Towards Acknowledgement and Accreditation of Digital Labour in Digital Humanities: A Case Study from Emerging Indian Digital Humanities Projects

Abstract

Digital labour (DL) in the context of digital humanities (DH) broadly comprises the process of data collection, curation, analysis, and visualization, leading to the creation of a final project. DL, when analyzed from an Indian DH perspective, consists of humanities scholars acquiring additional technical knowledge required for the research, finding suitable resources (technical and otherwise), infrastructures, and collaborating with other disciplines, etc. This DL, together with manual labour (ML) of writing about outcomes (Anderson et al. 2016), is complicated and time-consuming for DH scholars. Yet DL gets recognized due to the nascent state of DH in the subcontinent. Despite the evident DL involved in the creation and successful proliferation of DH projects, it is seldom addressed in academic scholarship (Anderson et al. 2016) and even more rarely in Indian DH academia. The lack of proper infrastructure (Anderson et al. 2016) and deficiency in technical knowledge (Thangavel and Menon 2020) have resulted in a greater DL among the DH practitioners in India when compared to their peers elsewhere, yet it has gone unrecognized, given the lack of literature and research on DL in Indian DH. The existing resistance in humanities towards accommodating the new approaches of DH (Greetham 2012) has made DL manifold. In an effort to recognize DL in DH, this paper attempts a definition of DL in DH, especially in the Indian context, followed by a broad classification of digital labourers (DLers) in DH in India. The paper utilizes a case study of selected DH projects in India to understand the gaps in recognizing the DLers and DL in Indian DH projects, especially the DL of students and researchers. The findings from the case study further lead to the proposal of a possible framework to address the emergence and evolving nature of DL in DH, as well as to compensate for the same appropriately. © 2024 The Author(s).