forming it. Conceptions shape digital spaces but so do their implementation and (dis)use.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Balachandran, Aparna, & Pinto, Rochelle (2011), ‘Archives and Access’. Delhi. Retrieved 7 December 2017 from https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/monograph-posters.pdf/at_download/file/.
Bendix, Regina, Bizer, Kilian, & Groth, Stefan (eds.) (2010), Die Konstituierung von Cultural Property. Forschungsperspektiven. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen. Retrieved from http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=610317/.
Bohman, James (2004). ‘Expanding Dialogue: The Internet, the Public Sphere and Prospects for Transnational Democracy’. Sociological Review, 52, 131-155.
Borowiecki, Karol Jan, Forbes, Neil, & Fresa, Antonella (Eds.) (2016), Cultural Heritage in a Changing World. Springer open access, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-29544-2.pdf.
Bourcier, Paul, Dunn, Heather, & Nomenclature Task Force (2015), Nomenclature 4.0 for Museum Cataloging. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Brügger, Niels (2016), ‘Digital Humanities in the 21st Century; Digital Material as a Driving Force’. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10(2), n.p. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000256/000256.html.
Cameron, Fiona, & Kenderdine, Sarah (eds.) (2007), Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Christen, Kimberly (2008), ‘Ara Irititja: Protecting the Past, Accessing the Future: Indigenous Memories in a Digital Age. A Digital Archive Project of the Pitjantjatjara Council’. Museum Anthropology, 29(1), 56-60.
Cohn, Bernard S. (1996), Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Das, S.K. (2001), Public Office, Private Interest: Bureaucracy and Corruption in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Farrow, Robert, & Iacovides, Ioanna (2014), ‘Gaming and the Limits of Digital Embodiment’. Philosophy & Technology, 27(2), 221-233.
Foucault, Michel (2015), Archäologie des Wissens. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Gil, Alex, & Ortega, Élika (2016), ‘Global Outlooks in Digital Humanities: Multilingual Practices and Minimal Computing’. In: Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, & Ray Siemens (Eds.), Doing Digital Humanities. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 22-34.
Government of India (2002), Tenth Five-Year Plan 2002-2007. New Delhi. Retrieved 30 January 2018 from http://planningcommission.gov.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/default.html.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, & Marrinan, Michael (Eds.) (2003), Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gupta, Akhil (2012), Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harrison, Rodney (2013), Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge.
Hogsden, Carl, & Poulter, Emma (2012), ‘The Real Other? Museum Objects in Digital Contact Networks’. Journal of Material Culture, 17(3), 265-286.
Hull, Matthew S. (2012a), ‘Documents and Bureaucracy’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 251-267.
Hull, Matthew S. (2012b), Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ivanova, Krassimira, Dobreva, Milena, Stanchev, Peter, & Totkov, George (2012), Access to Digital Cultural Heritage: Innovative Applications of Automated Metadata Generation. Plovdiv, Bulgaria: Plovdiv University Publishing House.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1995), ‘Theorizing Heritage’. Ethnomusicology, 39(3), 367-380.
Klimpel, Paul, & Euler, Ellen (Eds.) (2015), Der Vergangenheit eine Zukunft. Kulturelles Erbe in der digitalen Welt. Berlin: iRights Media.
Lopatovska, Irene (2015), ‘Museum Website Features, Aesthetics, and Visitors’ Impressions: A Case Study of Four Museums’. Museum Management and Curatorship, 30(3), 191-207.
Lunenfeld, Peter (Ed.) (2000), The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Marty, Paul F. (2007), ‘Museum Websites and Museum Visitors: Before and After the Museum Visit’. Museum Management and Curatorship, 22(4), 337-360.
Marty, Paul F. (2008), ‘Museum websites and museum visitors: Digital museum resources and their use’. Museum Management and Curatorship, 23(1), 81-99.
Mascia-Lees, Frances E. (ed.) (2011), A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Mathur, Nayanika (2016), Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Müller, Katja (2017), ‘Online Documents of India’s Past: Digital Archives and Memory Production’. Museum Worlds, 5, 149-161.
Poole, Alex H. (2013), ‘Now Is the Future Now? The Urgency of Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities’. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 7(2), n.p.
Risam, Roopika (2018), ‘Decolonizing Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice’. In: Jentery Sayers (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. New York: Routledge, pp. 78-86.
Schreibman, Susan, Unsworth, John, & Siemens, Raymond George (eds.) (2004), A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schreibman, Susan, Unsworth, John, & Siemens, Raymond George (eds.) (2016), A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: John Wiley.
Sen, Biswarup (2016), Digital Politics and Culture in Contemporary India: The Making of an Info-Nation. New York: Routledge.
Sharma, Aradhana (2013), ‘State Transparency after the Neoliberal Turn: The Politics, Limits, and Paradoxes of India’s Right to Information Law’. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 36(2), 308-325.
Sharma, Dinesh C. (2014), Indiens IT-Industrie. Software und Dienstleistungen für die ganze Welt. Edited by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Dossier). Retrieved 19 December 2017 from http://www.bpb.de/internationales/asien/indien/189895/indiens-it-industrie/.
Sircar, Jawhar (2017), ‘European Painters of India, 18th & 19th Centuries’. Unpublished manuscript.
Sneha, Puthiya Purayil (2016), ‘Mapping Digital Humanities in India’. Delhi. Retrieved 7 December 2017 from http://cis-india.org/papers/mapping-digital-humanities-in-india/.
Srinivasan, Ramesh, Becvar, Katherine M., Boast, Robin, & Enote, Jim (2010), ‘Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum’. Science, Technology & Human Values, 35(5), 735-768.
Stoler, Ann Laura (2009), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Svensson, Patrik (2010), ‘The Landscape of Digital Humanities’. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 4(1), n.p.
Terras, Melissa M., Nyhan, Julianne, & Vanhoutte, Edward (Eds.) (2016), Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. London: Routledge.
Thomas, Pradip (2012), Digital India: Understanding Information, Communication, and Social Change. New Delhi: SAGE.
Walsham, Geoff (2010), ‘ICTs for the Broader Development of India: An Analysis of the Literature’. Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, 41(4), 1-20.
Zeitlyn, David (2012), ‘Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts: Archives as Anthropological Surrogates’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 461-480.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1054 | 139 | 9 |
Full Text Views | 73 | 20 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 109 | 51 | 2 |
Digital archives are spaces for managing collections and providing online access to heritage material stored in museums and archives. In India, conventions on preserving cultural heritage in combination with the national agenda of ‘Digital India’ influence recent projects on digitizing collections and creating online repositories. Looking at ‘Virtual Museums’ and ‘Euro-Indian Paintings’ as two projects initiated by the Indian Ministry of Culture, this article sheds light on the dynamics involved in digitizing Indian cultural heritage: the visions, implementation, and use of the digital collection. The projects represent substantial efforts at creating modern collection management systems that would assemble heritage information in a single, online accessible space. In practice, however, it is not only information and communications technology for development that drives the creation of digital archives but also bureaucratic habits, reluctance, and impediments to forming it. Conceptions shape digital spaces but so do their implementation and (dis)use.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1054 | 139 | 9 |
Full Text Views | 73 | 20 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 109 | 51 | 2 |