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Area Studies, Digital Humanities, Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized, Scholars Lab, South Asia Collection

Read, Hot and Digitized: AI for OCR & Translation

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

The foundation of digital humanities is data.  Lots of it.

As the early phases of AI have shown us, there is a staggering amount of textual data available to manipulate and compute–both openly available and that which exists behind paywalls.  All too often the depth and accessibility of digital scholarly textual data in non-English and non-Roman scripts is lacking.  Rather than be left behind or constrained by these lacuna, individual scholars are working to generate their own digital research corpora, often building upon AI tools.

Recently I was introduced to the MITRA project and have been nothing short of amazed.

A research project from the University of California-Berkeley’s AI Research Lab, MITRA “focuses on bridging the linguistic divide between ancient wisdom source languages and contemporary languages through the application of advanced Deep Learning and AI technologies.”  Using Gemini APIs, MITRA builds upon an extensive digitized text corpus and contributions from translators and researchers alike to “harness AI technologies to promote the scholarly study and personal practice of the dharma and to accelerate academic and individual research through open-source collaboration on datasets, models and applications.”  In so doing, MITRA aims to “overcome the challenges inherent in low-resource language translation,” to “minimize language barriers,” and to create “more equitable access to literature and wisdom.” 

I have engaged with OCR and digital text conversion for years but have always found it to be a labor intensive and ultimately less-than-satisfying [or accurate] experience, especially for non-roman languages and scripts.  Of Interest to me, therefore, is how MITRA has harnessed AI to allow one to drag-and-drop PDF files into the tool at which point it can both detect the language (Sanskrit & other Devanagari-based languages, Tibetan, scriptural Chinese or English) and use OCR to produce a relatively accurate text file.  That unto itself is pretty amazing.  From there, however, one can quickly transliterate, translate and/or explain the text into Sanskrit, Buddhist & Modern Chinese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Hindi or Spanish. 

To test it out, I grabbed a small amount of openly accessible text from HathiTrust.  I chose an early Hindi novel, namely Rāmalāla Varmmā’s Banārasī Dupaṭṭā Yā Gularū Zarīnā from 1916 which is readily available in PDF form on HathiTrust.  I grabbed the first page of the novel which looks like this:

Page one of Banārasī Dupaṭṭā Yā Gularū Zarīnā from HathiTrust

I then put a PDF of that page into MITRA to see if it could OCR the text.  Despite some blurriness of the original source text, it most certainly could OCR it (even if not 100% accurate):

MITRA’s OCR of page one of Banārasī Dupaṭṭā Yā Gularū Zarīnā

Encouraged, I then asked MITRA to both transliterate (take the text written in Devanagari script and convert to roman script) and to translate the text which it also did quite quickly and easily:

MITRA’s transliteration
Translation of page one of Banārasī Dupaṭṭā Yā Gularū Zarīnā

Ever more optimistic, I then clicked on “English explained” and MITRA was also quite adept at parsing the translated text, the original script of the text, and the grammar and vocabulary. 

MITRA’s “English Explained” of page one of Banārasī Dupaṭṭā Yā Gularū Zarīnā

I repeat, I stand amazed.

While MITRA has clearly captured my attention and my appreciation, I will note that there are other similar projects currently available and equally commendable, from Andrew Ollett’s Indological and OCR tools [and fabulous related explanations] to Tyler Neill’s toolkit, Skrutable. 

Likewise, the UT Libraries is here to help explore the production of your own digital content for research.  The Scan Tech Studio in the PCL Scholars Lab has the hardware and software you might need to convert print into digital texts, as well as a group of specialists to help you.  We have online guides to introduce the practices and concepts of OCR as well as recordings from OCR workshops. 

I encourage anyone interested in exploring non-English or non-roman digital texts to jump in, kick the tires, and have some fun with these impressive conversion projects. 

Acquisitions/Foreign Travel, Distinctive Collections, Global Studies, Illuminating Explorations, South Asia Collection

CONTINUED DIVES INTO PULP FICTION

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“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.

As a part of my Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, I was back in Delhi in early 2025, continuing research on “hidden archives,” namely the unpublished materials found in institutional settings (places like the Prime Minister’s Museum and Archive at Teen Murti or the National Archives of India) as well as private papers still kept in family homes.  My fellowship allowed me to expand and nuance the work I regularly support here at UT such as the digital archiving projects related to 20th century politico-literary figures but also to delve a little deeper into UT Libraries’ growing distinctive collection related to South Asian popular and pulp fiction. 

