THE role of digital technology and social media in heritage conservation in India has evolved considerably over the last 15 years. The development in information technology not only allowed easy dissemination of information but also enabled greater participation for content creation.¹ New media and smartphones provided the heritage enthusiast an effortless platform to engage and share information about a site or place on blogs as well as on popular social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. The Delhi Declaration² in its preamble recognizes the role digital technologies and communication now play in heritage management.

In a large democracy such as India, the continual engagement of regular citizens in heritage conservation is critical to its success in the long run. Bringing diverse people and communities together is as challenging in the digital world as it is in the real world. Considerable research has already been undertaken on the application of innovative heritage media (web-based archives, 3D walk-throughs, mobile applications, 3D scanning and printing) and their application in conservation, documentation and interpretation of heritage places.

Digital technologies have been instrumental in the digital reconstruction of monuments destroyed by natural catastrophes or war in recent times. Additionally, the application of digital technologies for investigations to assist in conservation work is now an integral part of the heritage management process. Ground penetrating surveys and LIDAR techniques, among others, are increasingly being adopted for archaeological investigations to enable capturing of data and its analysis across the world.³

Similarly, in the area of engaging people in heritage conservation, digital tools and new media have had a significant impact on the ways and methods of provoking participation of regular citizens with their urban environments. The role of mobile technologies in engaging regular citizens to report data in urban governance has gained popularity in urban India. Local governments are encouraging regular citizens to aid as well as participate in governance by crowd sourcing data for traffic violations and garbage collection through the use of smartphone applications. Lewi and Smith have drawn parallels between digital tools for citizen engagement with citizen science, designed to bridge the gap between expert driven scientific knowledge and the needs and concerns of the citizens. The main types of digital tools when correlated with citizen science can be divided into three types: curated sites (contributory), content hosting sites (collaborative) as well as social networking sites (co-created).4

Most of the popular digital heritage projects in India have largely focused on digitization of heritage to create a databank or online archive. These sites, usually built by institutions disseminating information that is researched and curated by experts, fall within the category of contributory sites as defined by Lewi and Smith. Largely designed as a repository of that heritage, they can best be described as a web-museum of stories and narratives around artefacts or tangible built heritage.

 

With a greater focus on the use of digital mediums, the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, in collaboration with IIT Bombay, had launched the India Digital Heritage Project in 2011.⁵ The aim of the project was to produce 3D models of temples of the Hampi World Heritage Site as well as a mobile app to be used for interpretation. Similarly, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) has embarked on a project, ‘Parampara’,⁶ for digitizing and cataloguing old manuscripts. Recently the Government of Rajasthan, Department of Information Technology and Communication has launched a programme for the preparation of 3D models and walk-throughs of its heritage buildings and linking it to its GIS database, Rajdharaa. There are plans to develop an interactive gaming app for the interpretation of these heritage sites.⁷

Other digital initiatives such as the e-heritage project by the Digital Empowerment Foundation supported by UNESCO New Delhi and the Indian Heritage Cities Network (IHCN) has developed online travelogues for exploring places, curating walking trails or tours of Old Delhi,⁸ Pune,⁹ Shekhawati¹⁰ and Chanderi.¹¹ A similar online archive and blog of Mumbai’s tangible and intangible heritage is Bombaywalla,¹² created by historian Simrin Patel. There is an entire online community of bloggers who blog about a wide range of topics such as heritage, fashion, gastronomy, design etc. These bloggers inspire a large section of the digital community to explore their own towns and places, thereby generating dialogue with their own local heritage.

 

A strictly academic digital humanities based approach is also popular, wherein the websites are largely online archives of original research undertaken through funded or grant aided research projects. Some experiments such as Recalling Jewish Calcutta, Memories of the Jewish Community in Calcutta¹³ launched in 2014 is a collaborative project between Mayanooth University, Trinity College Dublin and School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR) at Jadavpur University. This project aims to create a digital archive of the tangible and intangible heritage of the Jews in Calcutta and has been largely successful in raising awareness about the Jewish community in the city. Another project, The Scottish Cemetery in Bengal, Digitizing the Untold Empire, launched in 2016,¹⁴ a collaboration between Presidency University and University of St Andrews Scotland, UK under the UKIREI (UK-India Research and Education Initiative) is an online archive of digitizing memories and mapping the narratives of migration and exchange.

This project is supported on the ground by a physical restoration of the Scottish cemetery by the local community with funds from a Scottish NGO, the Kolkata Scottish Cemetery Trust, making the digital repository more useful in the conservation process.

 

Another similar project, a multidisciplinary exercise combining methodologies of digital humanities and heritage conservation – Dutch in Chinsurah¹⁵ initiated by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands in India – was completed in 2014. This project was a collaboration between the Presidency University and Aishwarya Tipnis Architects and the outcome was a joint website that catalogued the research conducted through the mapping project for Chinsurah. The website also included a section on the digitization of the Dutch Cemetery in Chinsurah, where each tomb was mapped and its history recorded. Additionally, the website included an interactive time-line of the history of the town, a repository of old images and videos as well as geotagged inventories of buildings of heritage value in Chinsurah.

The project was very successful in raising awareness about this lost Dutch settlement in Bengal as the research was further translated in the form of a signage and interpretation project that allowed the dissemination of this research on the ground. The website was used as a handy tool for visitors and tourists to see the places where physical access was not possible.

As the focus shifts from narratives of authorized discourses to stories of everyday people, the role of social media as well as other digital tools gains prominence. We find that digital technologies have encouraged participation of citizens and enthusiasts towards co-creating heritage content built around nostalgia. The second category of digital tools are content hosting sites, built specifically for documentation and sharing of heritage content where the visitor is also the contributor of the bulk of the data.¹⁶ Sites such as historypin¹⁷ launched in 2010 and Sepia Town¹⁸ are content hosting sites that host rich media such as old photographs and videos contributed by users.

 

We find that these sites are usually developed on ‘open source’ Google technologies and use location as the key attribute in data collection. These projects are largely driven by nostalgia and are built as online archives of ordinary people’s memories or association with a particular event or a place. 1947 Partition Archive¹⁹ launched in 2010 is an online archive that involves collecting stories of Partition survivors in the form of interviews from across the world; a total of 3403 stories are archived with the website.

Similarly, Empire Faith and War²⁰ was an exhibition and research project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund in the UK in 2014 to mark the centenary of World War I. Citizen historians were invited to contribute and collect stories about Sikh soldiers who fought in the war, which were then crafted as narratives and plotted on an interactive soldier map of almost 8000 soldiers, each pin detailing the native place, summary of service and nature of death on the project website.

 

Another project worth mentioning is The Indian Memory Project.²¹ Launched in 2010, it is an online curated archive of photographs and narratives that aims to trace the history of the Indian subcontinent via photographs and letters found in personal archives. While most of these sites are web-based, an Australian project called Citizen Heritage²² launched in 2015 has developed PastPort,²³ a mobile web app for residents and visitors of Port Melbourne in inner Melbourne (City of Port Phillip). This app encourages the user to explore the area, discovering hidden stories, photographs and videos from the past, as well as contributions of stories, memories and photographs, adding to the rich history of Port Melbourne.

In 2015 a digital project called Heritage and People of Chandernagore²⁴ was launched by Aishwarya Tipnis Architects supported by Vielles Maison Francaise. The Heritage and People of Chandernagore project was designed as a collaborative mapping project, with the objective of not only identifying the built heritage of the town but also the intangible heritage of what the local citizens perceived as their heritage. A call for applications was placed on social media for ‘citizen historians’, enthusiasts who were interested in volunteering and collaborating for building the historical narrative of Chandernagore.

Many students from the town and nearby areas, particularly students of history from Chandernagore College, Presidency University as well as Jawaharlal Nehru University joined the project. Their task was to go from door-to-door collecting oral histories and narratives, sometimes captured on video or in the written format. The citizen historians then added their blurbs on the project blog, which was widely shared on social media, attracting many comments and suggestions. The historical overview of the town was created through an interactive timeline and map regression. The technical design of the website was such that it could gather information via crowd-sourcing where users could post content pinned on geo-locations of places connected to memories or associations.

The citizen historians also co-created a heritage trail through the town and developed their own map which was shared through the website. The objective was to create a web-home for the heritage of Chandernagore and spread awareness and engagement with the heritage of the town.

 

The third aspect of the project was that of citizen engagement through workshops and competitions. The project’s presence on social media (Facebook and Instagram) was considerably popular with people from the community and those who had migrated abroad with more than 2000 followers. This not only raised awareness about the town’s heritage, but created a platform for the community to collaborate and generate historical content supporting heritage conservation work. The project eventually received the support of the Embassy of France in India. This project was successful in finding a place for Chandernagore on the global map.

The project has inspired many other people to take up the cause. A follow-up project for the larger region is currently underway in the region through an AHRC-ICHR grant which has adopted some of the methodologies used in the project for mapping oral histories. Some of the citizen historians trained on the project now independently conduct heritage walks on a regular basis; other similar groups have also sprung up. The local media attention to the project has brought many tourists to the town as well as generated an awareness for the promotion and protection of heritage buildings in Chandernagore. The next level of digital engagement is currently underway as a campaign for crowdfunding is being developed for the restoration of a building in Chandernagore.

 

The third category of digital tools for citizen engagement according to Lewi and Smith is that of popular social networking sites. In India, there are a large number of Facebook and WhatsApp groups of heritage enthusiasts and activists that discuss local issues of heritage across the country. We have observed that there are free flowing interactions between various sections of the community about a specific issue or topic largely on social media.

