The July 2014 issue of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies is now available both in print and online. The special issue is available for free online.…

The arrival of video ushered in a new logistics of access, circulation and production of audio-visual forms. Analog video introduced new infrastructures and legal contests for film circulation and viewing cultures, set new terms for amateur and professional practices in home videos, documentary and commercial works, pedagogical practices and civil society activism, and has been a key dimension of the history of surveillance. This workshop seeks to track this history and also to consider the shifts engendered with the arrival of digital video.

This is an intensive two-week workshop for research scholars, aimed at the honing of research skills and creation of theoretical and methodological awareness. The workshop is oriented towards elaborating the general problematic of ‘margins and marginalities.’ The margins, for our purposes, constitute the vantage point from which to view and analyze a diverse set of historical and contemporary issues. Tentatively, we are planning to discuss the themes of knowledge, language, economy, democracy, religion, body, city, media and art.

The Sarai Programme at CSDS invites applications for three positions centered around media research.
The research agenda is historical and contemporary, archive based and ethnographic, and will traverse a variety of media, including radio, gramophone, cassette, photography, film, television, video, and digital forms…

More cell phone videos have been shot, edited and uploaded online in the last 16 hours then the total number of films and TV shows produced in India in the year 1989. Cell phone videos in particular have had definitive impact in shaping much of recent history. From the ‘Arab Spring’, to Abu Ghraib to the Kajieme Powell killing to innumerable videos capturing mundane violence or corruption worldwide, cell phone videos are the dominant visible template of the real today… In this post I look at some recent ‘citizen videos’ and try and nudge towards changing relationship between the (sting) video document and issues of ‘truth’, ‘shame’ and transparency.

This post contains a detailed summary of the secondary research component and an early stage analysis of the three interviews that were completed as a part of the primary research component of this project. Two of these Interviews were conducted with data scientists working with large scale public data. The third Interview was with an Image processing expert now active in the field of data sciences… The Interface as discussed collects the user data actively (through forms/text boxes, affordances) and passively (tags tracing user footprint on the site)… Data is far from being structured; it contains a lot of noise. It gets generated in high volumes and does not leant itself easily to analysis.

In McLuhan’s view the emergent televisuality of the time was marked by an intricate structural relationship between the new forms of media such as television and their function as social carriers of messages. In this post I look at ‘gossip’ as a formal constituent of Malayalee House and as an integral part of the cultural and social content contained therein… The incessant repetition and replicability of the information as it is relayed across digital social media also in many ways resembles the circuits of gossip… I argue that the use of gossip as a framing device in Malayalee House is analogous to the ways social media operates in assembling scattered bits of information…

The ethnographic studies on ICTs in rural areas, including my own earlier work, have often focused only on those factors which seem to most directly affect success or failure of technology led development. This was perhaps for a good reason, given the millennial euphoria of ICT4D. Moving forward however, one needs a broader understanding of socio-technical changes in rural life, which have outpaced scholarship. In this final research note, I would like to introduce some important features of the ‘rural’ socio-technical context by presenting a comparative picture of my two field sites, briefly discussing the emerging discursive practises of social and digital media access and uncertainties which characterise ICT ecologies in the villages…

In second week of September, when floods created havoc in Kashmir, thousands outside the Valley wanted to know whereabouts of their dear ones – family, friends and acquaintances. However, there was no way to communicate. With no communication network and no access, there was no news about the majority of the Valley. Concerned, a group of Kashmiris in Delhi and many well-wishers decided to meet at Nehru Place in South Delhi. Meanwhile, back in the Valley, a few of those whose cellphones were still functional, were working 24×7, receiving calls from all over the world from concerned people…