Reproducibility of Indian DH Projects: A case study

Abstract

Digital Humanities (DH) in India is continuously evolving to carve a space of its own through its contribution to the global DH theory, pedagogy, and tools. With the increasing number of independent, institutional, and/or collaborative DH projects in the country, it is now necessary to move beyond the primary questions of digitisation, infrastructure, and Anglican influence in Indian DH, to that of sustainability, reproducibility and explainability, of DH projects. In this paper, we critically examine and theorise the concept of reproducibility of DH projects in India. The paper achieves this by conducting a bipartite case study of selected Indian DH practitioners and their projects. First, a survey is conducted with the practitioners on questions ranging from the meaning of the concept, tools that facilitate reproducibility, and the process of documentation, to problems (like institutional or funding agency policies) that restrict the practitioners from following an open-access, reproducible workflow. Second, projects of selected DH practitioners are examined to understand the reproducibility offered by their projects. Critical analysis of the projects will foreground the constraints in�terms of reproducibility faced by Indian DH projects�such as linguistic and semantic barriers, along with providing valuable insights�on the �open, shareable, reproducible workflows� of the projects (Liu et al.,�2017). The results from the case study led to the proposal of a suitable model that can�effectively offers reproducibility of Indian DH projects.