In research, like in crime thrillers, you never know where seemingly random clues might lead.

Cover of 65 Lakh Heist.

Early into my stay in Delhi, a colleague from the Fulbright office called me up to invite me to join him in attending a literary “salon” where I could meet some new people.  The event was to welcome a visiting Greek poet, translator, and editor wherein she would read and discuss her poetry at the home of a prominent Indian literary editor.  Poetry? Editors?  “Salon”?  I was in.

In addition to the lovely verse and food which both flowed freely throughout the evening, I was delighted to make multiple new acquaintances at the gathering.  As we went around the room introducing ourselves—one person an activist, one a publisher, another a poet, and so on–one person identified himself as a translator at which point his jovial colleague interrupted him to reveal that he was also an author of pulp fiction.  As I’ve been building UT’s pulp fiction collection for over 10 years now, my ears perked up and I set my sites on meeting this translator/author as soon as the group dispersed for more casual one-on-one conversation. 

The author was lovely and humble about his own work and kindly asked me about which authors were included in UT’s pulp fiction collection.  I started listing off the names—Ibne Safi, Ved Prakash Kamboj, Om Prakash Sarma, Anil Mohan—but when I got to Surender Mohan Pathak he casually asked, “oh, SMP?  You want to meet him? My partner has helped edit and publish his work.”  I tried not to reveal my excitement.  Surender Mohan Pathak, with over 300 published novels to his credit, is one of the biggest, if not actually the biggest, authors of Hindi pulp crime thrillers.  Yes! Yes, yes!  I would in fact like to meet him.

With arrangements made through the generosity of new colleagues, a couple of weeks, multiple WhatsApp chats, and SMS texts later, I was greeted at the elevator gates to his Noida apartment by none other than Surender Mohan Pathak himself. 

SMP with the author in his home office.

Over the course of the next hour or two, as I sat starstruck and in rapt attention in SMP’s home office, surrounded by a lifetime of memorabilia and shelves and shelves of his publications. SMP graciously answered all my questions, generously telling me about his pathway to becoming a writer, the challenges he has faced in getting published, and his expectations about his legacy.  The highlights from this chance meeting, “Surender Mohan Pathak in His Own Words” are now available in the UT Libraries Digital Exhibits.  It was nothing short of an honor to have been able to meet such a legend and I remain tremendously grateful to the kindhearted help of my new network of fellow fans.

Fans and rasikars of pulp fiction don’t just reside in India, however.  A new faculty member to UT recently shared his admiration for the genre and our collection thusly,

SMP memorabilia in his home office.

[The collections] allowed me to reconnect with my own culture, which I could not even do in India. Given that English was the primary medium of instruction in the schools I attended, I ended up reading Rushdie before Premchand… [in the South Asia collections such as and including UT’s]… some of my most memorable moments have involved getting lost among the library stacks, and then suddenly stumbling upon a rare classic in [non-English Indian languages]… My intellectual life is much richer than it would have been otherwise. As I often mention to my friends, it is a different experience because “a different part of my brain lights up”, when I’m reading a [vernacular] novel, despite the fact that English was the first language that I learnt to read.

I invite everyone to explore the South Asia Popular and Pulp Fiction Collection, in a language of your choosing—Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Telugu, English–and consider what these mysteries, romances, and thrillers can teach us about research as well as about ourselves.

Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized

READ, HOT AND DIGITIZED: Digitizing, Repatriating, and Promoting Sound

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Financially supported by the Indian Ministry of Culture, the Virtual Museum of Images and Sound is an online platform drawing upon and digitally presenting the amazingly rich resources held in the American Institute of Indian Studies’ (AIIS) collections.  While the open access museum highlights a vast range of artistic expression that I encourage everyone to explore, this brief post highlights the audio recordings from the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE). 

Grab your headphones, settle into your comfortable chair, and join in to listen and learn!

