Digital Innovation in Water Scarcity in Coimbatore, India

该项目旨在对印度南部哥印拜陀持续恶化的水危机进行快速、反射性的干预。该项目将建立数字人文学科的巨大潜力，以生成强大而可信的数据集，并设计有意义的、共鸣的可视化，从而重新构建和颠覆水资源过度开发和枯竭的循环。该地区水资源的枯竭有大量文献记载：河流流域正在萎缩，干旱加剧，地下水位下降，随着支流含水层和河流的消失，河流正在从多年生变为季风性。然而，缺乏可靠的定量数据，将水与面临严重和紧迫资源危机的地方联系起来。泛地区或国家的汇总数据在危机话语中占主导地位，虽然重要，但这些数据与当地用水的日常模式几乎没有关系。迫切需要挑战殖民时期和1947年后制图、治理和水资源开发的做法所造成的地方与信息之间、水与土地之间的脱节。该项目将利用空间人文学科的概念和方法——地理参照、实体识别和语料库语言学方法——来恢复景观、人与水之间有意义的联系。文本挖掘和地理标记可以创建一个与哥印拜陀地区水资源相关的独特数据库。数字人文方法具有独特的能力，能够从广泛的材料（例如，收入统计、制图、水文干预、诗歌、地质、农业历史、艺术、广告、工业征用、医学地形和当代口头证词）中以极快的速度绘制数据，以便创建可以从根本上重新构建水危机的数据集，并创建创新的综合保护策略。该项目将收集有关哥印拜陀水体的一系列定性和定量数据：体积、表面积、在城市、半城市和农村的分布、干水和常年水资源（运河、水箱、湖泊和河流）的量化和命名。这些数据将从来自世界各地的数字化材料中收集，并返回哥印拜陀。该项目的合作伙伴包括记者、活动家和学者。他们的参与使项目的制定、发展和产出都能融入该地区正在进行的保护战略和辩论中（见影响之路）。第三部门合作伙伴包括五个在哥印拜陀从事维权工作的当地非政府组织：Kovai Kolangal Paathukaappu Amaippu、Sirithuli、Siruvani Vizhudhugal、Osai和Kurichi Kulam。这些非政府组织承担了一系列的信息、参与和保护工作，并明确表示有兴趣在拟议的项目上合作。其他与会者包括研究印度南部水资源历史和保护的学者、作家和学者。数字数据只有在获得社区、活动人士、地方、区域和国家水资源管辖官员等利益相关者的信任和共鸣的情况下，才能为创建新的、强有力的水资源保护实践提供基础和工具。数位媒体和平台将利用创造性的视觉化，包括动画、想像力的反地图和叙述，让水回归哥印拜陀地区，这些都是基于对哥印拜陀地区的历史、文学、语言和文化的理解。这些数据可视化将由本地协作和互动来构建和确定。项目合作将确保项目成果是有意义的资源和干预措施，可用于重新规划和重新定位哥印拜陀的水资源保护、管理和获取斗争。

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.