Recently there has been a campaign on Facebook and Instagram against the demolition of a Grade II listed building known as the Old Keneilworth Hotel in Kolkata by a developer. The campaign gained rapid traction and resulted in the issue of the listed buildings being demolished as well as the lacunas in the prevalent system being covered by the traditional media. The social media buzz created by the activists has furthered many conversations and similar initiatives, bringing together citizens for protection of urban heritage in Kolkata, advocating adaptive reuse as a solution against demolition.²⁵ The social media platforms provide users a virtual space for dialogue with the general public as well as enhance accountability of policy makers.

Additionally, apart from social media engagement, with increased emphasis on digital empowerment as part of Digital India scheme of the Government of India, large-scale urban development programmes of the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) through its missions such as HRIDAY,²⁶ AMRUT²⁷ and SMART CITY²⁸ are also seeking the opinion of ordinary citizens in various public projects proposed by the government. We have observed that digital technologies are being employed for facilitating this process of stakeholder participation, mainly for building consensus via polls, SMS and web based formats for feedback.

 

In conclusion, there is no doubt about the significance of digital technologies in heritage management in India. However, digital technologies also need to be treated like a double-edged sword, the primary concern being the very nature of the technologies that are constantly changing and evolving. When archiving formats become obsolete, sooner rather than later, how does one ensure posterity for data generated in digital formats?

Secondly, digital platforms such as blogs and social media are easy to manipulate with few mechanisms available to authenticate the data that is being shared. It is rather easy to spread ‘fake news’ or disseminate incorrect or partially correct information, thereby raising questions of authenticity.

 

The third and the most critical challenge is that of regulation and management of the data in the absence of a regulatory framework and guidelines for these digital repositories and data. Security concerns are also being raised about the easy access to such data, or how one can ensure that these online repositories do not aid in the misuse or wilful destruction of the artefacts. This is just the beginning of protecting heritage in the digital age and there is a significant role for us to play as professionals, policy makers and custodians of this common heritage.

 

Footnotes:

1. Henriette Roued-Cunliffe and Andrea Copeland (eds.), Participatory Heritage. Facet Publishing, London, 2017. https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Participatory_Heritage.html?id=TwkUDg AAQBAJ &redir_esc=y (cited 21 March 2018).

2. http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/1767

3. www.cipa.org

4. Hannah Lewi and Wally Smith, ‘Citizen Heritage: Provoking Participation in Place Through Digital Technologies’, Historic Environment 28(2), 2016, pp. 2-6. <http://search.informit.com.au/document Summary;dn=445605951865450; res= IELAPA>ISSN: 0726-6715 (cited 21 March 2018).

5. www.nrdms.gov.in/idh

6. www.paramparaproject.org

7. www.gis.rajasthan.gov.in/

8. www.olddelhiheritage.in

9. www.puneheritage.in

10. www.shekhawati.in

11. www.chanderiheritage.in

12. www.bombaywalla.org

13. www.jewishcalcutta.in

14. www.scotscemeteryarchivekolkata.com

15. www.dutchinchinsurah.com

16. Lewi and Smith, 2016, op. cit., fn 4.

17. www.historypin.org

18. www.sepiatown.com

19. www. 1947partitionarchive.org

20. The aim of the project was to commemorate the largely forgotten contribution of the Sikhs during the war. The project included dissemination of the research via workshops, talks, a curated exhibition as well as a website, www.empirefaithwar.com

21. www.indianmemoryproject.com

22. www.citizenheritage.com

23. PastPort is a collaborative project between the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, and City of Port Phillip, funded by the Australian Research Council.

24. www.heritagechandernagore.com

25. https://www.telegraphindia.com/calcutta/heritage-downgrade-cited-in-demolition-212133

26. HRIDAY (Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojna), was launched on 21 January 2015 by the central government for 12 pilot cities with a focus on holistic development of heritage cities. The scheme aims to preserve and revitalize the soul of the heritage city to reflect its unique character by encouraging aesthetically appealing, accessible, informative and secured environment. (http://hridayindia.in/)

27. The objective of Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) is to ensure that every household has access to a tap with an assured supply of water and a sewerage connection; to increase the amenity value of cities by developing greenery and well maintained open spaces (e.g. parks); and reduce pollution by switching to public transport or constructing facilities for non-motorized transport (e.g. walking and cycling). All these outcomes are valued by citizens, particularly women, and indicators and standards have been prescribed by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) in the form of Service Level Benchmarks (SLBs). 500 cities are being covered under this mission (http://amrut.gov.in/).

28. The objective of the Smart Cities Mission is to promote cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and application of ‘smart’ solutions. The focus is on sustainable and inclusive development and the idea is to look at compact areas, create a replicable model which will act like a light house to other aspiring cities. The Smart Cities Mission of the government is a bold, new initiative. It is meant to set examples that can be replicated both within and outside the Smart City, catalyzing the creation of similar Smart Cities in various regions and parts of the country. (http://smartcities.gov.in/content/)