PG Sindhi Library: Revisiting the Archive after 18 Months

Archives and archive building hold great potential within the theory and praxis of digital humanities in India. Sindhi, a minor language in India, is a non-regional language. It is unique in the sense that its geographical ‘home’ is in Sindh, Pakistan, but does not survive in official, academic, and administrative spaces. It is spoken in domestic spaces and does not have many written resources. The PG Sindhi Library is a digital archive that emerged out of addressing the need for creating access to Sindhi books published in India: these are both tangible and intangible heritage. Intangible heritage in the sense of literary heritage, and tangible heritage in the sense of products of book history and publishing history whose material being is deteriorating over time. Digitising these books and disseminating them through the website have been the objectives of the archive, which is located at the intersection of Sindhi Studies and Partition Studies. 

In a previous post about the PG Sindhi Library, I closed on a note of my vision for the archive. It involved 3 aspects:

1. Annotation: I wanted the space to be made open to the user so that they can annotate texts.
2. Transliteration: I also wanted to enhance the website’s functionalities to accommodate text transliteration so that different sub-communities can read the text: not all Sindhis understand the Perso-Arabic script. Transliteration can help the Sindhi community in India, especially the younger generations, access the texts in Devanagari, and provide the international diaspora (as well as Sindhis in South India) that do not have access to Devanagari with texts in the Roman script. 
3. Curation: I also suggested that a broader vision of curation needs to emerge from the archive so that the texts begin to make sense as individual pieces or as items within genres. 

In this post, I choose to look at what has happened, or rather not happened, on these fronts. 

Annotation

I have come across people who know of the archive, visit it, browse a book here and there, but because I don’t collect their data through login credentials, I am not sure what other actions they perform on the website other than downloading or reading books. I would like to keep it that way until I find resources to maintain the extra functionalities on the website. 

I have also realised that annotation as a functionality is very likely not to work in such a straightforward manner. Most Sindhis do not understand the script, and a majority of the books on the archive are in Perso-Arabic. Those who might be conversant with technology in ways sufficient to annotate using digital tools belong to the younger generation and do not know the script. 

I have been trying to work around this by building other projects that connect to the PG Sindhi Library in direct and indirect ways. For instance, I am building a digital repository of the metadata of Sindhi books available in Sindhi libraries in India and some online collections. This is a project funded by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore. At some point in the future, having this larger corpus might help the PG Sindhi Library. Or at least, it might help in indirect ways by making Sindhi authors and books more discoverable on search engines. That might in turn help the visibility of Sindhi literature by creating synergy among different names in Sindhi literary heritage. As of now, the PG Sindhi Library is a tiny, isolated resource. The larger network of books needs contextualisation in the digital sphere.  

I have received a research fellowship from George Mason University to research the history of Sindhi literature in India and to design further archives around it, which I have visualised as an annotated bibliography. Like the digital repository mentioned above, this is likely to create substance around these authors and books to facilitate search queries around a language and literature that is under-represented on the Internet. This is my ongoing research on the subject of history of Sindhi literature in India. 

The larger objective is to create opportunities for synergy among different resources, platforms, archives, and information because connections have to be made in which books and readers can speak to each other. Curiosity around these queries can generate possibilities of annotating texts or bytes of information through artificial intelligence or crowdsourcing, if any of these platforms reach users.

Transliteration

Like annotation, transliteration too requires resources and thereby an investment in the development of tools outside of the archive. I realised for the transliteration to be made available for any purpose, the larger community network needs to be motivated to work on large datasets so that a model can be prepared. I have tried to address this issue through research and networking.

On the one hand, I have researched the possibilities of transliteration technology and its use cases. I have written about the need for libraries to invest in this technology in order to publish texts in different scripts. I have also written about the need for this technology in the campaign around language revitalisation through literature. 

On the other hand, I have turned to the Sindhi Wikipedia network to make a case for investment in transliteration technology and its deployment on Sindhi Wikipedia. Sangam, a Perso Arabic-Indic script transliteration tool, has been identified as a possible solution. A GitHub project has been created, and further work on it can help integration on Sindhi Wikipedia. 

Curation

While the PG Sindhi Library does not have specific curation projects around genres as envisioned 18 months ago, a new archive is in the making. 

The Sindhi Halchal Archive is a digital archive that will feature advertisements published in Sindhi books and magazines available on the PG Sindhi Library. The advertisements constitute an interesting body of work as examples of advertising history in general and Sindhi business history specifically. For a community known, even stereotyped, as possessing business acumen, this archive presents the vibrant scene of the Sindhi ‘hustle’ (which is the equivalent of the Sindhi word ‘halchal’) in post-partition India. 

It is likely to go live in the next six months if things remain on track. It will then deserve an article of its own. 

Reflections in lieu of Conclusions

An archive grows in unexpected ways. More than a thousand books have been received for digitisation, which will be featured as sub-collections within the PG Sindhi Library website. I did not anticipate the advertisements would make sense as an independent archive. The PG Sindhi Library, unexpectedly, gave birth to another archive. It has helped me think of resource creation for digital humanities projects in South Asia. The digital repository and the advertisements archive inform my interest in literary historiography. In hindsight, it has been a great learning and researching experience. 

However, the PG Sindhi Library faces some tough challenges too. The issue of space constraints on the website might also involve removing the PDFs, letting them stay on the archive dot org website, and keeping the PG Sindhi Library as a list of  books that link to archive.org. Since the website is hosted on the space of the Sanchaya Foundation, they will make the final decision about optimising it. If the books move out of this archive, there won’t be any space for functionalities of annotation and transliteration. But if the projects mentioned above succeed, these will enrich digital resources for Sindhi. Ultimately, this enrichment was the larger goal for Sindhi. 

I look forward to revisiting this post in another 18 months. Fingers crossed.