media, information, the contemporary

Tag: Technology


  • Information and Society

    This colloquium, early in the history of the Information and Society Research Cluster at Sarai-CSDS, posits that the ‘sensor-census-censor’ triad may be a useful way in which the histories and contemporary realities of South Asia and Europe may be investigated. Here, we mean the historic affinities, networks and resonances pertinent to the traffic of information…

  • Objects, Media Technologies, Aesthetics and Politics: Material Histories and Cultural Imaginaries, India c. 1940-1960

    This project, supported by ICAS:MP, speaks to issues of archiving and memorialization by developing an engagement with a novel and underexplored terrain of historical experience. This is the world of objects as they bear testimony to major transformations in energy use, environment, travel, bodily health and cleanliness, registers of everyday life. We seek to attend to…

  • FLOSS – Free/Libre Open Source Software

    Ever since its inception the Sarai programme of CSDS, Delhi was excited about and engaged with the free software practices in local and global contexts. We invited Richard Stallman to deliver a lecture on and published several books explaining the concept and practice. Our English and Hindi print publications have always been available online for…

  • Ethnographies of Social Data

    Big Data and the Data Revolution have been pitched as a potential transformation of all modes of digital data collection, organization, storage, mining, analytics and visualization. The proliferation of digital infrastructures and information after the social media revolution called Web 2.0, has led to a global movement around leveraging the enormous potential of data to…

  • Publics and Practices in the History of the Present

    Publics and Practices in the History of the Present (PPHP) emerged in the early years of Sarai to explore rapidly changing mediated urban milieux through questions of production, distribution and delivery, circulation, information networks, legality, and the materiality of media forms. Practitioners, artists, activists, lawyers, and academics engaged with these themes through  ethnography, media practice, and…

  • Lives of Data Workshop – Report & Recordings

    The ‘Lives of Data’ workshop, 05-07 January 2017, brought together a diverse group of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to reflect upon the historical and emergent conditions of data-driven knowledge production in India and South Asia. The workshop initiated wide-ranging conversations on history of statistics, media and computational cultures, politics and practices of data-driven governance, and…

  • Lives of Data Workshop – January 5-7, 2017

    The Sarai Programme, CSDS is organising the Lives of Data Workshop on 5th to 7th January, 2017. The workshop examines the historical and emergent conditions of data-driven knowledge production and circulation in India and South Asia. In the context of the Data Revolution, the workshop links emerging research on the history of statistics, new/old technological…

  • Culture, Conflict and Cyberspace: Towards a Bodo Digital Identity

    The Death Valley (2012) is a multilingual short film by Rajiv Saikia that aims to capture the 2012 ethnic conflict between the Bodos and Muslims, highlighting how innocent civilians from both sides are caught in the crossfire. This fictional account tells the story of a Bodo man and a Muslim man who are on friendly terms. Their peaceful existence is disrupted when ethnic conflict erupts. The Bodo man is chased by a group of Muslim men before being brutally murdered while his Muslim friend is killed as he tries to save him. Afterwards, the women of the two families leave with their children because of the unsafe environment…

  • Morality, Illegality and Crime in Download Culture

    This is the third and final research note from Shiva Thorat, one of the researchers who received the Social Media Research grant for 2016.

    A Khandeshi album producer, who is also a politician, complained against me to the police. They gave me strict warnings on why I should not do download work. One of the policemen told me,

    “People involved in the production of the song cannot get any money when the transfer process is free. The product should be making profit to pay everyone who is involved in the production. They have copyright over the song and it is illegal. If someone is not paying for their produced song it is the case of copyright infringement and transferring them is a crime, we might arrest you”.

  • Context is King: Contextualisation of Models and Simulations

    “Models and simulations, both, represent certain reality in an abstract form…we are essentially trying to represent reality in some sense. [It is an] abstraction of reality – it could be a mathematical model, simulation model, or a physical model. When we develop a model there are a lot of parameters that need to be tuned, such as vehicle distribution, speed profile… Generally the software would have default values for these parameters and they have to be tuned based on Indian contexts. This becomes much more complicated in our traffic conditions because of the heterogeneity and non-lane-based movement. All this has to be replicated well in the simulation model…”