"Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution." ~wikipedia
SOCHARA works towards a paradigm shift that involves looking at health through its psychosocial, cultural, economic, political, and ecological dimensions, using technology for education and social processes, enabling, empowering, and building autonomy in communities, with research on socio-epidemiology, social determinants, health systems, and social policy.
This body of work that transcends traditional boundaries of disciplines when put under the lens of DH is what comes under Digital Humanities @ SOCHARA. For example:
A more detailed task list can be read below.
Health for All in the Internet Age - a theory of change.
You are welcome to volunteer towards this effort where we're chipping away every day. We can structure your relationship with SOCHARA in various forms (including internships and fellowships). Please contact [email protected]. You can also use call/message/whatsapp/telegram/signal ASD on 8123148720. You could also directly join the GLAMWW workgroup on whatsapp - please introduce yourself.
There are various groups which are potential users/consumers of the digitized content:
We need to:
For example,
The SOCHARA archives is getting digitized and uploaded online at:
The task is to go through these and add relevant metadata and curate these resources into accessible wiki pages on wiki.sochara.org
Use the various content we're making available in digital form to train/fine-tune a language model that can give intelligent answers in the topic of community health.
What does cleaning mean?
This can only be done offline at the Koramangala office (location: osm, google)
What needs to be done:
We want to do this towards enabling the Fifth People's Health Assembly in making an archive.
mfc has a very active email group which was initially on yahoo groups (actually it was on VSNL or something before that, but don't even ask me that), and then on google groups. We have an mbox format backup of the yahoo groups. How to get this online with sufficient safeguards of privacy (this is a closed group and we wouldn't want to make it public without everyone's consent) is the task.
This will require programming skills as I am not sure if there's any readmyade software that does this kind of "born digital" content preservation for mailing list archives.
There are a large number of individuals in our circle who have unique stories that need to be captured.
You need to be:
We have a collection of content related to disaster relief and other responses (Bhopal, Andhra cyclone, Tsunami, and so many other disasters). Someone needs to go through and curate a proper collection.
Priyanka Kalliath is doing this at the moment.
We have a collection of content related to medical pluralism. Someone needs to go through and curate a proper collection.
There are several people who have the inclination to do some of these tasks, but need regular follow-up and reminders (management). If you can take this up, that's also great help.