By Our Reporter
Shillong, Nov 12: A group of researchers has come together to work on a community based pilot project to develop a website which aimed to preserve the rich history of Shillong.
The ‘Digital Shillong Project’ which is taken up under the ‘Sdad’ initiative is an ongoing collaboration of scholars from the University of Melbourne, scholars and practitioners in Meghalaya and elsewhere to share research data and build a repository of archives, stories and images exploring the history and heritage of the Khasi Hills.
Fulled by the Unnati Research Collaboration Grant from the Australia India Institute and supported by the Australian Government Department of Education, Digital Shillong project unfolds as a collaborative venture between researchers in Shillong and Australia.
Partners include the University of Melbourne, INTACH Meghalaya, and The Northeast India AV Archive.
The interdisciplinary team, comprising historians, artists, archivists, urban heritage professionals, and data scientists, shares a collective passion for exploring how communities narrate, preserve, and commemorate their histories.
The project envisions an online urban encyclopedia featuring a map of Shillong, curated collections of stories and memories contributing to the collaborative digital heritage database, emphasizing the significance of impressions and every nuanced detail of the city.
Using innovative digital humanities tools, ‘Digital Shillong’ will develop an interactive online gateway to the history of Shillong, a publicly accessible website will integrate
historical maps, a selection of geo and temporally located cultural heritage sites, with annotated cultural summaries, links to datasets, historical and contemporary images, and the capacity for crowd sourced data.
It aimed to expand the potential of digital platforms to inform and impact in a real way our understandings of sustainable tourism, community, heritage, urban planning and place making.
The key figures within the project team include NEHU faculty, Professor Desmond Kharmawphlang, Meghalaya Chapter of INTACH convener, Dr Madeline Tham, Nathaniel Majaw from Northeast India Audio-Visual Archive, Prof J May, Dr Mitchell Harrop, Dr Henry Reese (all from the University of Melbourne), and Tarun Bhartiya.
“We are working on a pilot project to develop a website called Digital Shillong. We want to encourage people to share and contribute stories about favorite places inside of Shillong through this project,” Prof May who is spearheading the project said.
Meanwhile, Prof Kharmawphlang said that the idea germinated in Melbourne in 2018 when he was visiting fellow faculty at the University of Melbourne.
“During my stay there, we had a broad discussion how things could be digitize and we hit up upon this name “Sdad” which is a Khasi word for confluence junction or confluence and connotes the cultural value when different people come together in place to share stories about the past that inform the present and shape the future,” he said.
He said that people can contribute to the system which they are developing if they have anecdote, small story or even photographs.
“We are fine tuning the system and we are hoping to get a positive response to this small initiative,” Prof Kharmawphlang said.
The NEHU faculty said that the people who are involve in the project shared common interest in the way that communities narrate, preserve and remember their histories.