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Digital Environmental Humanities – Challenges and Possibilities

“I analyse texts that reflect the relationship between literature and environment with an emphasis on issues like pollution, resource crises, unchecked development and species extinction.” says Dr. Nibedita Bandyopadhyay who did her Ph.D. in English at IIT Kanpur with a specialisation in Environmental Humanities. Her journal papers and book chapters have appeared in reputed publications like Taylor and Francis and Lexington.

One example of the kind of literary text she speaks of is Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, a novel that touches on the subject of resource capitalisation while exploring the generation gap in a Gujarati family over a century of political and social turmoil in post-colonial India.

In 2016, upon an invitation from the American Studies Association, Dr. Bandyopadhyay presented a paper on environmental humanities at a conference in Denver, Colorado. The following year she got a tuition award to participate at a conference in Cornell University’s ‘School of Criticism and Theory,’ where her mentor was historian Dr. Faisal Devji, from the Oxford University faculty.  “It was a workshop where we analysed texts on the tenets of literary theory and criticism such as feminism, post-colonialism, eco-criticism and cultural studies”.

For Dr. Bandyopadhyay the April 2019 Dartmouth conference on digital humanities was notable for both raising concerns about technology and presenting opportunities in preservation and analysis of literary and cultural texts. She emphasises that digital humanities can lead to increased interdisciplinary research that will be fruitful to her domain as well because environmental humanities is a field which constantly engages itself with other fields of research.

 “Even though traditionally ecocriticism and digital technologies have been in conflict, I see some interesting possibilities. Many eco-critics see modern technology as a major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions and as essentially anti-environmental. It is understandable how and why experts in environmental studies would resist adopting digital technologies at the heart of digital humanities. But if we judiciously combine ecocriticism and digital technologies, this will yield  some remarkable changes.” Nibedita says.

The Dartmouth conference was highly successful in its attempt to dispel some of these doubts. One of the keynote speakers, Prof. Sukanta Choudhuri of Kolkata’s Jadavpur University spoke about a project that digitalizes and records works by writers like Rabindranath Tagore. Dr. Bandyopadhyay shares some of her memories of the conference session: “I raised the question of the numerous regional Bengali dialects that can be found from West Bengal to Bangladesh and how to reconcile these variations and differences, and most importantly, the mode of approach. It is a good idea to make digitised versions of classical texts but these must be made available to the Third World countries. It needs to be open to a wide audience, the public at large. Or else it has no meaning.” Here again, Dr. Bandyopadhyay points out the hesitation among some scholars of conventional humanities to adopt digital technologies and how the benefits once clearly understood can help overcome the diffidence: “They are just not comfortable with the medium. We need to build a real collaboration between Computer Science and Humanities because digitalisation depends on the operation of programming languages that belong to computer science. Digital technologies can in fact help in three important ways – digitization can record certain lost texts on environmental studies, simple online tools like hyperlinks can connect a large community of users to digitised texts, and computational technologies like Voyant can provide analysis, and this applies to environmental studies too”.

The computational tools in digital humanities are not confined to literary boundaries. Dr. Bandyopadhyay points out how these technologies can also access the natural world. “Digital tools can help to record the population and extinction rates of species in the natural world as well as take note of global warming and climate change. It is a new and challenging approach as not much work has been done in this area of research.”

In the coming semesters at SRM AP, Dr. Bandyopadhyay, who has taught Communicative English to SEAS students and creative writing and fiction analysis to SLABS students, will look to infuse SLABS course work with elements of digital and computational tools and introduce students to the immense possibilities. “For example, once we select a text and create a situational context, the students, many of whom come from technological backgrounds, can actively participate in digitisation exercises, access computational tools and even develop new programs to expand research and facilitate the analysis of literary texts. It will make the journey even more exciting for them.”

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SRM AP STUDENTS GRADUATE FROM THE 2019 SEMESTER ABROAD PROGRAM AT UC BERKELEY WITH AN IMPRESSIVE RECORD OF WINS.

13 students from SRM AP completed the Semester Abroad program at UC Berkeley, California capping a spectacular season of programs like ETH Denver (the world’s biggest Ethereum Blockchain Hackathon and Conference; TensorFlow Development Summit (the largest event for all the Machine Learning users); and GDC 2019 (the biggest gaming conference in San Francisco.

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Dr. Nimai Mishra’s work in Nanomaterials recognized by leading education research institutes.

In April 2019, at the 2nd Global Outreach Research and Education Summit held at HITEX Exhibition Centre in Hyderabad Dr. Nimai Mishra’s pioneering work in nanomaterials was recognized with the “Young Researcher in Chemistry” award, an initiative of the Global Outreach Research & Education Association (GOREA).

