The Northeast India Audio Visual Archive Nodal Centre of Nar Bahadur Bhandari Government College organised a lecture on the topics ‘Digital Humanities in Indian Classrooms’ and ‘Endangered Archives and Digital Humanities’ on September 4, 2023, in the College Seminar Hall. The lecture was the second of its Lecture Series organised by the NEIAV Nodal Centre, Nar Bahadur Bhandari Government College.
Dr. Shantanu Majee, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Techno India University, West Bengal, and Dr. Rahi Soren, Assistant Professor, School of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University were the invited resource persons. The lecture was attended by Dr. D. Purohit, Principal, NBBGC, Dr. Shobha Sharma, Vice-Principal, NBBGC along with HODs and faculty members from various departments, including other colleges and universities.
Dr. Purohit felicitated the resource persons and addressed the audience. He highlighted the significance of such lectures and urged the students to take advantage of the resources and knowledge provided by the lectures. After the Principal’s address, Sonam Gyalpo Bhutia, a student volunteer of NEIAV Archive Nodal Centre, gave a brief introduction about the Northeast India Audio-Visual Archive and its core values, objectives, and activities.
Dr. Shantanu Majee, Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Techno India University, Kolkata, with a commendable contribution towards digital humanities and cultural informatics, began his lecture by explaining how ‘Digital Humanities’ has witnessed remarkable growth over the decades. Through his lecture on ‘Digital Humanities in Indian Classrooms’, he explained that Digital Humanities is a diverse and still emerging field encompassing the practice of humanities research in and through technology and computational methods. He explained its origins, tracing it back to the 1940s when Roberto Busa, an Italian priest tried to encode 11 million words of St.Augustine into computer comprehensible codes. Dr. Majee explained that digital humanities by principle is interdisciplinary thereby making practitioners approach it from varied perspectives contributing to its inclusive approach to the applied disciplines. Providing several examples Dr. Majee stressed the evolving importance of Digital Humanities pedagogic methods in classrooms to assist in learning.
Dr. Rahi Soren, an Assistant Professor in the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University, was the second resource person. She spoke on ‘Endangered Archives and Digital Humanities’. Speaking from her archival experience and collaborative projects with the British Library and the University of Exeter, Dr. Rahi Soren highlighted the diversity of Sikkimese culture and the importance of the recognition of these cultures for the nation. She remarked how Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary tool that provides an engaging interactive medium for cross-cultural studies. Dr. Soren touched upon Digital Humanities’ role in preserving cultural heritage and its scope of increasing accessibility through online platforms. She also established a distinction between an archive and a library, pointing out that an archive provides first-hand information that a library does not. Broaching technicalities of the applied methods in Digital Humanities Dr. Soren explored the concept of ‘Metadata’ which she defined as “the data about a data”.
Citing examples, Dr. Soren mentioned a digitally available archive maintained by the Norwegian Institute in Oslo University collected by the Missionaries in 1940, explaining how in spite of the documents being produced, it was inaccessible to the people living here, reiterating the importance of digitization. Similarly, she discussed the initiatives that could be taken by the local community to contribute to the endangered archive programmes, referring to the projects completed by Jadavpur University.
The lectures were followed by an interactive session where queries from the audience were addressed by the resource persons. Following the brief Q&A session, NEIAV NBBGC Nodal Centre team member Solyop Lepcha presented the Vote of Thanks.
Report prepared by: Ugen Phunchok Bhutia, Semester III, Department of English