05 / Research

The archive is also a research question.

SHABD India studies the conditions under which literature becomes discoverable, translatable, computationally legible and ethically accessible across languages.

01Linguistic inequality02Minoritarian & regional traditions03Digitisation & archival access04Translation studies05Multilingual computing06Cultural preservation07Postcolonial & decolonial DH08Accessibility09Community participation

Questions

What the infrastructure lets us ask.

01

How do literary histories change when translation pathways are designed across Indian languages rather than routed primarily through English?

02

What metadata, typography and search practices make multilingual archives genuinely usable across scripts?

03

How can digitisation preserve provenance, rights and community knowledge rather than flattening texts into interchangeable content?

Outputs & updates

Evidence as it becomes ready.

Method note · In preparation

The 22 × 22 corpus model

Selection, translation and review as a networked scholarly workflow.

Rights framework · Living draft

Version-level permissions

A practical model for text, translation, audio and metadata rights.

Infrastructure note · Prototype

The story as object

Reading UX, contextual records and transparent incompleteness.