For those new to South Asian music traditions, the ARCE’s Music in Context section provides a great introductory overview as it organizes recordings thematically.  While one might expect a section on ragas, the ARCE site encourages one to listen to songs associated with life cycle events, with work, or with ritual traditions.  If curated thematic journeys aren’t your style, rest assured that the site also operationalizes a number of digital humanities methods to delve into the dizzying array of musical types.  For example, one can use the Mapping Music or the Music Timeline interfaces to discover recordings by geographical location or in their chronological context.  There are so many fascinating things to find here—for example, did you know that the American jazz artist Teddy Weatherford lived in Kolkata (the city then known as Calcutta) and was featured on India’s First Jazz Record in 1944?  Or that the 1978 “Jazz Yatra” brought the likes of saxophonist Sonny Rollins and sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan together?  One loses oneself in the midst of such resources.

Beyond the fun to be had on the site from wherever you are, it is important to remember ARCE’s compelling vision to support the study of ethnomusicology in India.  The original goals for the AIIS analog collection were to protect and preserve recordings made by foreign scholars in the course of their research which were subsequently deposited in archives around the world.  Troublingly, it was obvious that such recordings were rarely available in India itself.  Addressing this problem head on, ARCE declares that “repatriation of collections has remained a major aim of the ARCE, which houses collections… which were not [previously] available in India. Scholars and collectors from all over the world, as well as India, continue to deposit collections of their recordings regularly at ARCE.”  In addition, they see the collection and the wide array of associated programs and events anchored in the collection as a way to stimulate new ethnomusicological research worldwide.  Knowing this driving mission, it is no surprise that ARCE has made so many collections freely available online.  I commend them on this important work.

I further applaud ARCE on their partnerships to collaboratively digitize and make recordings openly available.  To cite one recent and impactful success, ARCE worked with grant funding from the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) to preserve, robustly describe, and offer access to the “Recordings of Hereditary Musicians of Western Rajasthan.”  A scholarly collection formerly only on audio cassettes, the new online open access through ARCE and MEAP allows listeners worldwide to celebrate and enjoy Rajasthani music, culture and history.   

Learn more with these databases (restricted to UT affiliates):

Saarey Music provides streaming access to over 60 years of South Asian classical music including genres like Dhurpad, Thumri, Kafi, Tarana, and Ghazal.

Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions and includes material from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE).

Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings presents content from across the globe, including thousands of audio field recordings.

Music Online: Listening provides access to over 7 million streaming audio tracks, see in particular the “World Music” section. 

Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized

Read, Hot and Digitized: Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.

As a librarian, I can’t help but love a good bibliography. 

The first professional book I purchased after getting my first bibliographer job was Maureen Patterson’s South Asia Civilizations: a Bibliographic Synthesis.  Over the course of many years, Patterson, the former Bibliographer of the South Asia Collection at the University of Chicago, enlisted the help of a small army of graduate students and library staff to identify and succinctly document citations of scholarly books and articles organized in the ways that academics think.  Arranged by broad chronological and thematic categories, Patterson’s Bibliography was a life-saver for me while in graduate school.  Whenever I ventured into unknown territory as a grad student, the Bibliography was the perfect launching pad, giving me recommendations to begin learning.  Since then, as a librarian often called upon to help people in areas less familiar to me, I’ve turned to Patterson’s Bibliography over and over to learn, explore, and discover.  My personal copy, now tattered and torn but always with lots of post-it notes and flags pointing me to particular areas, reveals just how helpful this work has been to me.

Author’s personal copy of South Asian Civilizations

And yet, as a print source, published only once in 1981, it is dated.  Not just in terms of content—the way we think about South Asia has certainly changed since 1981!—but also in terms of its static functionality.  Bibliographies are essentially curated lists of citations, that is, of metadata (“data about other data”).  The intersection of online metadata and citations, namely in and through tools such as citation managers such as Endnote, Procite, RefWorks, and Zotero, is fertile digital humanities ground wherein we can learn about new subject areas.

For example, I recently learned of a new bibliography for the study of legal history, the Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive, or IPSOLHA.  IPSOLHA takes up the challenge of complex histories from the colonial period when there were “hundreds of semi-sovereign, semi-autonomous states across the South Asian subcontinent. Varying in size and authority, these states (sometimes referred to as native, feudatory, or zamindari states) were incubators for innovative legal, administrative, and political ideas and offered a unique counterbalance to the hegemony of British rule. Yet despite their unique history, studying these states is complicated by the scattered nature of their archival remains.” IPSOLHA’s intervention is to use the tools of the digital humanities “to build a database and collection of references to facilitate historical study of these states, with a special focus on their legal and administrative history.” 

