Digital Innovation in Water Scarcity in Coimbatore, India

The project is designed to be a rapid, reflexive intervention in the ongoing, and worsening, water crisis in Coimbatore in Southern India. The project will build the considerable potential of digital humanities to generate robust and trusted data sets and to design meaningful, resonant visualisations that will reframe and subvert cycles of water over-exploitation and depletion. The depletion of the region's water resources is abundantly documented: river basins are shrinking, droughts increasing, water tables lowering and rivers are being transformed from perennial to monsoonal as tributary aquifers and rivers vanish. However, there is a paucity of trusted quantitative data that connects water to the localities faced with an acute and immediate resource crisis. Pan-regional or national aggregate data is dominant in the crisis discourse and, while significant, these figures have little relationship with quotidian patterns of local water use. There is an urgent need to challenge the disjunctures created between locality and information, and between water and land, created by colonial and post-1947 practises of cartography, governance and water exploitation.

This project will draw on the concepts and methods of spatial humanities - georeferencing, entity recognition and corpus linguistics methods - to restore meaningful associations between landscape, people and water. Text mining and geotagging can create a unique data base relating to the water resources of the Coimbatore region. Digital Humanities methods are uniquely capable of drawing data, at great speed, from a wide-range of materials (for example, revenue statistics, cartographies, hydrology interventions, poetry, geology, agrarian history, art, advertising, industrial expropriation, medical topography and contemporary oral testimonies) in order to create data sets that can radically re-frame the water crisis and create innovative, integrated strategies of conservation. The project will assemble a range of qualitative and quantitative data relating to water bodies in Coimbatore: volume, surface area, distribution in urban, semi-urban and rural, quantification and naming of dry and perennial water resources (canals, tanks, lakes and rivers). This data will be gathered from digitised materials drawn from across the world and returned to Coimbatore.

The project partners include journalists, activists and scholars. Their participation allows both the formulation, the development and the outputs of the project to be embedded within ongoing conservation strategies and debates in the region (see Pathways to Impact). Third sector partners include five local NGOs engaged in activist work in Coimbatore: Kovai Kolangal Paathukaappu Amaippu, Sirithuli, Siruvani Vizhudhugal, Osai and Kurichi Kulam. These NGOs undertake a range of information, engagement and conservation work and have made explicit their interest in collaborating on the proposed project. Other participants include scholars, writers and academics working on water histories and conservation in Southern India.

Digital data can provide the foundations and tools to create new, robust practises of water conservation only if it has credibility and resonance with a number of stakeholders: communities, activists, local, regional and national officials with jurisdiction over water. Digitised media and platforms will be used to return water to the localities of Coimbatore through creative visualisations - animations, imaginative counter-mapping and narratives - that are based on historical, literary, linguistic and cultural understandings of the Coimbatore region. These data visualisations will be framed and determined by local collaborations and interactions. Project collaborations will ensure that the outcomes of the project are meaningful resources and interventions that can be used to re-frame and re-orientate struggles for water conservation, management and access in Coimbatore.

The project is designed to have immediate, significant and measurable impact within and beyond the one-year duration of the planned research. This impact will take place at a number of scales: within specific communities, in localities, districts, regionally and globally. A range of strategies for digital dissemination of both the data and visualisations will be explored and implemented from March 2020 onwards. The initial, prototype visualisations will be discussed with communities, conservationists and officials. The visualisations will be developed on the basis of this, and subsequent feedback, until November 2020. Once a set of visualisations are complete, they will be disseminated to officials, revenue administrators, community groups, local schools, colleges and environmentalist networks. Access to specific fields of information within the data set will be made available and promoted using Tamil and English-language social media (for example, Instagram, facebook and twitter).

Engagement and co-creation with activists, farmers, small industrialists, and residents living in the areas affected by the water crisis will be integrated into the project throughout its duration. The named RA, Shanmugapriya, was a member of an agricultural community for 11 years before re-starting her undergraduate study. Her academic career has culminated in her PhD in digital humanities. The combination of her life and academic experience is critical to the impact success of the project. The project will be designed to reflect and act upon the information, insight, critical and constructive feedback garnered during fieldwork and from ongoing interactions with our project partners. Summaries from our analysis of the assembled data will form an important aspect of the discussions to be conducted in Coimbatore during period of fieldwork. These discussions will inform the organisation of that data, to maximise its impact, and will frame the initial visualisations created. These visualisations will be co-created and reflexively refined, through further discussion and dissemination work in Coimbatore over the Summer fieldwork. The visualisations will incorporate sounds, images and ideas collected in the region.

Planned engagement events will be held with local communities and in local colleges during fieldwork. These events will be designed to introduce the 'headline' insights, provide apertures into the data and to garner responses from local communities. The educational events will encourage young people in the region to engage with the raw data in order to formulate their own creative responses to it.

The data will have significant impact for a range of official and semi-official bodies charged with enacting water conservation policy and responding to 'Right to Information' queries about water. The project will aim to bridge the disjunctures of custody and management that exist between different local, state and private jurisdictions and between different classifications of water bodies. Both the raw data and the visualisations will be disseminated locally and further afield in Tamil Nadu. They will be made available to our project partners and through other networks of scholars and activists engaged in the region and beyond. Promotion and dissemination using social media will allow the impact of the digital resources created by the project to be tracked and measured. These reactions and responses will form an important aspect of our reflective, scholarly outputs on the project. These outputs will reflect on the methodologies deployed and developed during the life of the project. They will also consider the engagement and impact created by the project, both that predicted in the application and unforeseen responses collected over the course of research.

Seminar, conference papers and publications will disseminate this ground-breaking, inter-disciplinary research in state, industrial, third-sector, policy and activist fora.