Infrastructure and Social Interaction: Situated Research Practices in Digital Humanities in India

The computational tradition in India goes back to the two historic archival projects Project Madurai, a digitised collection of ancient Tamil classics and Bichitra, a digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore's works which remarked the genesis of Digital Humanities in India. Subsequently, few public and private universities, non-academic organisations and individual scholars are actively involved in digital humanities projects: digital library, digital archive and digital databases. Though these digital establishments underpin Indian humanities scholars to engage in digital humanities research practices, the challenges in infrastructure impede them from leveraging the computational techniques and resources. In this paper, we will study the specific challenges of physical infrastructure such as digital humanities lab, digital humanities pedagogy, digital tools and software, and institution and government support. We will also discuss the brief survey report and few interviews which we conducted from the Indian DH community to reinforce our arguments.