This is a guest post by Saniya Irfan.
Studies in Digital Humanities (DH) constantly illustrate that the discipline cannot be confined to computation, coding, or technical infrastructure alone. From this perspective, DH commences not with code but with voice: through the processes of listening, recording, and preserving delicate histories that may otherwise vanish. This extensive understanding of DH is especially productive for South Asian and Indian contexts. Cultural knowledge has traditionally been transmitted through oral tradition, performance, lamentation, storytelling, and memory – modes that challenge simple textual representation and algorithmic abstraction. In this context, computation serves as a methodological enhancement of humanities enquiries rather than a substitute. DH thus stays grounded in interpretation, critique, and the construction of meaning, even when involved in algorithmic or data-driven methodologies.
The digital realm does not process experience; it maintains its delicacy. Expressions are deemed “digital” when they are recorded or archived, not due to algorithmic processing, but because they are captured, mediated, and kept inside digital infrastructures. A significant outcome of this transition is the acknowledgement of ‘born-digital’ cultural expression as a valid subject of humanities research. For example, once an oral history (OH) testimony is recorded in a digital format, it transforms from ordinary documentation into a born-digital expression of historical awareness. The importance of these materials is not in their computability but in their ability to encapsulate human experience, emotion, and memory in digitally native formats.
A decolonial approach necessitates a reassessment of the presupposition that associates the “digital” with computation and quantification. The notion of a “Decolonial Data Narrative” arises at this specific junction. It suggests that data need not stem from numerical abstraction or organised databases; rather, data can be perceived as embodied testimony, affective memory, and narrative remnants that enter digital circulation through processes of recording, archiving, and listening. In this context, data is not merely quantifiable but rather that which demands remembrance. The digital archive transforms from a mere storage of information into a site of ethical engagement, where the act of interaction, listening to a quivering voice, reflecting on silence, and acknowledging sorrow, for example, constitutes the creation of knowledge.
This move disrupts prevailing DH paradigms in two significant respects. Initially, it broadens the ontology of data beyond extractive or colonial paradigms of classification. Conventional archive systems, influenced by colonial rule and contemporary nation-states, have historically reduced human experiences to administrative classifications: refugee, migrant, minority, while obscuring the nuanced narratives of relocation. A decolonial data narrative counters this simplification by emphasising narrative as framework and emotion as proof. This viewpoint reinterprets digital mediation. While computation frequently aims for scalability and abstraction, decolonial digital activity emphasises individuality, interaction, and attentive listening. In this context, interpretation is inherently linked to a responsibility. DH, thus, transitions from a focus on tool-centric innovation to what can be termed an ethics of preservation.
This reconfiguration is particularly important in South Asian contexts, where histories of colonialism, partition, and migration have created extensive areas of undocumented or insufficiently documented memory. A significant portion of this history endures not in governmental records but through delicate oral traditions: narratives passed down through generations, mourning rituals, and everyday memories of loss and restoration. When memories are digitally captured, they do not merely enter an archive; they transform the archive’s epistemic foundation. The digital serves as a means enabling historically marginalised voices to attain permanence while maintaining their complexity.
The theoretical framework of a decolonial data narrative becomes tangible when contextualised with modern OH scholarship from South Asia. Sumallya Mukhopadhyay’s research on Partition memory, refugee subjectivity, and digital oral archives exemplifies how voice and narrative serve as modalities of digital information, surpassing computer abstraction. His examination of refugee identity in post-Partition Bengal (Mukhopadhyay 2021) intensifies this counter-archival impulse, as oral narratives convert refugees from mere bureaucratic entities as statistical figures in state documentation into socio-material subjects who articulate their experiences of displacement, labour, belonging, and survival on their own terms. By redirecting focus from the narratives of refugees to their recollections, manifested through silence, hesitation, emotional rhythm, and temporal dissonance, he emphasises memory as an affective and sensory phenomenon (Mukhopadhyay 2022).
The digital implications of this paradigm are elucidated in Mukhopadhyay’s conceptualisation of “affective listening” in online oral history archives (Mukhopadhyay 2025). By positioning the listener as a tertiary interpretive entity alongside the storyteller and interviewer, he reimagines the digital archive as a site of ethical engagement rather than mere passive storage. Digitisation broadens the narrative landscape, enabling testimony to disseminate beyond the initial interview, while alongside necessitating deliberate, careful, and responsible modes of interaction. This theory posits that the digital does not reduce memory to mere data; rather, it facilitates the existence of witness accounts through auditory engagement.
This perspective is anchored in the extensive intellectual tradition of “humanities computing”, wherein digital tools were employed to facilitate interpretative, historical, and cultural investigations. Patrik Svensson’s seminal contribution Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities (2009) stresses that the hallmark of Digital Humanities is not technological advancement but the enduring presence of humanistic epistemology inside digitally mediated research contexts. This challenges the prevalent notion that DH equates to quantitative analysis, as the discipline comprises a range of activities that are qualitative, archival, narrative, and interpretive in nature.
Mukhopadhyay’s research illustrates that oral histories, once digitally recorded, saved, and accessed, inherently fulfils the objectives that decolonial DH aims to conceptualise. His archive does not convert voice into computation; rather, it maintains narrative complexity in digital format. A form of DH arises, rooted in memory, affective presence, and counter-historical narration, wherein the digital serves not merely as an analytical tool but as a medium of survival. The decolonial data story represents not merely a theoretical concept but a continuous archiving practice, established wherever marginalised voices maintain persistence within technological timeframes.
Rethinking DH through the perspective of decolonial data narratives and OH practices necessitates a transformation in the field’s understanding of digital knowledge. When voice, emotion, and memory, rather than mere data entry, are pivotal to archive significance, the digital transcends technical processes and instead demonstrates as a temporal state of preservation. Viewed in this context, the role of OH in DH is not peripheral but fundamental. It suggests that the digital humanities may originate not in laboratories or code archives, but in the act of heeding a human voice transcending time.
References
Sumallya Mukhopadhyay, “The Emerging Contours of Oral History in India: Now and Then.” In Handbook of Global Oral History, edited by Mark Cave and Selma Leydesdorff (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2026): 104–126. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004737181.
Sumallya Mukhopadhyay, “Affective Listening and the Digital Oral History Archive: A Case Study Based on the 1947 Bengal Partition,” The Oral History Review 52, 1 (2025): 22–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2025.2468508.
Sumallya Mukhopadhyay, “‘I Am a Refugee in This Land’: Performative Narration, Recollection, and Resilience in Refugee Narratives of West Bengal, India,” Narrative Culture 9, 1 (2022): 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0009.
Sumallya Mukhopadhyay, “Who Is a Refugee? Understanding the Figure of the Refugee against the Backdrop of the Bengal Partition (1947-1970),” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 13, 2 (2021): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.31.
Patrik Svensson, “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.3 (2019).
