Topic Description and Relevance

South Asia Digital Humanities (SA-DH) has reached a generative yet fragmented moment. Across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the broader South Asian diaspora, scholars are developing digital corpora, multilingual NLP tools, spatial data systems, digital archives, and public-facing platforms. Yet these efforts often exist in disciplinary and institutional silos—split between area-studies units, DH centers in the Global North, library digitization teams, computational linguistics labs, and small humanities research collectives. At the same time, DH infrastructures, institutional recognition, funding, and documentation vary widely across the region; in many places, DH-aligned work exists under different labels (archives, linguistics, NGO-led digitization, public humanities) or remains under-recognized. Acknowledging this unevenness enables the mini conference to set realistic expectations for participation while positioning the gathering as a space for listening, mapping, and understanding divergent conditions alongside mature projects.

This mini-conference argues that now is the critical moment to articulate a shared SA-DH framework grounded in intersections between historical research, linguistics, and digital methods, and in postcolonial modes of inquiry. Because the event will take place outside South Asia, it can function as a provisional, mediating venue for dialogue across contexts where political, logistical, or mobility constraints complicate regional collaboration, making visible the asymmetries that shape cross-border DH work.

The current state of Asian DH—particularly East and South Asian DH—highlights key themes relevant to SA-DH:

Language and script diversity: South Asia’s linguistic ecology poses methodological challenges: multi-script OCR, tokenization, and normalization across Devanagari, Perso-Arabic scripts, Tamil, Kannada, Sinhala, and others; multiple transliteration regimes; and textual hybridity across historical periods. Scholars such as Horváth (2021) and Dombrowski (2019) emphasize transparent workflows for non-Latin text preparation, while NLP approaches (Jiménez-Badillo et al. 2020) show promise for complex multilingual corpora.

Spatial humanities and historical reconstruction: From GIS-based temple networks and trade routes to colonial urban mapping, spatial humanities are expanding in South Asia, yet rarely in sustained conversation with linguistics-based DH.

Postcolonial and decolonial historical knowledge production: DH in the region operates under asymmetrical digitization infrastructures shaped by colonial collections and uneven data access. South Asian DH scholarship (Risam 2018; South Asian Review’s 2022 DH issue) urges re-centering local knowledge, archival politics, methodological ethics, and attention to under-documented or emergent DH practices.

Public-facing DH as community resource: Projects like Connecting Threads (Murali et al.) demonstrate the potential for transnational, community-engaged, and multilingual public humanities.

In alignment with global DH trends, this mini-conference contributes to broader SA-DH community-building efforts while framing “community” as an open-ended, evolving network rather than a predetermined structure. Participants working on corpora, historical GIS, critical archival work, and multilingual NLP will articulate convergences, divergences, constraints, and areas where collaboration may or may not yet be viable. The event will:

• Convene historians, digital humanists, computational linguists, archivists, and technologists from South Asia, the diaspora, and global DH networks.
  
• Surface best practices for corpora creation, digitization ethics, multi-script NLP, metadata and ontologies, spatial-temporal mapping, digital storytelling, and decolonial DH practice.
  
• Draft infrastructural templates—model data schemas, collaborative vocabularies, corpus-preparation protocols, and potential repository partnerships—without presuming uniform applicability.
  
• Produce a public, open-access white paper outlining needs, challenges, methods, ethical priorities, divergences, and unresolved questions for South Asia DH.
  

Intended Format of the Mini-Conference

This day-long mini-conference will function as a community-building and methods forum for scholars working at the intersection of South Asian history or historical linguistics, and digital humanities. The format is modular, designed to support both presentation and collaborative production:

• Opening Plenary Roundtable (1 hour+ Q&A?): “State of South Asia DH: Historical, Linguistic, and Infrastructural Perspectives.”
  
• Lightning Project Showcase (1.5 hours): 5–7-minute presentations highlighting emerging and mature South Asia DH projects by participants that center historical texts, multilingual corpora, GIS, archival recovery, and public-facing work.
  
• Collaborative Working Sessions (2 hours):
  
  • Track A: Historical DH & Spatial/Temporal Methods
    
  • Track B: Handwritten Text Recognition, NLP, and Multi-script Corpora using AI
    
    Participants co-develop problem statements, discuss modes of production of datasets, visualizations, and infrastructural needs. Participants co-develop problem statements, discuss modes of production of datasets, visualizations, and infrastructural needs.
    
• Design Sprint: South Asia DH Community-building (1.5 hours): A facilitated session to design a framework for a sustained South Asia DH consortium/hub, focusing on community organizations, resource sharing, training pipelines, and collaboration between participants/institutions.
  
• Closing Synthesis + Manifesto Drafting (1 hour): Creation of a public document outlining priorities, ethics, and next steps for the field.
  

This format is neither a workshop nor a series of traditional panels; instead, it is meant to seed a long-term, transnational South Asia DH network capable of supporting researchers working on multilingual data, complex histories, and thinking through issues of equity in global research infrastructures