Example of entries re: Princely States from Patterson’s Bibliography

Main collection of IPSOLHA, with options for sorting, display and visualization

Like Patterson’s Bibliography, IPSOLHA is built upon student labor to investigate and document publications; but unlike Patterson, IPSOLHA has used the dynamic citation manager tool, Zotero, to gather relevant references from both online and analog resources which are then uploaded into a database.  The database sorts and presents the references in static thematic categories, but also in ways that can be determined by the researcher, including by type, language, location and more.  At the time of this writing, IPSOLHA is primarily a discovery tool (like Patterson), but in time, the hope is that the discovery will lead to digitization projects and more online full-text access for researchers.

Display from IPSOLHA of Gazetteers

IPSOLHA is a fabulous place for both beginner researchers to get started, but also for more advanced scholars of princely India to find hitherto unknown source materials.  I encourage all to dive in and explore the possibilities.

Learn more about:

Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized, South Asia Collection

Read, Hot and Digitized: More is less? Less is more? Minimal computing in South Asian Lexicography

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.

I had the lucky opportunity recently to catch Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara’s presentation on the University of Colorado’s Digital El Diario project at the UC San Diego Digital Initiatives Symposium wherein she advocated for the use of “minimal computing” to achieve “archival justice.” Deeply inspired by her comments but woefully ignorant of the corpus on minimal computing within DS/DH (what seems a combination of activist- and digital-turn on the “less process, more product” concept in archival work), I took it upon myself to learn more as I struggle with the constant nagging tension between achieving the immediate task at hand (“will a simple Google chart effectively communicate my point?”), exploiting technologies to their fullest extent (“boy, I sure bet I would impress folks if I used a sexy Tableau dashboard”), and justifying resources (“this will cost how much??”).  When, I wondered, is less actually more in DS/DH, when is more actually more, and how should we negotiate those differences?

Way back in 2017, Roopika Risam and Susan Edwards argued (in “Micro DH: Digital Humanities at the Small Scale”) that the fixation of everything “large” is not conducive to justice across our institutions, our staff, nor our data:

“Digital humanities practices are often understood in terms of significant scale: big data, large data sets, digital humanities centers… This emphasis leads to the perception that projects cannot be completed without substantial access to financial resources, data, and labor… While this can be the case, such presumptions serve as a deterrent to the development of an inclusive digital humanities community with representation across academic hierarchies (student, librarian, faculty), types of institutions (public, private, regional), and geographies (Global North, Global South).”

I found their argument compelling and wondered where I had seen these tensions in practice.  As a South Asianist, I had to look no further than the uniquely colonial way of knowing—lexicography–and the uniquely 21st century way of access–digital reformatting. 

For over 20 years, the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (part of the Digital South Asia Library at the University of Chicago) has arguably been the gold standard for online South Asian language dictionaries.  Recognizing the inadequacies of OCR tools to convert images of most South Asian scripts to accurate text data, the DDSA has utilized strategies such as “double blind keying” to produce highly accurate digital editions of established and respected dictionaries.  The process is time-consuming and expensive but produces trusted full-text data that can be used and manipulated in a variety of ways, including those beyond dictionaries.  The institutional positioning of the University of Chicago has allowed for many successful grants over the years to fund DDSA, including those from the US Department of Education, the Mellon Foundation, the Association for Research Libraries and others.  The DDSA is truly extensive in scope and in impact.

At the other end of the spectrum is the DigitalRoses project.  In this pilot, an individual researcher, Gil Ben Herut, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, presents another approach to digital dictionary making.  Rather than seeking a fully searchable, text-mineable dictionary, Herut suggests that simple encoding that operationalizes headwords alone (rather than the full-text) for navigation within a dictionary is sufficient for most user applications.  Using target words, the DigitalRoses approach “resolves a common problem in OCR text ingestion through the utilization of manual indexing of the first entry word on each page in physical media, [thereby… ingesting dictionaries at a fraction of the time and cost of full digitization,… streamlining searching by allowing partial, wildcard and fuzzy searches, and maintaining the richness of the printed layout.”

In comparision, then, we have two approaches to the same problem and therefore two solutions.  See, for example, a search for the Kannada word for “book,” Kitaba/ಕಿತಾಬು, in the DDSA version of Kittel’s Kannada-English Dictionary and in the Digital Roses version.

  • https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/kittel_query.py?page=446
  • https://digitalroses.net/que/process.php?book_shelf=kittel

The thoroughly meticulous approaches used in the DDSA model produce a robust and unique digital experience built on fully manipulatable, multiscript data while the simple imaging and only partial inputting of the DigitalRoses project produces a quick digital surrogate to the analog counterpart. 

Turning back to “minimal computing,” these two projects offer up models to complicate our understanding of who gets to do what and how in our technologically informed research.  Grant funding allows for big data and big research at big institutional levels.  Minimal computing allows individuals and less resourced cohorts to also meaningfully contribute to the field.  Both approaches have the potential to positively impact users and the creation of new knowledge. 

I encourage you to consider where you fall on this debate: is less more? Is more more?  And when does it matter?

For more on minimal computing, justice through DS/DH, lexicography, and Kannada, see:

Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane and Ray Siemens, eds.  Doing digital humanities: practice, training, research (London; New York: Routledge, 2016)

Howard Jackson, ed. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Lexicography / [edited by] Howard Jackson. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)

Ferdinand Kittel and Mariappa Bhatt. Kittel’s Kannaḍa-English dictionary. (Madras: University of Madras, 1968-1971)

Roopika Risam. New digital worlds: postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2019)

Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized

Participatory Community Archiving: The South Asian American Digital Archive

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this new series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

May marks Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Month and reminds us to celebrate the contributions of AAPI communities in the U.S. and to confront the ongoing trials experienced by members of the AAPI population.  AAPI Month also challenges us to learn more about the diversity of peoples and cultures enfolded under such a broad umbrella.  This post suggests that we unpack the complexity such a ubiquitous but ultimately masking label as “Asian American” by looking closely at just one community, South Asian Americans, through the lens of a digital project, the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA).

The core of SAADA is community building through documentation and action.  Documentation takes the form of an online repository of narratives, including the personal and private (oral histories, written correspondence, photographs) and the published (newspaper clippings, academic articles).  That archival core forms the foundational structure around and through which SAADA organizes and facilitates action (the process of documentation, educational events, community building).  Throughout, the intention is to represent the complexity of South Asian American experience in an effort to create a more inclusive society.  As their vision states, “We envision American and world histories that fully acknowledge the importance of immigrants and ethnic communities in the past, strengthen such communities in the present, and inspire discussion about their role in the future.”[1] 

Browsing the archive allows one to learn more about topics such as the histories of South Asian immigration or the intersectional engagement of the community, but also demands that one consider the continuity of those histories in the present.

SAADA exemplifies the power of the “community archive.”  Purposefully participatory rather than merely consumptive in practice, community archives encourage those described, presented and preserved in an archive to determine not only what is included and excluded but also how.  As such, SAADA offers an insider-driven alternative to colonial and colonialist libraries and archives, an alternative realized through action.  They are not alone in their efforts.  Other powerful examples of anti-colonial community archival practice include  platforms such as Mukurtu, an open source content management platform that empowers and operationalizes knowledge systems inherent to a community (as opposed to those from outside), and UT-affiliated initiatives such as the Human Rights Documentation Initiative which supports the Texas After Violence Project and the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. 

Learn more!

Caswell, Michelle, “Seeing yourself in history: community archives and the fight against symbolic annihilation,” The Public Historian 36: 4 (November 2014), pp 26-37. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.26

Center for Asian American Studies, University of Texas, https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/aas/.

Desai, Manan. The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature and Transnational Refraction / Manan Desai. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020).

Mishra, Sangay K. Desis Divided: the Political Lives of South Asian Americans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Shams, Tahseen.  Here, There, and Elsewhere: the Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2020).

Sharma, Rashmi, and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns. Living in America: Poetry and Fiction by South Asian American Writers (New York, New York: Routledge, 2018).

[1] South Asian American Digital Archive, “Mission,” https://www.saada.org/mission, Accessed 9 May 2021.

Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized, Uncategorized

Read, Hot and Digitized: Wish you were here! Early Postcards from India

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the Libraries’ Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship to encourage and inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

The Indian subcontinent gained independence from Britain in 1947, ending centuries of colonial influence and rule, thereby creating the nation states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Bangladesh was East Pakistan until 1971).  Like elsewhere, the “colonial project” in India took many forms and could be readily observed through examples such as the built environment, changes in civil infrastructure, and ultimately in ways of documenting and “knowing.”  Contemporaries in the colonial period noted (and in some cases celebrated) these changes in many ways too, leaving traces such as official documents and reports, personal narratives including diaries, and even ephemera.  As students of history, we desperately need these primary sources to nuance our awareness of what happened in the colonial period and of how people understood the events at the time.   We need documentary mnemonics.   In this post, I highlight a social media project that encourages us to look closely at postcards as sources to inform our understandings of both what was considered as important (the visuals on the cards themselves) as well as how information traveled and gained collective traction (the sending and receiving of the cards, not to mention what might be written on them). 

As I write this from a scenic spot in Austin on a lovely spring day, I see many folks with their cell phones out, ready to take pictures.  I’m not sure why they’re feeling compelled to take the pictures—maybe to help them remember this pleasant day, maybe to document things they haven’t seen before, maybe to share with friends and family later, inviting them to imagine Austin along with them.  Whatever the reason, this now ubiquitous phenomenon of quick, easy and cheap photo sharing feels simultaneously both very “natural” and very “21st century.”

Hindu Woman on a Bike

Delightful digital projects such as the “Early Postcards from India,” however, challenge my assumption that an ephemeral capturing and sharing images is a particularly “contemporary” activity.  As School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) visual anthropologists Stephen Hughes and Emily Stevenson explain,

“For anyone who has lived through the recent emergence of the Internet, social media, camera phones, and digital-printing technologies, it is perhaps all too easy to assume that the rapid and large-scale circulation of photographic images is a uniquely twenty-first-century phenomenon… A growing body of literature demonstrates that since its invention, in the mid-nineteenth century, photography has always circulated, moving among different spaces, discourses, and material forms.. Of the various nineteenth-century photographic innovations, the humble picture postcard was the most widely traveled of them all.”(1)

In “Early Postcards from India,” Hughes and Stevenson build on the success of their earlier physical exhibits of postcards as historical documents.  They creatively exploit Instagram’s social media platform to reintroduce and redistribute the visual memories captured in and on early postcards from India.  The chosen platform is unpretentious in layout, openly accessible to anyone with an Instagram account, and constantly growing–they have a new image and related provocative or didactic post daily.  Their use of Instagram, one of the most widely adopted and therefore “traveled” image innovations, to continue the circulation and consumption of these images, is a simple but highly effective stroke of genius.   

Metro Cinema, Kolkata

The content in “Early Postcards” is wide-ranging: it includes images of monuments, of municipal infrastructures, of “anthropological types.”  As such, the images evoke feelings of nostalgia, of curiosity, of unease, and perhaps, of collective regret.  Thanks to Hughes and Stevenson for sharing these images so we can all collectively participate in the critiques and (re)writings of history.

Those interested in further exploring the history of postcards, of visual representation(s) and of colonial India might find these helpful starting points:

Akbar, Sohail, “An Exploration of the Early History of the Nation through Personal Photographs.” photographies 6:1 (2013): 7–15.

Jhingan, Madhukar, Post Card Catalogue of India and Native States (New Delhi: We Philatelists, 1979).

Khan, Omar, Paper Jewels: postcards from the Raj (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing, 2018).

Mathur, Saloni, India by Design : Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Nenadic, Stana, “Exhibiting India in Nineteenth-Century Scotland and the Impact on Commerce, Industry and Popular Culture” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 34.1 (2014): 67–89.

Pinney, Christopher, Camera Indica : the Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Ponsford, Megan, “Photographic Reportage and the Colonial Imaginary,” Sport in Society 22:1 (2019): 160–184.

Seth, Vijay, and J. R. Nanda. Centenary of Indian Airmails, 1911-2014 (New Delhi: Indian Aviation Research Foundation, 2014).

Notes:

(1) Hughes, Stephen and Emily Stevenson, “South India Addresses the World: Postcards, Circulation, and Empire” Circulation 9:2 (2019).

