2. Projects

I’ve made a number of things over the years. Some of them were called archives. Some were tools. Some began as collaborations, others as questions. Many are still online. A few have disappeared. All of them, in one way or another, have developed how I think about knowledge and form.

Bichitra was the first large project I worked on. A digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, it brought together manuscripts, printed editions, editorial judgments, and machine-readable metadata. Most of the conceptual work was already solid. The difficulties were infrastructural: teaching markup to thirty project workers in a week, figuring out how to collate a five-act play against a single-act edition, working out how Bengali behaves when encoded, line by line. Bichitra remains one of the few projects I’ve been part of that feels, even now, finished.

Recalling Jewish Calcutta was not like that. It was fragile from the start and, perhaps, more intimate. Built with members of the city’s dwindling Jewish community, it held photographs, oral histories, recipes, and family trees. For a few years, the site travelled widely: Time, the BBC, CNN, and elsewhere. Then it vanished. There was a malware attack in 2017, and we recovered. Another came in 2019, and we could not. The files are safe. The site isn't. The project taught me that not everything can be recovered. I wrote about it here.

I joined Letters of 1916 after those two. Like Bichitra, it was an editorial project. But the audience was different. Bichitra was built for scholars, for close readers of text and context. Letters was built for the public. People I would never meet transcribed wartime correspondence from home, on browsers I would never test. My work focused on transcription systems, interfaces, data flows, network graphs, and topic models. The editorial labour was distributed and still remains active to this date. It was the first time I saw scholarship unfold across hundreds of hands.

Battle of Mount Street Bridge was public history, but of a different kind. Built inside a game engine, it reconstructed a single day of the Easter Rising through a virtual city and a physics engine. We consulted with military historians to test weapon accuracy, worked with mathematicians and geographers on spatial modelling, and brought in external 3D artists to build the environment. I contributed to the conceptual frame: what we were trying to show, and what we were willing to simulate. It was a really cool way to teach history to kids.

Humanities at Scale was about teaching. The project set out to create digital humanities training materials with a full teaching and research platform. Everything had to be built: the content, the delivery system, the modes of engagement and even the workflows for multilingual collaboration. The targeted teachers. People who were already doing the work but needed a framework to teach with. The project was part of DARIAH-EU and brought together digital humanities experts from across its working groups. It was collaborative in a different register. In many ways, Humanities at Scale was a response to the crisis of the humanities. Looking back, I’m not sure I ever believed in distance learning. At the time, I was committed to the work, but uncertain about the form. The effort to build, to make something teachable and shared, still matters to me.

anvay is a web-based topic modelling tool for Bengali texts. It began as a pedagogical experiment: how do we design digital tools for people who aren’t already experts? I wanted to avoid a structure that assumes a particular model of pedagogy: one designed for measurable outcomes. anvay was built with that openness in mind. The interface is exploratory. The documentation is interactive. You choose how deeply to engage, how much complexity to invite, how to read what the model returns. I am inviting you to discover what that method might be. You can use it with a single click here. Oh, and it now works for some other languages too. But, a word of warning: these newly added languages are in experimental stages. Beware.

gridOCR is a desktop tool for digitising historical printed books and periodicals, the kind with running headers, footnotes, and text that bleeds through aged paper because nobody in 1887 thought about future archivists. It runs entirely locally. You give it scans; it splits double-page spreads, detects text regions, suppresses bleed-through, runs Tesseract OCR, and lets you correct regions before exporting clean plain text. It handles multiple scripts (I actually don't remember which languages work. You just have to test it out for yourself). It came out of a recurring frustration that tools that exist for this kind of work either assume clean modern typography or require a cloud subscription, neither of which is useful if you're working with 19th-century Bengali periodicals on a slow connection. gridOCR is not a general-purpose OCR tool. It is built for a specific kind of source and a specific kind of researcher. There are probably twelve of us.

overdub is a browser-based multitrack recorder. You open it, set a tempo, pick a key, and record. I don't ask you for a subscription or an account or two-factor authentication. It started as a personal thing. I have written elsewhere about being a bedroom musician, about never quite managing to record what I hear in my head. Whether the problem was the tools or the talent is a question I prefer not to examine too closely. overdub was an attempt to build the simplest possible thing for that gap. It runs as a PWA and exports to WAV. It is not trying to compete with proper recording software. It is trying to get out of the way.

Unfinished Work

Not every project finds its form.

In 2014, I, and a few others, began work on a network for digital humanities from the region where I am from. It was called South Asia Digital Humanities. The idea was to bring together scholars, archivists, and technologists across the region. It didn’t work. I was in the right place, just not at the right time. In retrospect, it was an early formation: an ancestor to what would later become DHAI and later, DHARTI.

In 2016, I built a prototype for a mobile app to explore historical letters. I spoke about it in conferences. There was interest in it, but I never released it. Somewhere along the way, I lost interest. That happens to me often. I write half-papers. I sketch bits of code. Once the idea has been tested, once the challenge is met, I tend to turn away.

My CV of failures is long. In 2017, I returned to India with a freshly minted Ph.D., some work in the European cultural heritage sector, and with the expectation that I would seamlessly transition into this system. Over the next three four five six years (I just gave up after that), I tried to partner with cultural heritage institutions in India. I needed this for my work; dare I say, some of these institutions needed me. I followed leads and wrote proposals. Nothing came of it. It broke a part of me that I don't think I have managed to fix. I have applied and have been rejected by grant bodies five times nine times and counting!. Some of it, I’m sure, is on me. These are the scars I bear. Sometimes I think that this is what it means to be an academic. And, I am fortunate than most.