Roopika Risam – författare

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise.

Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques.

South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a ''homelanding'' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production.

This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise.

Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques.

South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a ''homelanding'' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production.

This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

The next chapter of human history should not be written by algorithms, it should be written by us. It is only by fully understanding how data has shaped our past that we can decide what role it plays in our future.'The new history of mankind demanded by our times... This book asks what we will do about data now that we have no choice but to do something' Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now 'Breathtaking in its scope and enormously fulfilling in its depth, this book is profoundly fascinating' Lewis Dartnell, author of Being HumanWe live in an era when trading our information for access can feel harmless or inevitable - yet from targeted advertising to mass surveillance, data shapes the course of our lives. How did it gain the power it now holds over us?Long before writing existed, at the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia, rulers pressed marks into clay to keep track of land, people and grain. To rule, they had to keep count. It is no accident, then, that the first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant. As ships and navigation expanded our horizons, a new age of European empires took control of more than 80 per cent of the world's surface, using colonial censuses, maps and ledgers to decide who belonged, who owed, and who could be sacrificed. Today, a handful of private brokers increasingly define what we see and what is real.Taking readers from ancient cave markings and knotted strings to the algorithmic state, Dartmouth professor Roopika Risam reveals how data has always been the seed of power: a technology of control that has shaped civilizations and upheld empires. Provocative, humane and sweeping in scope, Data Empire challenges us to decide whether we will allow a new set of data empires to hardwire inequality into the next century, or fight for systems that work for the benefit of all.This groundbreaking 11,000 year history argues that empire was never just about weapons or ships - it was built on collecting information on us, to rule us. Perfect for readers of Nexus and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.'Essential reading for understanding the opportunities and dangers of the technological revolution now transforming our world' Jonathan Kennedy, author of Pathogenesis'This brilliant, readable book offers a striking new historical perspective' Corinne Fowler, author of Our Island Stories