At Powells bookstore in Chicago, I saw a new Encyclopedia of India edited by eminient South Asian historian Stanley Wolpert. It’s an impressive four volume work, with 580 essays on the history, culture, economy and politics of the Indian subcontinent. Over two hundred scholars have contributed to this international projects.

Despite its obvious usefulness and the good reviews it has gotten, I couldn’t but help wonder whether print is the right format for an encyclopedic work of this nature. I like printed books as much as anyone else. I am devoted to writing printed books. But still I cling to the belief that print is no longer suited for publishing encyclopedias. There is a finality to a printed volume that doesn’t make sense any more. I am sure there is a market among institutional buyers for a work such as this but shouldn’t this be a digital archive, which can be periodically updated?

Shouldn’t Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy be the model for all such projects in the twenty first century? In the past, the backing of big publishers was essentially for a project such as this but is that the case now?

In the context of history, the changes that today’s technology will impose on literary society may not be as earth-shattering as some may think. In fact, books themselves are a relatively new construct, inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-produced books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the printing press that likely put legions of calligraphers and bookbinders out of business.

The book, as we know it, will survive and perhaps even flourish, if writers play with the format, explore and extend creatively its forms of materiality. That may mean integrating the reader and creating a new set of literary cultural assumptions that the author and reader may share. Or it could mean exploring different forms of story telling. Mere railing against technology, as Mr. Updike did a few days ago, would take us nowhere.

So given the nature of specific changes and experiments, the question is: who is the author, if he is not already dead in multiple ways? Read on.

When Mark Z. Danielewski’s second novel, “Only Revolutions,” is published in September, it will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work. Nearly 60 of his contributors have already received galleys of the experimental book, which they’re commenting about in a private forum at Mr. Danielewski’s Web site, www.onlyrevolutions.com.

Rich quotes Danielewski at some length at the end and that paragraph is also worth reading:

Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. “Only Revolutions,” he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. “As excited as I am by technology, I’m ultimately creating a book that can’t exist online,” he said. “The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you’re exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that’s the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books.”

It’s for writers (of books) to take up that challenge of establishing what is different, exceptional and valuable about books.

A play is supposed to be performed.

Only a novel is read in solitude. But then novel is a product of print culture.

Now as we come to terms with the digitization of our cultural practices and everyday life that is happening at such a rapid pace, let us imagine how a poem or a play can be re-presented digitally. Let us imagine the contrast between reading Hamlet in solitude and have Laurence Olivier and all the other great performers re-enact Hamlet for us. Personally, I am a ‘word’ person and I want to read everything. I want to let my imagination help me bring Hamlet alive. If I can also access Olivier through some gizmo, that would also be kinda neat.

But it’s not about my preference anymore. Books are becoming available digitally and they are not scanned versions of printed books. This is true of old printed books, which are being scanned and made available to the world by Google et al. Reading these digitally marked up books will be a different experience.

Let me also ask a more specific question, which has a narrow focus. What is the impact of digitization on scholarship and pedagogy? Is digitization only an archival, preservation strategy? Or do texts get transformed and become kinds of cultural artifacts? How will all this impact our own reading, writing and pedagogical practices?
Now read a revised version of The Polyglot manifesto again. And let us think about the difference between print and digital cultures. Seriously.

The innocent among us expected the larger theme of the conference to be the future of Humanities, given Franke Institute was hosting it and the theme was the Fate of Disciplines! What we heard was a lot of Foucault and discourse analysis, which was interesting in its own right but we could have gotten that in any other conference. Here on this occasion though, we expected our star Humanists to offer us in broad and bold strokes, some speculative thinking on how we could re-define the relationship of humanities to the larger world; some reflections on the purpose of our intellectual practice. Not only did we not get that, no one even asked clearly and openly a simple question: what are the responsibilities of humanists in the contemporary world? No one wanted to ask whether the digital age has made any difference to their practice or discipline. There was rarely a moment when someone even considered how the massive digitization of libraries undertaken by Google or the Open Content Initiative (Yahoo-Microsoft) might impact our scholarly practices.

We waited with baited breath to hear someone ask a simple question: how have our reading and writing practices been changing even as we speak? There were some honorable exceptions: Robert Post, Sahlins and my own advisor, Sheldon Pollock. Still it seemed like a beautiful aesthetic event, with little political or ethical charge.

This evening, I was reminded of all this, at a fantastic and inspirational talk by Gregroy Crane on the Perseus project. Crane began by urging us to think about the relationship of humanities to the larger world. While he spoke specifically about the history and future trajectories of Perseus project, his broader concerns compelled him to reflect on where will humanities - and classics in particular - be in twenty years. If it is done crudely, this would be an exercise in predicting where technology would take us but to his credit, Crane consistently avoided thinking about technology in an instrumental fashion. For me and Sepoy, what was refreshing, however, was his formulation of our responsibilities as scholars of humanism. Not only did he speak positively about new forms of intellectual production, such as Wikipedia, he faulted humanists for not contributing to such ventures. Our salaries aren’t being paid just to perform in the class room, he said; we ought to share our knowledge widely and outside the four walls of the university. We agree, wholeheartedly.

The other primary focus of Crane’s talk had to do with the digital infrastructure for humanities, which is now being built by humanities scholars but also by companies such as Google. In that context, he asked very specific questions too. As we build digital archives, what will the world give us (humanists) and what might we need to do, on top of that? ‘World’ is the operative word here. Rarely a moment passes when we are not made aware of the differences between the print and digital cultures. While Google or Yahoo might enthusiastically scan an entire library of texts in English and other major world languages, and perhaps even create searchable texts, the onus of creating digital versions of classical texts will fall on humanities scholars. And so will perhaps even the task of figuring out the necessary tools and frameworks.

In a curious way then philology and digital technologies coalesce. Digital texts offer the flexibility that printed texts didn’t and can accommodate multiple variants and commentaries (visual, audio and written) and embed inside a text all the reading/interpretive conventions that a text historically possessed. Google or yahoo have neither the expertise nor the incentive to undertake digitizing Sanskrit or Persian texts. Here is where Humanists will have to intervene and do both philology and technology extremely well. A striking feature of Crane’s talk were constant references to his students who moved seamlessly between the worlds of University classics departments and Yahoo/Google. While I would want all of us to spend more time in Pune, Benaras and Lucknow to become better philologists, we would also do well to be curious about technology too.

Well, ultimately we return to the same question: has technology actually changed the way we think or ask questions? Should the content and method of our research and teaching change because of technology? Surely Aristotle and Upanisadic sages managed well without technology? Sure, I would write what I write without Google or Regenstien Library. But Digital Humanities too isn’t an illusion that I can wish away. Moreover, to be better philologists and especially to share our scholarship with a wider world, digital technology might help us considerably. Or so I suspect.

But tonight, while visiting Sampada after some time, I was pleasantly surprised to see several nice features, especially podcasting. Here in Chicago, we are still struggling to get our folks at the University to make our weekly seminars and other such ‘public’ events available online. So, it was a pleasure to listen to pretty good interviews of Tejaswi, URA, Halemane, Kambara and GSS, writers that I grew up with. They are pretty good company even in the cyberspace, especially on a sleepless night.

Good job, guys. This was fun to listen to.

2. Looking at Sampada, I also began thinking about my own much postponed plans to write Kannada entries regularly. I haven’t figured out the fonts and rendering issues. I am committed to Unicode, and I am a predominantly Mac user. I want to make sure all the browsers display the text properly. Earlier, I was reading Sampada entries using my PC on Firefox and the display was flawless. On my powerbook, that isn’t the case. Anyway, one of these days we will have to stop boasting about our software proficiencies and address these problems.
Sampada seems to be using Drupal. So folks, if you would share your experience and expertise, we would all appreciate that. I haven’t looked at the Sampada archives yet to see if there is any documentation but please send a note or bring to our attention what we need to know. We would all appreciate that. Also, any thoughts on WordPress MU?

