Digitalectics
Decolonizing Digital Narratives Together
Digitalectics.com re-imagines digital spaces from a decolonial perspective, focusing on non-western societies like India. By integrating indigenous knowledge systems and archiving them, we explore how historical forces shape shared meanings. Engaging scholars and educators, our project bridges the gap between Indian poetics and digitization, promoting diverse narratives in poetics, water bodies, queerness, science fiction, and Dalit writings.
Our Mission
Digitalectics.com re-imagines the digital space from the decolonial, multilogical perspective reflecting the heterogeneity of socio-cultural spheres of non-western societies like India. It is cognisant of the limitations of the current affordances of digital technologies, the urgency to overcome them by extending their reach to indigenous knowledge systems and the need for archiving them. The website forays into the repertoire of Indian languages and the languages of the global south and deploys digital tools to see how different historical forces contribute in the making of shared meanings and histories. The multiple projects underway/planned aim to sensitise readers, writers, researchers, scholars, educators, and curriculum builders — across disciplines — to the rich literary traditions across Indian languages and even beyond to develop insights into subjects such as poetics, water bodies, queerness, science fiction and Dalit writings.
We are a group that emerged from academic engagements on the question of optimizing the use of digital tools to comprehend and annotate Indian poetic texts at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Our project ‘Digital Apprehensions of Poetics’ led by Prof. Nishat Zaidi, and supported by the Ministry of Education, Govt of India under its “Scheme for the Promotion of Academic and Reseach Collaboration” facilitated multiple courses and workshops that were aimed at bridging the gap between the shrinking significance of Indian poetics and ever-growing digitization. With Digitalectics, we aim to go a step further exploring wider implications of digital technologies not only for literary production, consumption and critical cataloging of Indian literatures but also to develop digital archives around other less attended narratives as well. We invite scholars of Indian literary traditions, practitioners, and graduate and doctoral students to join us in this endeavour by sharing their knowledge and insights.
Our Team
Nishat Zaidi
Professor, Project Coordinator
Kashish Dua
Assistant Professor
Steven S George
PhD Scholar
Aqib Sabir
Poet, PhD Scholar
Fazal Mahmood Shah
PhD Scholar
Grace Mariyam Raju
PhD Scholar
Mohammad Athar
PhD Scholar, Tech
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We aim:
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To compile a glossary of comparative key-terms in poetry traditions across Indian languages identifying conceptual overlaps and variations
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To develop research models on interlingual poetics combining conventional and digital methods
3.
To create a digital repository of audio visual content in the form of podcasts on Digital Humanities.
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