Acquisitions/Foreign Travel, Distinctive Collections, Global Studies, South Asia Collection

Distinctive, Collaborative Collections Work in the Subcontinent

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Regular travel “to the field” is an indispensable tool in the area studies librarian’s toolkit.  Firsthand knowledge of the cultural, political and intellectual context for the production and distribution of information resources is essential to maintaining both our expertise and currency in support of the global literacy being nurtured and developed here at UT.  I was fortunate to travel to India again this January due to the generosity of UT’s South Asia Institute and the many donors to UTL’s 2019 Hornraiser funding campaign.  I am immensely grateful to both for supporting this mission-critical acquisitions-, networking-, and professional development work! 

This year, I was able to visit 3 north Indian cities (Delhi, Lucknow and Varanasi) and I was able to achieve 3 major goals:

  • Acquire distinctive materials for UT’s collections, including materials specifically requested by UT faculty to advance their teaching and research but also books in Hindi and Urdu that will deepen our ever-growing South Asian Popular and Pulp Fiction Collection
woman in sales transaction with man in black coat and hat, in a book stall
Buying pulp fiction titles in Lucknow.
twelve people (from the english department at the university of lucknow and librarian mary rader) standing, smiling for the camera.
With the English Department at the University of Lucknow
  • Advance post-custodial open access efforts on South Asian Studies, including recently completed and collaboratively funded digitization projects, for example the newly available journals (Viplav, Viplavi Tract and Baagi), while simultaneously advocating the use of open access initiatives such as the South Asia Open Archive
  • screencap of south asia open archives website homepage

One project I have been working on for the past 5 years exemplifies the type of work we UT global studies liaisons try to do while traveling abroad: the Sajjad Zaheer Digital Archive.  The opportunity to digitize the papers of the 20th century Progressive Writer, Mr. Sajjad Zaheer, was brought to me back in 2014 by 3 UT professors—Kamran Ali (Anthropology), Akbar Hyder (Asian Studies) and Snehal Shingavi (English)—as all 3 used Sajjad Zaheer’s work in their scholarship.  As the Zaheer family had made an MoU with Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) to be the physical home of the collection, over multiple trips to Delhi and via countless email messages over the years, I worked with both the family members and with representatives of AUD’s Centre for Community Knowledge to inventory the collection, to get permissions to digitize the material, and to put the resulting files online in an open access repository.  Successful appeals to UT’s South Asia Institute and the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP) at the Center for Research Libraries for funding and eventual hosting of the archive enabled the work.  I used connections I had made on previous trips to facilitate the careful scanning work with digitization partners in India (the Roja Muthiah Research Library).  At our meeting this year in Delhi, we celebrated the completion of our initial objectives—digitally preserved and openly accessible copies of the collection. 

archival photo of three people (Sajjad Zaheer, Jawaharlal Nehru and Nehru's daughter) on a stone pathway in a garden
Photo from the Online Archive of Zaheer with his daughter and India’s 1st Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Digital collections are never done, however, so we also used this year’s meeting to put our heads together to explore ways to improve access and discovery of the archive (a digital humanities project currently underway at UTL, again generously funded by UT’s South Asia Institute) and to think of other authors’ work we would like to present in similar ways.  The project may have taken 5 years but they were productive, cooperative, and mutually beneficial years.  I can only hope for such success in future projects!

  • people sitting around a table with laptops and papers in an office
    Exploring new ideas with Surjit Sarkar, Seema Baquer and others at the Centre for Community Knowledge at Ambedkar University Delhi.
Digital Scholarship, Global Studies, Read Hot and Digitized, Research

Read, Hot, and Digitized: 1947 Partition Archive

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Increasingly simple and cost-effective digital technologies have made capturing and distributing oral histories a robust and growing field for archivists and for researchers, and, by extension for students and scholars seeking primary source, personal narratives to augment their understandings of history.  One of the most compelling South Asian oral history projects is the 1947 Partition Archive.  The Archive’s mission is to preserve eyewitness accounts from those who lived through the exceptionally turbulent and violent period when the Indian subcontinent gained independence from Britain, divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, and millions of people migrated from India to Pakistan, from Pakistan to India, from India and Pakistan to other parts of the world.  The work of the Archive is especially pressing: it has been 72 years since Partition and those still alive and able to directly recount their stories are increasingly rare.  As such, the core of the Archive’s work is to use its digital platform to encourage and motivate more interviews.

