8 - 10 June 2022 | 10:00 - 6:00 PM (Indian Standard Time) Archivists | Designers | Lawyers | Activists | Developers | Curators | Academics | Community Organisers | Artists | Writers | Students.... coming together for an online showcase of archives on Jun 9 and intensive in-person workshops between Jun 8-10 2022. Queries? Email: hello at milli dot link Jun 9 2022 | 17:30 - 19:30 IST | International Archives Day 2022 Archives Showcase! Dozen Archives Across India and the world, #ArchivesAreYou

An Archives Flyover! Dozen Archives Across India, Present and Future Recording Summary Chapters Q&A session Resources Archiving Protests Recording Summary

Milli Archives Discussions: Form & content, preservation and access, privacy, pedagogy, standards & more! The Living document (https://j.mp/millisessions-iaw2020) of the event will help you get a gist of discussions, links to reading materials mentioned during the session. This is the shortlink for the youtube playlist of all video recordings: https://j.mp/IAW2020-Milli-YouTube About this event Archivists/curators/historians/scientists/artists/writers coming together for a set of informal online events.

Archives and the Digital Humanities Recording {% youtube d2Y-L6Ai1rA?start=1 %} Summary Moderator Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy of IIT-Jodhpur opened panel discussion on questions pertaining to archive's pedagogical properties, ethological roots, and the dynamics between archivist and digital humanist. The pedagogues came from different professional backgrounds, adding variety to the discussion. Rishi Sighal and Amarnath Praful from NID use dissertations as pedagogical tool in the Photography Design Programme. Students there also involve in digitizing institute's collection to find connection between vernacular photography and India's colonial past. Two teachers from IIT-Jodhpur brought their experiences to the table from film studies and literary perspectives respectively. Issues like catering to the needs of heterogeneous classrooms, mutability of archives, politics of access and navigation, the problematic relationship between cinema, nation state, and the digital emerged through Dr. Parichay Patra's talk. Dr. Natasha Thoudam pondered over questions of insider-outsider dynamics, politics of segregation and stereotyping the NE, and how the digital space can negotiate these problem spaces. Ishita Shah, an independent researcher & practitioner, narrated some of her pedagogical explorations across places, people, and practices, citing examples of Hampi, Kishkinda Trust project etc. as efforts at collaborative learning practices,including the ongoing COVID Care archives. Dr. Ghosh, IIT-Delhi, explained the transition from oral to manuscript to documentary to digital cultures, and how performative art has the power to negotiate the silence, or ephemerality of the documentary left, possibly perpetuated by the digital archives. Last speaker Dr. Mukherjee of CS3-Kolkata, commented on the disruptive nature of Postcolonial DH, citing his Scottish Cemetery project which helped unearth oral/ micro- histories otherwise undocumented.

Archives and the City Recording {% youtube jY_si8DUvuE?start=1 %} Summary Under the theme of ‘Explore’, the session began around the centrality of space in archives. Swati, Tripti, and Friederike from the Missing Basti Project spoke about building a counter map of Delhi that showed its negative image of evictions and resettlement of working-class people. The archive was a living repository of peoples’ lives through video interviews. We were told how the archive was used as an advocacy tool, as well as for informing urban policy makers. Prof. Ayonna from University College of London deliberated on the contentions between physical and digital archives of cities. Giving Shimla’s example, she spoke about how, for officials who take decisions on demolishing neighbourhoods, what mattered was how the hill station appeared on the web (to the average tourist), rather than detailed colonial documents in the public records room. She cautioned, however, how subaltern histories did not find easy access to either physical or digital/web archives. Dr. Malini talked about her experiences of taking oral interviews of veteran planners of Delhi and other metropolitan cities, as well as block-level planners from Kerala and Punjab. Her motivation was to see if planning style was monolithic across India, the nature of data gaps on which planning is done, and the need for urban planners to synthesise their work with indigenous practises of planning.

