Bichitra: The Making of an Online Tagore Variorum

Bichitra: The Making of an Online Tagore Variorum
Author: Sukanta Chaudhuri
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319236784

This book documents the creation of the Bichitra Online Tagore Variorum, a publicly accessible database of Rabindranath Tagore's complete works in Bengali and English totaling some 140,000 pages of primary material. Chapters cover innovative aspects of the site, all replicable in other projects: a hyperbibliography; a search engine and hyperconcordance working across the database; and a unique collation program comparing variant texts at three levels. There are also chapters on the special problems of processing manuscripts, and on planning the website. Early chapters take readers through the history of the project, an overview of Tagore’s works, and the Bengali writing system with the challenges of adapting it to electronic form. The name Bichitra, meaning "various" in Bengali, alludes both to the great variety of Tagore’s works and to their various stages of composition. Beyond their literary excellence, they are notable for their sheer quantity, the number of variant forms of a great many items, and their afterlife in translation, often the poet’s own. Seldom if ever has the same writer revised his material and recast it across genres on such a scale.​​ Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913. By its value-added presentation of this range of material, Bichitra can be a model for future databases covering an author’s complete works or other major corpus of texts. It offers vastly expanded access to Tagore’s writings, and enables new kinds of research including computational text analysis. The “book of the website” shows in technical and human terms how researchers with interests in art, literature and technology can collaborate on cultural informatics projects.

Exploring Digital Humanities in India

Exploring Digital Humanities in India
Author: Maya Dodd
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2020-07-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000078809

This book explores the emergence of digital humanities in the Indian context. It looks at how online and digital resources have transformed classroom and research practices. It examines some fundamental questions: What is digital humanities? Who is a digital humanist? What is its place in the Indian context? The chapters in the volume: • study the varied practices and pedagogies involved in incorporating the ‘digital’ into traditional classrooms; • showcase how researchers across disciplinary lines are expanding their scope of research, by adding a ‘digital’ component to update their curriculum to contemporary times; • highlight how this has also created opportunities for researchers to push the boundaries of their pedagogy and encouraged students to create ‘live projects’ with the aid of digital platforms; and • track changes in the language of research, documentation, archiving and reproduction as new conversations are opening up across Indian languages. A major intervention in the social sciences and humanities, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of media studies, especially new and digital media, education, South Asian studies and cultural studies.

The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore

The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore
Author: Sukanta Chaudhuri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2020-06-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108857523

This is the first one-volume guide in English, or indeed in Bengali, to the full spectrum of Tagore's multi-faceted genius. It has two parts: (a) critical surveys of the chief sectors of his artistic output and its reception; (b) specialized studies of particular topics. The authors are among the leading Tagore experts from India and abroad. They have drawn upon all relevant material in Bengali, English, and other languages, including the entire body of untranslated Bengali works that comprise the greater part of Tagore's oeuvre. They have also considered the historical and cultural context of his time. The book includes an index of all primary works cited, with full details of their complex history of transmission, and a reading list for Tagore studies in English. It will be an indispensable guide for all scholars, students and informed general readers, even those who can access Tagore in Bengali.

Dream and Literary Creation in Womens Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Dream and Literary Creation in Womens Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Author: Isabelle Hervouet
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1785277545

This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.

Textuality and Knowledge

Textuality and Knowledge
Author: Peter Shillingsburg
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0271079959

In literary investigation all evidence is textual, dependent on preservation in material copies. Copies, however, are vulnerable to inadvertent and purposeful change. In this volume, Peter Shillingsburg explores the implications of this central concept of textual scholarship. Through thirteen essays, Shillingsburg argues that literary study depends on documents, the preservation of works, and textual replication, and he traces how this proposition affects understanding. He explains the consequences of textual knowledge (and ignorance) in teaching, reading, and research—and in the generous impulses behind the digitization of cultural documents. He also examines the ways in which facile assumptions about a text can lead one astray, discusses how differing international and cultural understandings of the importance of documents and their preservation shape both knowledge about and replication of works, and assesses the dissemination of information in the context of ethics and social justice. In bringing these wide-ranging pieces together, Shillingsburg reveals how and why meaning changes with each successive rendering of a work, the value in viewing each subsequent copy of a text as an original entity, and the relationship between textuality and knowledge. Featuring case studies throughout, this erudite collection distills decades of Shillingsburg’s thought on literary history and criticism and appraises the place of textual studies and scholarly editing today.

Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India

Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India
Author: Nishat Zaidi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2022-12-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 100081470X

This book explores the use of digital humanities (DH) to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literary and cultural texts, which circulate in digital forms — in manuscripts — and as oral or musical performance. Drawing on the linguistic, cultural, historical, social, and geographic diversity of Indian texts and contexts, it foregrounds the use of digital technologies — including minimal computing, novel digital humanities research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance — for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which will facilitate comparative readings. With contributions from DH scholars and practitioners from across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more, this book will be a key intervention for scholars and researchers of literature and literary theory, DH, media studies, and South Asian Studies.

The Big Humanities

The Big Humanities
Author: Richard Lane
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2016-11-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317692918

This book provides an accessible introduction to, and overview of, the digital humanities, one of the fastest growing areas of literary studies. Lane takes a unique approach by focusing on the technologies and the new environment in which the digital humanities largely takes place: the digital laboratory. The book provides a brief history of DH, explores and explains the methodologies of past and current DH projects, and offers resources such as detailed case studies and bibliographies. Further, the focus on the digital laboratory space reveals affiliations with the types of research that have traditionally taken place in the sciences, as well as convergences with other fast-growing research spaces, namely innovation labs, fabrication labs, maker spaces, digital media labs, and change labs. The volume highlights the profound transformation of literary studies that is underway, one in which the adoption of powerful technology – and concomitantly being situated within a laboratory environment – is leading to an important re-engagement in the arts and humanities, and a renewed understanding of literary studies in the digital age, as well as a return to large-scale financial investment in humanistic research. It will be useful to students and teachers, as well as administrators and managers in charge of research infrastructure and funding decisions who need an accessible overview of this technological transformation in the humanities. Combining useful detail and an overview of the field, the book will offers accessible entry into this rapidly growing field.

Global Debates in the Digital Humanities

Global Debates in the Digital Humanities
Author: Domenico Fiormonte
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452967105

A necessary volume of essays working to decolonize the digital humanities Often conceived of as an all-inclusive “big tent,” digital humanities has in fact been troubled by a lack of perspectives beyond Westernized and Anglophone contexts and assumptions. This latest collection in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series seeks to address this deficit in the field. Focused on thought and work that has been underappreciated for linguistic, cultural, or geopolitical reasons, contributors showcase alternative histories and perspectives that detail the rise of the digital humanities in the Global South and other “invisible” contexts and explore the implications of a globally diverse digital humanities. Advancing a vision of the digital humanities as a space where we can reimagine basic questions about our cultural and historical development, this volume challenges the field to undertake innovation and reform. Contributors: Maria José Afanador-Llach, U de los Andes, Bogotá; Maira E. Álvarez, U of Houston; Purbasha Auddy, Jadavpur U; Diana Barreto Ávila, U of British Columbia; Deepti Bharthur, IT for Change; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Carlton Clark, Kazimieras Simonavičius U, Vilnius; Carolina Dalla Chiesa, Erasmus U, Rotterdam; Gimena del Rio Riande, Institute of Bibliographic Research and Textual Criticism; Leonardo Foletto, U of São Paulo; Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch U; Sofia Gavrilova, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography; Andre Goodrich, North-West U; Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change; Aliz Horvath, Eötvös Loránd U; Igor Kim, Russian Academy of Sciences; Inna Kizhner, Siberian Federal U; Cédric Leterme, Tricontinental Center; Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Pontificia, U Javeriana, Bogotá; Lev Manovich, City U of New York; Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky, Ben-Gurion U of the Negev; Maciej Maryl, Polish Academy of Sciences; Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore; Boris Orekhov, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Ernesto Priego, U of London; Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, U of Kansas; Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega, U of Málaga; Steffen Roth, U of Turku; Dibyadyuti Roy, Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur; Maxim Rumyantsev, Siberian Federal U; Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru; Juan Steyn, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources; Melissa Terras, U of Edinburgh; Ernesto Miranda Trigueros, U of the Cloister of Sor Juana; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Tim Unwin, U of London; Lei Zhang, U of Wisconsin–La Crosse.

South Asian Digital Humanities

South Asian Digital Humanities
Author: Roopika Risam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-09-10
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000195392

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise. Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques. South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a 'homelanding' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

New Digital Worlds

New Digital Worlds
Author: Roopika Risam
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0810138875

The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge. New Digital Worlds traces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon.