Overview
DHARTI is a collective platform for digital humanities in South Asia. It connects scholars, students, technologists, and cultural-heritage practitioners who work with data, archives, and computation. The aim is to foster rigorous research, thoughtful pedagogy, and public-facing work, while building shared infrastructures that are multilingual, ethical, and sustainable.
Aims and Objectives
- Grow a supportive community that shares methods, tools, and teaching materials.
- Enable collaborative research through working groups and project partnerships.
- Develop open resources: datasets, code, documentation, and simple how-to guides.
- Support training through short courses, winter schools, and hands-on workshops.
- Encourage public engagement: talks, exhibitions, and accessible writing.
- Advocate good practice: credit and citation norms, data ethics, accessibility, and long-term preservation.
Spheres of Work
Research and Projects
Collaborative projects that use text analysis, geospatial methods, network analysis, image and AV study, and curation. Priority on South Asian languages and collections.
Teaching and Training
Short courses, “DHARTI Speaks” conversations, learning labs, and a weeklong winter school that emphasises practical skills and critical reflection.
Infrastructure and Resources
Shared toolkits, starter datasets, sample syllabi, and documentation that help people begin and help institutions plan.
Public Programmes
Events that connect universities, libraries, museums, and independent initiatives. Recordings and summaries are archived for reuse.
Policy and Advocacy
Guidance for institutions on evaluation, openness, multilingual access, and ethical use of AI in research and teaching.
Who Is It For
Academics, librarians and archivists, museum professionals, independent researchers, students, and developers who wish to collaborate across disciplines and institutions.
Membership and Participation
Membership is open to individuals and organisations. Members can propose events or working groups, access selected resources, and contribute to shared documentation. Clear contributor credits and authorship are maintained.
How We Work
We value openness, care, and rigour. Work is documented, credited, and reusable. Projects are designed to be lightweight to adopt, multilingual where possible, and mindful of preservation and accessibility.
Contact and Governance
DHARTI is coordinated by a small governing group with rotating working groups for specific programmes. For enquiries, partnerships, or to propose an activity, please write to the DHARTI team via the contact page.