Using the power of “the crowd” to create content as well as to fund itself, the 1947 Partition Archive is demonstrably transparent in its methodologies; of particular use to those new to video oral histories is their “Citizen Historian Training Packet” which walks a novice through best practices for interviewing, strategies for good video capture, recommendations for incorporating still images into videos and even how to employ social media to generate interest (and potentially more interviews!).   The Archive has gathered over 5000 interviews so far and uses a very persuasive interactive map (StoryMap) on its front page to document the scale and scope of migration while simultaneously indexing the interviews; on the map itself, try searching a city either in “migrated to” or “migrated from” to generate a list of interviews, many with detailed text summaries that can be easily shared through social media, email, etc.

A handful of video interviews are available on the front page of the Archive’s website and raw, unedited recordings are available upon request.

Recently the Archive has partnered with Stanford University Library to preserve and archive the recordings.  To date, approximately 50 interviews are available through streaming on the site and (contingent on funding) one can hope for more to be available soon.  On the Stanford site, one can navigate by language, author, place & date of recording, but those just beginning to explore the subject may find the “Today’s Story” a good place to start.

The stories bravely shared through the 1947 Partition Archive are simultaneously compelling and devastating in their intimate descriptions of destruction, of violence, of loss.  And yet, they also provide hope: all interviewees survived the ruin that was Partition and the very act of sharing their stories demonstrates a hope for and generosity towards future generations to learn from the past.

The UT Libraries has an extensive collection related to Partition; those new to the topic might begin with a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh,”  a novel by Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan, or by Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, or Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s curated graphic novel, This Side, That Side.

Stanford University's 1947 Partition website.
Acquisitions/Foreign Travel, Collections, Global Studies, South Asia Collection

Vibrant but Vanishing Lending Libraries of South Asia

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Inside Eashwari Lending Library.
Inside Eashwari Lending Library.

Throughout the fall of 2018, I was honored to be able to convene UT South Asia Institute’s Seminar Series, “Popular | Public | Pulp: form and genre in South Asian cultural production.”  Throughout the series, speakers explored printed examples of South Asian popular culture—mysteries, romances, comics—as they underscore and grapple with historical and contemporary concerns such as identity, power, & representation.  In addition to interrogating literary approaches, speakers in the series further addressed questions of gender, of sexuality, of caste & religion, and of authority, helping readers and scholars alike challenge what qualifies as “worthy” both in terms of style and substance.

One goal of the series was to draw attention to UT Libraries growing collection of popular and pulp fiction in South Asian languages, a collection that is nationally and internationally unique in gathering and preserving popular materials and subsequently making them available for users.  Beyond publicity, however, the series was also intended to uncover reading and distribution networks for these materials so that I might continue to creatively and productively acquire them while on acquisitions and networking trips to South Asia.  In November and December, and with the generous funding of both UTL and the South Asia Institute, I was privileged to travel to India and more deeply explore a venue repeatedly invoked in the fall speaker series: small lending libraries.

Small lending libraries are a cultural phenomenon throughout South Asia which support themselves through highly localized, neighborhood-based memberships.  Unlike UT Libraries which has a long-term and “long-tail” research agenda, the mission of these lending libraries is to support current and highly popular reading practices, not unlike many small public libraries in the U.S.

Senthil Lending Library.
Senthil Lending Library.

While in Chennai, I was able to visit two lively lending libraries—Easwari and Senthil—to observe their operations, to ask questions about the popularity of particular authors, and to acquire second-hand materials.  Both libraries carry all the bestsellers—in English [Mills and Boon, Harry Potter, James Patterson] and in Tamil [Rajesh Kumar, Indira Soundarajan, Raminichandran]—and experience high circulation of their books.  Because preservation is not part of their mission, the libraries are willing to sell the most ephemeral of their materials, namely monthly periodicals which include crime, detective and “women’s” fiction (romances as well as family dramas).

Eashwari Lending Library.
Easwari Lending Library.

Inside Eashwari Lending Library.
Inside Easwari Lending Library.

Despite the vibrant activity I observed at both these libraries, I am told that lending libraries are slowly vanishing from the South Asian landscape, ceding space to other entertainments and ways of “time pass.”  I was happy to have had the chance to visit these libraries and I do hope they will still be open and serving their readers on my next visit.  If not, though, I am comforted knowing that UT Libraries is participating in documenting and preserving some of this literary and cultural history for researchers long into the future.