[Sci-tech-public] Talk Today: Digital Archiving and Courseware in India

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Dear All:

I am organising this talk and presentation by my friend Ashish Rajadhyaksha, with the participation 
of people in Academic Computing, OpenCourseWare and the MIT India Program. Please come if you are 
interested and please forward this invitation onwards into cyberspace.

Best,


Shekhar

-- 

Dear All:

You are cordially invited to a talk and presentation by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, media historian and 
archivist from the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society in Bangalore, India on THURSDAY 11 MAY 
2006 at 5.00 p.m.

Ashish will introduce the Comprehensive Online Resource for Education (CORE), a recent initiative of 
CSCS, and present a short history of changing practices of database management, digital archiving, 
and curriculum and courseware development at CSCS for teaching cultural studies and social sciences 
in India.

See the detailed description of the talk, and more information about Ashish Rajadhyaksha, please see 
the text and links below. Please RSVP to Shekhar Krishnan ( shekhar at mit.edu ) if you plan to attend, 
and please forward this invitation to your friends and colleagues in the Boston-Cambridge area.


WHEN:

Thursday 11 May 2006 at 5.00 p.m.

WHERE:

MIT Building 9-253
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=9-253&mapsearch=go

WHO:

ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA is Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society (CSCS), 
Bangalore [1], where he coordinates the CSCS Media Archive [2] and the CSCS CORE (Comprehensive 
Online Resource for Education) [3]. With Paul Willemen, he was co-author and editor of the 
Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (1999). He is an active member of the editorial collective of the 
Journal of Arts and Ideas [4], and is a regular contributor to the journals Framework and Sight & 
Sound, and an advisor to CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Mumbai [5].

He has written Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (1983), was Editor, The Sad and Glad of Kishore 
Kumar (Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1988); was Editor, with Amrit Gangar, of Ghatak: 
Arguments/Stories (Screen Unit/Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1987). He was co-curator, with 
Geeta Kapur, of the exhibition Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001, part of the exhibition Century City: Art and 
Culture in the Modern Metropolis, at the Tate Modern, London, 2001 [6]. Ashish's forthcoming book is 
called CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CELLULOID: INDIAN EVIDENCE 2005-1925 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2007).

[1] http://cscsban.org
[2] http://cscsarchive.org
[3] http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar/official/cscs_core.pdf
[4] http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/artsandideas
[5] http://www.crit.org.in
[6] http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/centurycity/ccmumbai.htm


ABOUT THE TALK:

CSCS and the New Academic Domain in India

The Centre for the Study of Culture & Society was founded in 1998 in Bangalore, as a ‘new 
generation’ academic research centre. While CSCS derived its historical legacy from the tradition of 
institutionalised social science research as supported by the well-known state-run institutes of the 
ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research), it has also struck out on its own with new 
models for inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional pedagogy and research in the field of social 
science and theory.

The Digital Resource

Since the late 1990s, CSCS has experimented with database formats that could be transformed into 
teachable instruments. In 1999 CSCS started its Media & Culture Archive, and extended this in 2004 
into India’s only M.A. programme in Cultural Studies taught entirely online. In 2005, this was 
further extended into the Undergraduate Diploma Programme in Cultural Studies. In the future, CSCS 
seeks to consolidate effective databasing with online pedagogy, by further linking this connection 
to the larger needs of social science pedagogy in India.

The Social Sciences in India

Indian social science research has been, since the 1970s and the pioneering work of the Subaltern 
Studies Collective, perhaps the most significant social science research tradition worldwide for 
close to two decades. Among its significant aspects has been its interlinking with the priorities of 
India’s NGO movement together with the needs of academic institutions both inside and outside the 
University.

Furthering this linkage, social science research has mined the resources provided by numerous 
practices of independent informal archiving. As such archiving encounters the problems of 
digitization, it has also opened social science practice into three further areas: (1) The linking 
of the special skills of navigating the archives with new techniques of online pedagogy, (2) The 
options opened up by online publication, and (3) The need for consolidated structures of data 
collaboration including academically valid search platforms.

The Domain of ‘Informal Archiving’ in India

Since roughly the late 1970s (conventionally from the time of the end of the Emergency), 
non-governmental organisations have attempted a form of archiving, alongside their work on advocacy, 
research, training and monitoring in their specialised fields of interest. Since the mid-1990s, this 
movement has also sought to enter the domain of digitization at various levels, and with varying 
results.

The ‘informal archive’ in India could consist of anything between 3-5,000 institutions seeking to 
work at various levels, from the collection to the catalogue to the archive itself. It is now a 
sufficiently significant database, with sufficiently significant problems, to merit an independent 
look, as the phenomenon grows in tandem with the research work of social scientists in India.

_________


The Comprehensive Online Resource for Education (CORE) is an attempt to think through a possible 
strategy for bringing together the diverse resources and research materials available in different 
locations of new social science research in India, with a possible Asian extension. CORE hopes to 
bring into focus the the need to convert critical research into teachable, intelligible and easily 
accessible knowledge bases, the identifying of effective online tools and methods for teaching and 
learning, and the relocation of education centres, the educators and the students within the digital 
interfaces of cyberspace – all within the domain of higher education in social sciences in Asia.


For more information on CORE, see the full proposal on 
http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar/official/cscs_core.pdf and contact Ashish Rajadhyaksha on 
ashish at cscsban.org.


-- 

Shekhar Krishnan
Apt.302, Edgerton House
143, Albany Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
U.S.A.

http://www.crit.org.in/members/shekhar
http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar