Urban Heritage and the Digital Humanities in India

“印度的城市遗产和数字人文”研究网络将开发数字人文技术在动态城市环境中记录、宣传和保护遗产方面的巨大潜力。该网络将由三个相互关联的活动组成，将印度和英国的历史学家、遗产专业人士、地理学家、建筑师、计算机科学家、业余活动家和公众聚集在一起。该网络将涉及德里物质和非物质遗产的保护。德里异常丰富和复杂的遗产由一系列国家和私人托管，往往很复杂。这座城市也是一个快速变化的城市环境，在这种环境中，正式和非正式的物理变化以及随之而来的地方社会和经济变化使遗产承受着持续的压力。该项目将对过去的物质结构采取综合方法，并将包括受立法保护的古迹和嵌入城市生活环境中的支离破碎的物质遗迹。该网络将特别关注一系列非物质遗产-记忆、口头知识和歌曲-它们丰富和活跃了这座城市的过去。该项目的一个主要目标将是促进那些生活在物质历史碎片周围的人对城市遗产的认识、参与和对话。研究网络的项目伙伴是印度国家艺术和文化遗产信托基金德里分会、设在德里安贝德卡大学的社区知识中心和1947年的分区档案项目。这些项目合作伙伴对这座城市的过去和现在拥有丰富的知识，并将提供物质和非物质遗产文献和保护方面的经验和专业知识。研究网络将促进数字技术的潜力，以加强和整合文献、保护和参与工作。讲习班将审议利用数字技术和媒体保护、可持续性、保管和获取与物质和非物质遗产有关的权利的潜力和挑战。该网络旨在建设数字人文技术方面的能力。地理信息系统绘图、数字转换、统计和语料库语言分析方面的实用动手软件培训将成为2017年9月和2019年8月在德里举行的两个讲习班的核心组成部分。该项目的一个关键成果是创建了一个原型智能手机应用程序-SHARC Dilli-它将创建城市遗产的互动地图。地理地图应用程序将由兰开斯特大学计算和通信学院开发的地理地图软件配置，并将由研究网络在德里和兰开斯特的研讨会活动中合作开发。地理地图在德里具有特别的潜力，在快速变化的城市环境中，这座城市的遗产层次分明，往往被掩盖起来。这款应用程序将针对城市中的特定地点绘制文本、视觉和听觉信息，以提供遗产地点的故事，并将空间上分散在城市各地的纪念碑、记忆和遗迹联系起来。地理空间地图捕捉了人们对城市空间及其过去的日常理解的复杂性，并可以独特地包含表征城市历史动态丰富性的多重含义。这款应用程序将用印地语和英语设计，以提高人们的意识，促进讨论，进而保护全市的一系列物质和非物质遗产。作为一个原型，这款应用程序将提供定位的文本、视觉和听觉信息，内容是1947年英国和君主印度分治期间和之后难民占领该市各种遗产建筑的情况。

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.