Interoperability and Standards Across Archives Recording {% youtube rNUbcno_fzQ?start=2 %} Summary This panel focused on interoperability and connections between various custodians of archival objects. Madhan Muthu of APU detailed the evolution of cataloguing standards in the field of library science and emphasized the need for interoperable digital archives to improve discovery of archival objects. If different archives use these standards and platforms (such as EAD<, ISAD(G), AToM0, and you expose metadata, you can search them all using one interface. Online Archive of California (OAC) is an example. So much material is simply inaccessible in India because no such service or platform has been made. Madhura Wairkar spoke about deciphering museum objects through the case of MAP, a new museum in Bengaluru. Its collection is the core of the museum and is divided into 6 categories: Photographs, Pre-Modern, Modern & Contemporary, Living Tradition, Textiles, Crafts & Designs, Popular Culture. MAP has a diverse and dynamic collection where one has to rethink categorisation of object - do you base it on medium, form, or something else? In the case of Gond or Madhubani art from the post 1947 period - do you classify it as folk & tribal or contemporary? Are folk & tribal the right terminology? What the team at MAP realised is that they need to acknowledge communities, ensure they get the right respect, and decided to rename them Living Traditions. Indira Chowdhury spoke from her experience of setting up several archives. While we want to have a universal system it is not always possible for things to be in neat categories. At the TIFR Archive, they paid attention to provenance and original order. What we find in official institutional archives is a small subset of what the archive is. How do we categorise these when you have different kinds of material? At TIFR they had equipment as well as letters and docs and papers. Older methods of cataloguing are of great interest to historians, one size fits all in categorization will not work for us. Especially in the living traditions, we have to think up our own categories, and match the archive through some system of cross referencing rather than standardisation.

Reclaiming the Archives Recording {% youtube NL06DMUt7Z4?start=17 %} Summary In this session, all the four speakers stressed the need for indigenous communities, or adivasis, to archive and share their own stories, their own pasts, rather than have people from outside the communities do it for them. That is what would prevent indigenous communities from being reduced to data, meant only for extraction and exploitation by individuals and institutions unilaterally assuming the authority to speak for them. Adivasi Lives Matters did this by leveraging the potential of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for which they created content through audio, video, and text. They have democratised content creation for their platform further by instituting training programmes, where members of their own community and other indigenous communities receive training in the method and the technology required to create compelling content. In this manner, they have ensured that adivasi youth are empowered to document their own communities and their own cultures as well as highlight the archiving practices that have existed in their communities for centuries. The Living Waters Museum has similarly empowered indigenous girls from the North-East through their programme to learn the art of storytelling once prevalent in their communities and engage in creative forms of expression of their own through them. That is because, in these communities, stories are sacred, containing the roots of their identity and their deep connection with the nature around them. Their initiative seeks to introduce these stories and storytelling itself to children in the North-East at an young age, so that the children grow up with a sense of pride in their identity and their tradition. Chapters

7 - 13 June 2021 | 3:00 - 8:00 PM (Indian Standard Time) 25+ Sessions|80+ Voices|5+ Countries Archivists | Designers | Lawyers | Activists | Developers | Curators | Academics | Community Organisers | Artists | Writers | Students.... coming together for a set of informal online events Zoom Registration Link : http://bit.ly/Milli-IAW2021 Session recordings, notes and resources : Session recordings, notes and resources

Digital Deccan Recording {% youtube T4dVjhCBNnE %} Summary This panel addressed the question of how we narrate the archive across language, media and form by taking up the concept of the Deccan and its shifting boundaries, what the region means to us and how it has been renarrated across history. Kurush Dalal approached the idea of the Deccan as an archaeologist, noting its peculiar geography and importance. Some of the earliest evidence for human habitation in peninsular India is found there. It is a region that has continuously engaged with the rest of the world in so many ways. When you try to find evidence for the Deccan in the archaeological/ancient period, there are very few places you can go and put your finger on. Archives that talk about the hoary past have been very few and far between. As a culinary anthropologist, Kurush Dalal also looks at archiving the Deccan through the food that has come to it and the food that it has sent out. He emphasized the need for platforms that can disseminate historical knowledge in a simple, but well researched manner, especially since history is so open to misuse in today’s time. He is involved with two such platforms: Live History India and India Study Center Trust (instucen.org). Rochelle Pinto approached the Deccan as a counterpoint to her area of research – the Konkan coast and Goa. You can't tell a monolingual narrative of the Konkan. Her interest is in dismantling modern statist histories which bear an expectation of a normative structure for literary history. For Konkan if you have a normative literary history in mind, what you end up narrating is a lack. In the Deccan again there is no singular language master narrative. It demonstrates that you can tell a history through the conjunctions of events and persons rather than a singular linear narrative. Language use and literary history in the Deccan is not unmarked by power but we see forms of power that are differential and very varied, and the Deccan offers that as a concrete point. Both the Deccan and the Konkan are regions where in anthropological terms you have the suppression of race, they could offer alternative maps if we begin from a premise of a multiracial region - how caste and religion subsume and suppress and conceal and hierarchise racial difference. Ashutosh Potdar spoke of the theatrical archive and its role in his research and artistic practise. The performance and the archive are seen as two poles – archive is or was there, the performance is now, in the present moment. Researchers don't have access to the particular moment of performance, they rely on documents produced before or after the performance. The moment a performance passes, it becomes an archive. This is an ongoing, circulatory play between the new, the then, and the now. Archives and performance are intrinsically linked. The discussion revolved around the difference between animating the landscape of the ancient past and narrating the landscape, on the need for linguistic collaboration in comparative research and on archival spaces as battlegrounds for nationalism and identity.

Design for Access Recording {% youtube SVjKQXruuLE?start=24 %} Summary The first session of the Milli Archive's Day 3 started with a discussion around enabling Access to Archives. Dr. Claire Wintle, from University of Brighton opened the session, along with the host Farah Yameen. The panelists included Sue Breakall, Suchitra Chatterjee, Jen Grasso and Monna Matharu. All the panelists are/were members of University of Brighton and had worked with Dr. Wintle. Their intention was to talk about their experiences as researchers and archivists with the limitation they faced with access to different archives and the innovative measures they adopted to approach archives. Sue Breakall started the conversation by showcasing the different rules directing different archives. As she noted a University archive is designed for students while a Business Archive is simply to store data and less open for access. In contrast, museum archives such as Tate often promote open access through exhibitions. In times of Covid, exhibitions presented on social media platforms have also helped open access. Through her experience as a university archivist she noted that every archivist carries the twin responsibility of preserving and providing access to archives. Certainly, as Derrida had alluded, power dynamics played a role in giving access. Her thoughts were mirrored by Jen Grasso who recalled her experience with Photowalks, a company that wished to catalogue its photographs and business records. However, she lamented that the archive was relegated to the storage unit and interested parties like artists could not access it. Monna Matharu talked about a similar situation where archives detailing immigrant's experience stored in Tower Hamilton had to be redacted, due to data protection laws. Suchi Chatterjee celebrated the digitization of archives which eliminates racism and disability based limitations. Digitization has accelerated due to Covid and promoted wider access to many archives.

Literature and Archives : Resource Building Campaign Summary Our goal was to create a crowdsourced list of literary works that engage with archives, in order to create an online resource that would remain on the Milli website. The intention was to encourage people – not necessarily from archiving or allied backgrounds – to engage with us, and to think about the many ways in which archiving is a part of our lives (even if it doesn't involve a formal archive with a professional archivist). By talking about fiction and poetry in multiple languages, with a focus on South Asian works, we were hoping to start a fun conversation that would help us all expand the way we see archives and archiving. We kept our eyes peeled for work that reimagined ways of archiving, articulated the joys of discovery in the archive, questioned the process of archiving or addressed current challenges. We weren't looking for just recommendations of titles – we wanted reflective answers. We asked people to tell us how these works were connected to archives, and what thoughts or questions about archives they evoked in them. We also weren’t looking for recommendations of works that were based on research in the archives – our focus was on works that deal directly with aspects of archiving in their very stories.

We’re creating a crowdsourced list of fiction and poetry that features archives, or helps us think about, imagine or question archives and archiving. What are your favourite works that fit this bill? What thoughts or questions about archives do they dig up for you? Help us build this resource by sending us your recommendations here . Gadhi (2010) by Prashant Bagad Language: Marathi Form: Short story Connection to archives: This is a tragic-comic take on how an assistant librarian, fiercely possessive of books, deploys hilarious strategies to protect the books from readers, defeating the whole purpose behind setting up a library. Frustrated, the protagonist imagines a story within this story where he is the supreme ruler of the library who ends up executing his own younger self. Although this work features a library, it touches upon issues critical to archiving as well, raising questions about accessibility and poking fun at the possessiveness of gatekeepers.

The Milli Consortium is a not-for-profit network of individuals and communities interested in the nurturing of archives. Milli helps individuals and institutions to build and sustain archives. It facilitates discussions among the community around issues of diversity, archival standards, conservation, physical and digital access, pedagogy, privacy and the development of inclusive description standards. More here: https://www.milli.link/about/. Ours is a small team of archivists, designers, developers, and semantic web researchers. We are currently working on rolling out a prototype of our archival discovery-interpretation-narration platform. niosX is an adaptable backend (GNU GPL License), capable of serving any application that manages highly connected data, modelled using W3C Annotation Data Model. We overlay a semantic layer of NiosxConcepts over the annotation data model to capture the structure of an application in any given context. Checkout wiki for more on architecture, design and specification https://notabug.org/prasoon/niosx/wiki We are looking for FOSS volunteers to help us with our code, documentation, testing and community engagement. Come and know more about our community, by attending the International Archives Week 2021 organized by Milli Consortium starting 7th June till 13th June, 2021. Archivists, Designers, Lawyers, Activists, Developers, Curators, Academics, Community Organisers, Artists, Writers, Students…. coming together for a set of informal online events. All sessions are free and open to the public. Checkout the schedule and details on sessions at https://www.milli.link/iaw2021/