Urban Heritage and the Digital Humanities in India

The 'Urban Heritage and Digital Humanities in India' Research Network will develop the considerable potential of Digital Humanities technologies for the documentation, promotion and conservation of heritage in dynamic urban environments. The network will consist of three inter-related events to bring together historians, heritage professionals, geographers, architects, computer scientists, amateur activists and the public in India and the UK. The network will adress the conservation of tangible and intangible heritage in Delhi. Delhi's extraordinarily rich and complex heritage is held under a range of, often complex, state and private custodies. The city is also a rapidly changing urban environment in which physical transformation, formal and informal, and concomitant social and economic change within localities places heritage under persistent pressure. This project will take an integrated approach to the physical fabrics of the past and will encompass monuments protected by legislation and fragmented physical remains that are embedded within living urban environments. The network will be particularly concerned with the range of intangible heritages - memory, oral lore and song - which enrich and animate the pasts of the city. A key aim of the project will be to promote awareness, engagement and dialogue about the heritage of the city among those who live around fragments of the physical past.

The Project Partners for the Research Network are the Delhi Chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Culture Heritage, The Centre for Community Knowledge based at Ambedkar University Delhi and the 1947 Partition Archive Project. These Project Partners have a wealth of knowledge about the city's past, and present, and will provide experience and expertise in tangible and intangible heritage documentation and conservation. The Research Network will promote the potential of digital technologies to enhance and integrate documentation, conservation and engagement work. The workshops will consider the potential and the challenges associated with the use of digital technologies and media for the conservation, sustainability, custodial and access rights in relation to tangible and intangible heritage. The network aims to build capacity in Digital Humanities technologies. Practical, hands-on software training in GIS mapping, digital conversion, statistical and corpus linguistic analysis will form a core component of the two workshops to be held in Delhi in September 2017 and August 2019.

A key outcome of the project is the creation of a prototype smart phone app - SHARC Dilli - that will create interactive maps of heritage in the city. The geomapping app will be configured from geomapping software developed in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University and will be developed collaboratively by the Research Network at workshop events in Delhi and Lancaster. Geomapping has particular potential in Delhi, a city in which heritage is richly layered, and often obscured, within rapidly changing urban environments. The app will map textual, visual and aural information against particular localities in the city to provide heritage-place stories and to connect monuments, memories and remains which are spatially dispersed across the city. Geospatial mapping captures the complexity of everyday understandings of urban spaces and their pasts and can, uniquely, encompass the multiple meanings that characterise the dynamic richness of urban history. The app will be designed in Hindi and English to promote awareness, discussion and, in turn, protection for a range of tangible and intangible heritage across the city. As a prototype, the app will provide located textual, visual and aural information about the refugee occupation of various heritage buildings in the city during and after the Partition of British and Princely India in 1947.

The Research Network is designed to create impact on the documentation, analysis and conservation of urban heritage by facilitating integrated approaches to urban heritage and promoting public debate and dialogue about the significance and value of tangible and intangible heritage. Digital technology can bring the rich dynamic cultural heritage and living demography of the city into meaningful contact. The Research Network has a multi-disciplinary approach and will emphasis practical and strategic measures to build capacity in urban heritage conservation. Digital Humanities techniques have the potential to strengthen the connections between different agencies concerned with the documentation and conservation of cultural heritage and build and enrich the relationship between those agencies and a variety of urban publics.

The workshops on Digital Humanities in Delhi will draw together a wide-range of stakeholders in Delhi's urban heritage. These include 1. Government organisations (for example, the Archaeological Survey of India, the National Archives of India and the Delhi State Archives), 2. Non-governmental organisations (for example, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the Indian National Trust for Art and Culture Heritage), 3. Non-professional heritage activists and volunteers (for example, Delhi Heritage Walks, Delhi Heritage Photographic Club, Friends of the ASI, India Youth for Heritage Foundation), and 4. Our Project Partners, the Delhi chapter of the Indian National trust for Art and Culture Heritage, the Centre for Community Knowledge and the 1947 Partition Archive Project.

The workshops will develop the potential of a range of Digital Humanities methodologies to transform heritage documentation, analysis and dissemination. They will provide advanced-level software training in specific techniques for data collation, mapping and analysis. This training will be tailored for the audience at each of the workshops. These groups will benefit from 1. the pooling of expertise, experience and insight into the challenges of heritage conservation in challenging urban environments, 2. the provision of tailored software training using a range of documentation, mapping and analytical technologies, 3. the development of protocols for the licensing and sharing of data and other knowledge forms associated with intangible and tangible heritage, 4. the development of a prototype geospatial mapping app for the city in order to develop and promote the potential of digital methods for urban heritage documentation and conservation.

It is essential to foster stakeholder value for local heritage. The Research Network will aim to use tools developed by Digital Humanities to promote shared values around resources and public spaces in urban India. The Research Network will design and develop the first heritage app in India, SHARC Dilli, to geomap a range of information about specific places associated with the city's past. SHARC Dilli will be designed to have a significant impact on the lives of citizens of Delhi living in heritage rich localities and to draw a wider public into a dialogue with the city's physical and cultural past. Geomapping heritage will allow governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in the urban environment to connect to the heritage of localities in new way. Through the SHARC Dilli app, stakeholders will have the opportunity both to encounter the constellation of different pasts in the city and to feed back narratives, nomenclatures and meanings that can be incorporated into the app.

The use of digital technologies to collate and promote tangible and intangible heritage will create new engagements between that heritage and the many agencies responsible for urban infrastructural and architectural development. Geomapping physical and cultural pasts within localities will facilitate the creation of new ways of thinking about the importance of the city's many pasts within its future.