Author: Sarai

• Digital Histories of Partition: Memory, Archives and the Narration of a ‘South Asian’ Identity Online

  By focusing on the transnational South Asian histories, national and diasporic identities negotiated online through Partition-related narratives and archives, this project will interrogate the effect of new media technologies on South Asian memory and history. Memories of Partition stand at the crossroads of the personal and the political, by being a personal tale of displacement and trauma that is also simultaneously a constitutive moment in the construction of national identity and the birth of the nation-state. This dissonance is exemplified in the digital archiving of memories and histories of Partition.

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  Digital Divide, Online Offense: Malayalee House, “Pandit Phenomenon” and Morality Debates in Contemporary Kerala

  My project looks at two contemporary phenomena in the Kerala mediascape — the emergence of “internet celebrity” Santhosh Pandit, and the recent reality TV show, Malayalee House, both of which have been amplified by the digital-social media’s potential to unsettle intended trajectories and uses of media circulation. In corollary, these have also inaugurated new ways of thinking about what it is to be a “media celebrity” in Kerala.

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  The So Far of ‘Shooting with the Interface’

  Users access the web through the interface generating an event, captured as a log in the server. Millions of these events get parsed through filters to be analyzed on dashboards, another interface. Dashboards then optimize the user facing interface to streamline and increase the number of events happening… I was interested to find out if there were more ways in which an interface mimics the camera.

• Mobile Phones and Media Consumption Practices: A Brief Introduction to the Project

  This project tries to understand the changing socio dynamics of access to media content in India with the spread of mobile phones, and intends to trace the new techno social networks of users and other actors that form to gain such access. The research focus will be on users and user groups with limited technological means and access (such as security guards, auto drivers and vegetable vendors etc).

• 36 hrs, June 06, 2014

  36 hrs is a duration-based provocation to artists/non-artists to share a singular physical space. Through this entire duration of 36 hours people are invited to join in, stay, visit and become a part by contributing to or engaging with individual/collaborative acts, conversations, discussions, performances, readings, watching films, take naps, exert, and exhaust etc. The first…

• Short Term Research Projects in Social Media: Selected Proposals

  The Call for Proposals for the Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media attracted over 80 applications from all over the country, and it took a careful scrutiny of all the applications to reach our decision. We got applications from scholars as well as practitioners, young researchers and older, and proposals looked at a wide range of themes. Please take a look at the excerpts from selected proposals for this year’s Short Term Research Projects in Social Media.

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  The Many Lives of Indian Cinema: Conference Report

  This conference was part of the golden jubilee celebrations of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies and was organized by The Sarai Programme to commemorate 100 years of Indian cinema. The conference sought to draw on the diverse heritage of Indian cinema to highlight the importance of cinema studies in the wider architecture of disciplinary engagements. This was with a view to bringing cinema into the academy as subject matter that required not only specialist analysis, but also as something which offered fresh perspectives, methods and materials to the human sciences.

• Call for Proposals: Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media

  The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, invites proposals from individuals for research projects on contemporary social and digital media, its ecologies and histories. Research is supported by a project grant from the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

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  Lives of Information Workshop – Participants

  Amlan Das Gupta is Professor of English in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. His current research interests are classical and renaissance European literature and thought and the history of Christianity. For the last few years he has been working on creating an archive of North Indian classical music at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. In 2010 he assumed charge of the School as its Director and is in overall charge of its current programmes. He has also written on digital archiving and the history of North Indian classical music.

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  Lives of Information Workshop, February 21-22, 2014

  The Sarai Programme organised the *Lives of Information* workshop to gather an inter‐disciplinary group of researchers to discuss information practices, cultures, infrastructures, and histories with a specific focus on post-colonial contexts. The workshop examined topics of colonial and post-colonial strategies of archiving identification, storage and informatic governance; bureaucratic cultures and politics of document and media forms; information infrastructures and networked politics; user-created content cultures and anxieties of mediated lives; and more.