# Call for Papers: Confronting the ‘Global’, Exploring the ‘Local’: Digital Apprehensions of Poetics and Indian Literature(s)
# An Online Conference Hosted by Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi on 21-22 December 2020, supported by MHRD/SPARC
In an increasingly digitally connected world where literary forms and discourse become more and more enmeshed with the digital, global approaches to Digital Humanities are heralded for the globalization and internationalization of digital knowledge production. However, DH can no longer exist without examining the idea of the 'global' and how such an epithet impacts and complicates it. It follows that digitization and digital criticism must confront its biases that occur out of its monolithic assumptions. Explorations of local digital cultures and local approaches to DH would then have to take into account the linguistic, cultural, historical, social and geographic diversity of its context.
Digital literary cultures in Indian languages showcase unique generic complexities with an experimental fluidity that comes out of the close interaction between the verbal, the visual, the auditory, the performative, and the virtual. As the medium of creation, dissemination and consumption evolves more and more towards a virtuality that is still mutating, knowledge generation about these genres and their unique specificities requires exploration, experimentation and creation of localized DH practices. It then becomes interesting to ask and explore how localization of digital tools and technologies can be harnessed to annotate and critically analyze the poetics of these digital texts in circulation.
The proposed conference, connected to a SPARC-sponsored collaboration between Jamia Millia Islamia and Michigan State University, USA, aims to foreground use of digital technologies such as minimal computing, novel DH research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance, to mention a few, for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which may facilitate comparative readings.
The proposed conference aims to explore the use of digital technologies to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literatures, which circulate in digital texts, in manuscript, and as oral or musical performance. In Kathleen Fitzpatrick's view digital humanities involves "the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study. And that happens in two different ways. On one hand, it's bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. But it's also bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media." Accordingly, our contention is that computational technology can enhance both scholarly analysis and pedagogical explanation of the poetics of Indian literatures. Despite the good intentions behind the growing collection of internet literary resources and archives, these often amateur-led projects tend to lack both scholarly rigour and digital precision. We aim to harness these efforts as a humanities equivalent of "citizen science," in which data crowdsourced by passionate, everyday people is put to use in state-of-the-art systems.
This conference will concern itself with possibilities of developing digital resources while refining standards for academically rigorous digital editions for literatures in Indian languages. It will discuss the roadblocks one encounters in such an effort, especially while modelling, explicating, and visualising the poetics of literatures in Indian languages, especially poetry, including formal, metrical, and rhythmic structures. Thinking through small and specific case studies, the conference seeks to spark conversations about the scope of literary modeling in locating the similarities and differences in various literary movements in Indian languages. Lastly, we seek to explore the scope of DH in teaching and disseminating knowledge of Indian poetics, both within academia and among the general public through practices such as crowd-sourced annotation and digital critical editions among others.
Some of the questions we hope to ask though this conference include:
Can modelling formal processes allow for computer-assisted scholarly analysis across the variously related languages and literary histories of India?
What are the exigencies involved in applying digital tools to languages other than English?
Can different forms of graphical visualisations be used to determine the most effective modes to convey poetics to new generations of students and scholars?
What role can computational technology play in facilitating understanding of poetics among students and scholars?
Papers can be about, but are not confined to the following themes:
Minimal Computing and Poetics.
Case Studies of ongoing DH projects in the domain of Indian Literatures
Literary Modeling and Comparative Indian Poetics
Digital Futures of Indian Literatures
Text Encoding for Indian languages
Digital Cultures in India
Localization of Tools and Technologies for Apprehensions of Poetics in Indian Literatures
Digital Diasporas
De-centering Global DH
Postcolonial DH
Media Archaeology of Indian Literatures Online
DH pedagogy and Indian Literatures
From script to screen-digital cultures and performing arts in India
# Important Dates
25 October 2020 Submission of Abstracts
30 October 2020 Intimation of Accepted Abstracts
30 November 2020 Submission of Full-Length Papers
21-22 December 2020 Online Conference
# Guidelines for Abstract and Paper Submissions
Please send abstracts of about 300 words along with short bio-note of about 100 by e-mail to jamiadhconf@gmail.com on or before 25 October, 2020.
Full length papers of 6000-8000 words, citation style: MLA 8th Edition, should reach on or before 30 November 2020.
# Contact Information
For further queries and submissions kindly mail at: jamiadhconf@gmail.com
# Patron
Prof. Najma Akhtar
Vice Chancellor
Jamia Millia Islamia
# Conference Chair
Professor Nishat Zaidi
Department of English
Jamia Millia Islamia
nzaidi@jmi.ac.in
# Conference International Chair
Dr A. Sean Pue
Michigan State University, USA
pue@msu.edu
# Conference Co-Chair
Mr Roomy F Naqvi
Department of English
Jamia Millia Islamia
rnaqvy@jmi.ac.in