Since monday, I have been meaning to write on a couple of digital humanities themes. I also wanted to respond at some length to a some comments too. Hopefully, this weekend, I can return to Rajkumar movies. Time to catch up on the backlog on a freakishly cold friday evening.

Let us begin with a column that Richard Cohen wrote in the WAPO entitled Digital Lynch Mob. Cohen commented on the nearly 3,500 emails he received in three days response to an earlier column on Stephen Colbert’s funny performance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. Cohen didn’t find Colbert funny and said so. His respondents said: ‘Cohen, you suck, Colbert rocks’.

The content of these responses is not what interests me. But the fact of the response, where the medium itself is the message and its form. As Cohen points out, many of the respondents appear to have been ‘egged on’ by bloggers; it wouldn’t surprise me if the content of the responses had also been provided or borrowed from a few (blogger) sources. But the sheer numbers involved in such cases and more importantly, the lynching mentality seems to steer politics, both on the right and the left, in directions, which make politics an art in accomplishing nothing. Anyone with a computer and DSL connection now has a voice and wants to influence an agenda of a party or collective that he (or she) cares about. In such a scenario, I am curious to see what the response of the politcal parties would be and how the 2006 elections might turn out.

Two points that I want to make explicitly. On the digital front, what we need to recognize now more than ever is the steady questioning of distinctions that we have been used to, traditionally. For instance, Cohen’s status as the pundit using WAPO pulpit can no longer be taken for granted, even if it has not eroded completely. Clearly, 3,500 emails (even if he doesn’t read them) influence the way he (or any other pundit) would comment on our world. I have read in the last week itself many MSM journalist/bloggers making references to hundreds of emails that they have received. While this new virtual interactive (?) community might be fun and offer a sense of affirmation, this is still very new for us to realize how it might influence punditry itself.

Similarly, the impact on politics is also unknown. How will Hillary respond to the shrill digital voices from the left? How will other seekers of public office attempt to position themselves, given the enthusiastic and organized Internetters?
It is no fun to say it is hard to even speculate but it will be fun to watch it all unfold.

PS: Speaking of politics, this week, several major states went to poll in India. The continued success of the Left Front in West Bengal is as puzzling as the anti-incumbency sentiment in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen—all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today’s “Digital Native” students.

My friend Scott Payne has an interesting essay entitled “Evolutionary Trajectories, Internet-mediated Expression, and Language Education”, in which he has a brief discussion of digital natives and immigrants; Scott quotes the above paragraph from the research of M. Presky.

Today, Ken Sadowski referred to both these categories in a presentation at the ‘Colloquium on Language Instruction and Technology’, which, as the regulars may remember, is my ‘baby’ for the Spring Quarter in Chicago.

What are the implications for our own practice of teaching? Sure, we want to take the changing profile of the learners/students and personally, I don’t find adapting my classroom a great challenge. Using chat or skype or podcasting in the class room doesn’t produce any anxiety in me. But if you speak of forms of socialization, then that’s a different matter.

The place is packed with instructors who teach Slavic, Inner Asian, East Asian (mostly Korean) and African Languages. Also present are coordinators of language programs, mostly from Indiana University, a species rarely seen in the South Asian world. However, Indiana University, for instance, has, as part of the same department, Hungarian, Mongolian, Tibetan and everything in between. Surely, the instructors (many of whom are native speakers) require someone to interface with administrators as well as numerous pedagogy experts.