At the summit, attended by over 100 delegates from all over the world, Dr. Mishra, delivered a talk on “Nanochemistry: Impact in Device Fabrication” specifically, the control synthesis of nanoparticles via colloidal chemical route and their application in solar cell and LEDs. 

Through his research, Dr. Mishra, Associate Professor of Chemistry at SRM AP, has attempted to develop a synthesis technique that can produce blinking free semi-conductor nanoparticles for increased energy savings in the use of light emitting diodes (LED), lasers and solar cells.

“For the past decade there has been considerable work in this field and in 2013 as a post-doctoral fellow at Los Alamos Lab in the US I began to focus exclusively on this research. The technology has wide application potential including bio-imaging diagnosis in the health sector.”

For Dr. Mishra, whose education and research background includes IIT-Madras, NUS, Singapore, Los Alamos National Lab, USA and IIT-Genova, Italy, the summit was an opportunity to share ideas on how to meet challenges in higher education research.

The papers presented at the summit were a diverse mix of subjects from materials science, digital dentistry, blockchain technology and the booming smart classroom market in India.

The Global Outreach Research & Education Association (GOREA) is a charitable foundation established in 2018 to promote technical advancement, entrepreneurship and skill development. GOREA achieves this through a global association of educationists, technologists, industrialists, business leaders and policymakers working towards the growth of research & education industry.

Earlier in February at IIT-BHU in Varanasi Dr. Mishra was awarded the Young Scientist Award” at the International Conference of Functional Nanomaterials (ICFNM-2019)” organized by IIT-BHU along with IIT-Guwahati and Society of Interdisciplinary Research in Material and Biology (SIRMB). The shortlisted six candidates were faculty from IIT, NIT, DBT Institute.

Of the event, Dr. Mishra said, “Speakers were from IIT, IISER and IISc. The good news is that most were aware of the work being done at SRM AP and admire the broad ambitious vision of the university management.”

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The growing impact of Nanotechnology on educational research and future markets

Nanomaterials are an increasingly important product of nanotechnologies with applications in medicine/healthcare, electronics, environmental health, technology and industry.

“The reason so many disciplines like chemistry, physics, engineering and biology are looking at this field is the exciting properties of materials at a nanoscale.  It has broad application potential including bio-imaging diagnosis in the health sector.” says Dr. Nimai Mishra, Associate Professor of Chemistry at SRM AP.

Through his own research, Dr. Mishra, has attempted to develop a synthesis technique that can produce blinking free semi-conductor nanoparticles for increased energy savings in the use of light emitting diodes (LED), lasers and solar cells.

“For the past decade there has been considerable work in this field and in 2013 as a post-doctoral fellow at Los Alamos Lab in the U.S. I began to focus exclusively on this research.”

In April 2019, at the 2nd Global Outreach Research and Education Summit held at HITEX Exhibition Centre in Hyderabad Dr. Nimai Mishra’s work in nanomaterials was recognized with the “Young Researcher in Chemistry” award – an initiative of the Global Outreach Research & Education Association (GOREA).

Dr. Mishra, delivered a talk on “Nanochemistry: Impact in Device Fabrication” specifically, the control synthesis of nanoparticles via colloidal chemical route and their application in solar cell and LEDs. 

For Dr. Mishra, whose education and research background includes IIT-Madras, NUS, Singapore, Los Alamos National Lab, USA and IIT-Genova, Italy, the summit was an opportunity to share ideas on how to meet challenges in higher education research.

At the summit, attended by over 100 delegates from all over the world, the papers presented were a diverse mix of subjects from materials science, digital dentistry, blockchain technology and the booming smart classroom market in India.

The Global Outreach Research & Education Association (GOREA) is a charitable foundation established in 2018 to promote technical advancement, entrepreneurship and skill development. GOREA achieves this through a global association of educationists, technologists, industrialists, business leaders and policymakers working towards the growth of research & education industry.

 Earlier in February at IIT-BHU in Varanasi Dr. Mishra was awarded the Young Scientist Award” at the International Conference of Functional Nanomaterials (ICFNM-2019)” organized by IIT-BHU along with IIT-Guwahati and Society of Interdisciplinary Research in Material and Biology (SIRMB). The shortlisted six candidates were faculty from IIT, NIT, DBT Institute.

Of the event, Dr. Mishra said, “Speakers were from IIT, IISER and IISc. The good news is that most were aware of and admire the broad ambitious vision of the SRM AP university management.”

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