Each Editor’s Digest at The Digital Orientalist serves as a window into a team’s work and reflections over a given term. The South Asian Studies section is somewhat unique: two editors, two sets of researchers, one shared aim to explore the digital dimensions of South Asian scholarship. This digest, covering the period from October 2025 to March 2026, looks back at the projects, insights, and conversations that shaped our newly formed team’s work together. My name is Yashee Singh, and I joined The Digital Orientalist as one of the two editors for the South Asian Studies section at the start of this term. I had the pleasure of working with Saniya Irfan and Sunayani Bhattacharya, whose research interests span across the digital and the archival, connecting questions of South Asian culture, history, and technology.
From the beginning, our team sought to highlight the projects and initiatives transforming digital humanities scholarship in South Asia, with a focus on India. We were especially interested in how researchers and practitioners engage with language, data, and archives in a region where many of these resources remain fragile, decentralized, or undocumented.
The first article of the term, “Scripts That Don’t Fit: The Hidden Bias of NLP in South Asian Languages,” by Saniya Irfan, set the tone. Saniya examined how Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, so central to modern data-driven humanities research, carry structural biases when applied to South Asian scripts. English-language models dominate the architecture of machine learning systems, and as a result, languages written in scripts such as Devanagari, Bengali, or Urdu are often forced into ill-fitting computational molds. Her piece called attention to both the technical exclusions and the epistemic hierarchies built into digital infrastructures that remain calibrated to Western-language corpora.
Building on this interrogation of bias and legibility, Sunayani Bhattacharya turned the question from the archive to the classroom. In her two-part series “Teaching Bengali Digital Texts to Anglophone Undergraduates: What Voyant Reveals about the Infrastructural Bias of DH Tools” and “Seeing the Text Arranged: Using Omeka to Critically Engage with Bengali Language Texts,” she offered a pedagogical case study of how digital infrastructure conditions our encounters with non-Latin scripts. Through her experiments with Voyant and Omeka in a classroom of anglophone students, Sunayani illuminated the limits of “ready-made” DH tools that assume Roman letters, left-to-right text flow, and predictable metadata fields. Yet, rather than treating these incompatibilities as purely obstacles, she reframed them as critical learning opportunities: moments when students must confront the infrastructural assumptions embedded in supposedly neutral technology.
Having examined the infrastructural biases that shape both research and teaching, our next step as a team was to look outward, toward the undertakings that define the practice of digital humanities in South Asia today. Once we had grappled with issues of access, legibility, and pedagogy, we wanted to understand how scholars and practitioners were doing DH in local contexts where data itself can be fragile, oral, or embodied rather than textual. It was in this spirit that Saniya Irfan’s article, “OH in DH: Listening to Memory in the Age of the Digital,” opened a new thread in our exploration. Moving away from questions of script and software, Saniya positioned oral history as a deeply rooted form of digital practice. By foregrounding memory, voice, and the ethics of listening, her piece argued that in South Asia, where archives are often dispersed or precarious, digital humanities must also mean listening humanities. Oral history, she suggested, does not merely supplement the archive; it is the archive, demanding new modes of preservation and participation in the digital age.
Across these six months, our team’s work unfolded as both an inquiry into, and a conversation with, the infrastructures that define digital humanities in South Asia. From the algorithmic biases of NLP systems and the uneven legibility of non‑Latin scripts, to the pedagogical challenges of teaching Bengali texts with English‑centric tools, and finally to the living archive of oral memory, each piece asked what it means to make knowledge digital in contexts shaped by linguistic diversity and archival fragility. In the process, we moved from confronting problems of representation toward recognizing practices of adaptation: the ways scholars, educators, and storytellers reconfigure the digital to fit South Asian realities rather than the other way around. As a new editorial team, this term has been about learning to see those moments of negotiation not as limitations but as the very texture of our field, reminding us that digital humanities, in and on South Asia, continues to be defined by its capacity to listen, improvise, and reimagine what counts as data, archive, and voice.
