Digital Innovation in Water Scarcity in Coimbatore, India

该项目旨在迅速、本能地干预印度南部哥印拜陀持续不断且日益恶化的水危机。该项目将构建数字人文学科的巨大潜力，以生成稳健和可信的数据集，并设计有意义的、有共鸣的可视化效果，以重塑和颠覆水资源过度开采和枯竭的循环。该区域水资源的枯竭有大量记载：随着支流含水层和河流的消失，河流流域正在缩小，干旱增加，地下水位下降，河流正在从常年河流转变为季风河流。然而，缺乏可信的量化数据，将水资源与面临严重而紧迫的资源危机的地区联系起来。泛区域或国家总体数据在危机讨论中占主导地位，尽管这些数据意义重大，但与当地日常用水模式关系不大。迫切需要挑战殖民时期和1947年后的制图、治理和水资源开发做法造成的地方与信息、水与土地之间的脱节。该项目将借鉴空间人文学科的概念和方法--地理参考、实体识别和语料库语言学方法--以恢复景观、人和水之间有意义的联系。文本挖掘和地理标记可以创建与哥印拜陀地区水资源有关的唯一数据库。数字人文方法独一无二地能够从广泛的材料(例如，收入统计、地图绘制、水文干预、诗歌、地质学、农业历史、艺术、广告、工业征用、医学地形图和当代口头证词)中快速提取数据，以便创建能够从根本上重塑水危机并制定创新的综合保护战略的数据集。该项目将汇集一系列与哥印拜陀水体有关的定性和定量数据：水量、表面积、城市、半城市和农村的分布、干旱和常年水资源(运河、水箱、湖泊和河流)的量化和命名。这些数据将从世界各地的数字化材料中收集，并返回哥印拜陀。项目合作伙伴包括记者、活动家和学者。他们的参与使该项目的制定、发展和成果都纳入了该地区正在进行的保护战略和辩论中(见影响之路)。第三部门的合作伙伴包括在哥印拜陀从事活动的五个当地非政府组织：Kovai Kolangal Paathukaappu Amaippu、Sirithuli、Siruvani Vzhudhuga、Osai和Kurichi Kulam。这些非政府组织开展了一系列信息、参与和保护工作，并明确表示有兴趣就拟议的项目进行合作。其他参与者包括从事南印度水资源历史和保护工作的学者、作家和学者。数字数据只有在具有公信力并引起一些利益攸关方的共鸣时，才能为创建新的、强有力的水资源保护做法提供基础和工具：社区、活动家、对水有管辖权的地方、地区和国家官员。将使用数字化媒体和平台，通过基于对哥印拜陀地区历史、文学、语言和文化理解的创造性可视化--动画、富有想象力的对应图和叙述--将水归还哥印拜陀地区。这些数据可视化将由当地的合作和互动来制定和确定。项目合作将确保该项目的成果是有意义的资源和干预措施，可用于重新确定哥印拜陀节水、管理和获取水资源的斗争的框架和方向。

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.