The Media Lab: News & Events

This workshop was a platform where collectors, archivists/researchers and granting agency members came together and tried to bridge the gap that exists between collectors on one hand and granters & archivists on the other. Abhijit Bhattacharya, Head Archivist, Centre for the Studies of Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), started the day with a presentation on the importance of creating digital archives to preserve data and also harped on the disadvantages of a digital archive. The next talk was on ‘Textual scholarship and principles of documentation’ by Professor Swapan Chakravorty, Department of English, Jadavpur University. This was followed by a presentation about the web-based platform called DSpace, which helps create digital archives. This was presented by Rajesh Das, Archivist (Documents and Collections) of The Media Lab. Hardikbrata Biswas, a researcher with the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, talked about the obstacles he faced while acquiring data, primarily photographs, from the collectors. Hardik is an IFA grantee, who is researching on urban middle-class women of West Bengal in photographs. Post lunch, Shubranil Sarkar, research fellow at the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR), Jadavpur University, made a presentation of the archival work on Hindusthani Classical Music that has been going on at the School for the past few years. This was followed by a talk on Digital Humanities by Anindya Sengupta, Lecturer at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, and Moinak Biswas, Coordinator of the Lab. They explained the concept of Digital Humanities through three examples of how certain communities were building up archives through open platforms.