Nirmala Menon: "Decolonizing Knowledge Infrastructures: Open Access and Multilingual Scholarly Publishing"
This talk will examine the emerging areas of research in Digital Humanities in India by an examination of the term “Digital Humanities” and its uneven and uncertain trajectory in the Indian research ecosystem. As with other systems around the world, DH in India is complex and contextual and each of us involved in the disciplinary practice encounter resistance and skepticism. Resistance to what is perceived as a deliberate distancing from the larger Humanities queries, scepticism about appropriating the rhetoric of STEM disciplines merely as a tool for greater legitimacy and validation. But of course DH is far more than a sum of its criticisms and scepticisms. I will address why it is imperative that the digital be harnessed, critiqued, deconstructed and dissected precisely so that the issues that Humanities scholars have been invested in continue to be at the centre of the development, deployment and dissemination of technology.