I am the only south Asian around but I have no language teaching experience and even my learning experience is limited. Still, that comes in handy, as I could pretend to ask questions on classical languages, which none of the modern language instructors would have considered. A university education has many uses but flummoxing your friends and foes is the foremost. I pass off myself as someone who works on pedagogy and technology, hiding the fact that I know neither. My brown skin immediately labels me as a computer expert and not wanting to disappoint my new friends, (all fifty of them), I open up my Powerbook, use the guest password offered kindly by the Indiana Memorial Union (where I was also staying) and get connected to the world.

The workshop went off very nicely. I was there to listen to my friend Ursula Lentz, with whom I am working to organize a similar workshop this summer. I was really impressed by not only how well organized she was and all the pertinent questions she raised but more importantly by her capacity to get the instructors, all of whom teach Less Commonly Taught Languages, buy into her approach and theory. My south Asian friends aren’t usually so well disposed towards anyone who wants to offer instruction on their languages of expertise. Yet Ursula has this non-threatening, friendly presence and the activities at the workshop produced a fabulous atmosphere. I made some notes on what we should do for June, both prior to the workshop and during the workshop itself. My brown self also made me consider more about what can be done through a blog and workshop website, in the months prior to the workshop. Overall a pleasant and educative trip.

Actually, I want to write about a new conversation that we initiated this past week in Chicago on language instruction and technology. I am officially the organizer of a colloquium and well, I have already confessed my ignorance in both fields. Even as we are assailed by our own doubts and some skepticism in the air about the usefulness of such exercises, we are also gratified by the good response from our elders and fellow students. We console ourselves by saying we are as knowledgeable or ignorant as anyone else, which is qualification enough to undertake this daunting task. But as we begin our teaching careers in earnest, we do want to ask in the context of this colloquium: what is the purpose of thinking about pedagogy in the digital age? Does pedagogy (itself) or do pedagogical goals change in this era?

As part of a teacher centric analysis, I could ask myself how will I teach what I want to teach. I could conceivably have a career teaching a language (Kannada) or Humanities or Social Sciences. Same is true of most of my colleagues, here in Chicago and elsewhere. Regardless of what we teach, our pedagogical goals and strategies are what we want to think about seriously. How should we use what is available to us (from holdings in large research libraries, audio and visual archives, learning management systems, digital archives or a combination of all these) to be effective teachers?

Once when I taught for a year in the Mysore University history department, my students read a single 2400 (yes, twenty four hundred pages, written by a human being that I have met) page text book on Indian history for seven of the ten courses they were required to do. They refused to read anything else. In fact, they read this book only for the final exams and not for any of the lectures, where the instructor was expected to lecture ‘at’ unresponsive faces staring at him for an hour each weekday. Here obviously the notion of class, curriculum and even library are very different. The history department library, for instance, would be open for a couple of hours on a random day of the week, when the in charge librarian decided to show up to sign the attendance register.

Sure, the greatest teachers in human history – the Upanisadic sages or Socrates, for instance – never needed text books or libraries and could do with a Socratic method. Their only requirement: sitting near the teacher.

Online courses and podcasting make even that requirement obsolete. But before we hail the podcasters and offer them contracts to be the Upanisadic sages of our ages, let us also ask ourselves: how vastly different is our context and the purpose of education? This question makes me consider ‘who I teach’, in addition to how and what I teach. What are the expectations of a generation that has grown up on cell phones, PDA, Wireless, laptop and chat? How could our modes (old or new) be made more interesting, effective ways to open up intellectual inquiries?

We hope to spend the quarter assessing our learning, in the hope that it might prepare us to be better teachers.

I still need to make a couple of changes to the sidebar, especially to list recent posts and comments. While I am at it, I also need to add to the Blogroll and to complete the new look, add a favicon. There seem to be nice plugins to make the writing process much more efficient. WordPress 2.0 is fabulous already, even without these plugins, and makes it easy to insert images, tables and anything else that catches our fancy. Anyway, I will probably need a couple of days to get all this organized.

I already like the new look and feel of the Land of Lime. Hope you also like the new theme and please do make suggestions if you would like me to add something.

A big thank you to Scott.