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、促进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、遗产专家、地理学家、建筑师、计算机科学家、业余活动人士和公众聚集在一起。该网络将致力于保护德里的物质和非物质遗产。德里极其丰富而复杂的遗产由一系列复杂的政府和私人托管。城市也是一个快速变化的城市环境，在这个环境中，自然的转变，正式的和非正式的，以及当地伴随的社会和经济变化，使遗产面临持续的压力。该项目将对过去的物理结构采取综合方法，并将包括受法律保护的纪念碑和嵌入城市生活环境中的碎片化物理遗迹。该网络将特别关注非物质遗产的范围，如记忆、口头传说和歌曲，它们丰富了城市的过去，使之充满活力。该项目的一个主要目标是促进那些生活在物质过去碎片周围的人们对城市遗产的认识、参与和对话。研究网络的项目合作伙伴是印度国家艺术和文化遗产信托基金会德里分会、位于德里安贝德卡大学的社区知识中心和1947年分区档案项目。这些项目合作伙伴对这座城市的过去和现在有着丰富的知识，并将在物质和非物质遗产的记录和保护方面提供经验和专业知识。研究网络将促进数字技术在加强和整合文献、保护和参与工作方面的潜力。讲习班将考虑数字技术和媒体在物质和非物质遗产的保护、可持续性、保管和获取权方面的潜力和挑战。该网络旨在建设数字人文技术的能力。在GIS制图、数字转换、统计和语料库语言分析方面的实用软件培训将成为2017年9月和2019年8月在德里举行的两次研讨会的核心组成部分。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交互式地图。这款测绘应用程序将由兰开斯特大学计算与通信学院开发的测绘软件配置，并将由研究网络在德里和兰开斯特的研讨会上合作开发。在德里，地理测绘具有特别的潜力，在这个城市，遗产层次丰富，在快速变化的城市环境中往往模糊不清。该应用程序将根据城市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，并将分散在城市各处的纪念碑、记忆和遗迹联系起来。地理空间制图捕捉了对城市空间及其历史的日常理解的复杂性，并且可以独特地包含具有城市历史动态丰富性特征的多种含义。该应用程序将以印地语和英语设计，以提高人们的认识，促进讨论，进而保护整个城市的一系列物质和非物质遗产。作为一个原型，该应用程序将提供关于1947年英国和印度分治期间和之后难民占领该市各种遗产建筑的定位文本，视觉和听觉信息。

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.