 So, good afternoon everyone and welcome to our first graduate research series presentation of the fall 2021 semester. I'm Janet Holm, assistant dean for collections and digitization strategies for the university libraries and I'd like to thank you all for joining us this afternoon. Each year the university libraries and partnership with graduate student senate welcomes applications from graduate students who wish to present their research process for the graduate research series. I'm honored to introduce today's presenter, Riddica Popli, a doctoral candidate of rhetoric and culture. Her dissertation explores the intricate relationship shared between history and memory in the digital landscape with a focus on digital oral history archives dedicated to archiving witness accounts of the partition of British India in 1947. Focusing on public memory, borders and archives her research investigates how emergent digital projects are altering and remaking the event of partition in the virtual digital space. Please join me in welcoming Riddica who will share her research process with us today. Welcome Riddica. Hi, thank you everyone first off for being here taking our time on a Monday afternoon to spend some time listening to my research. Obviously I'm very grateful and very rather deeply grateful to Alden Library which for many of us is almost like our second home and the graduate student senate for providing this fantastic opportunity to graduate students to be able to not just share our research but also create this forum for hopefully what everyone is hoping to be a meaningful discussion and also I hope I can gather some feedback that can add to my dissertation as I'm in the process of writing it. So thank you for being here and thank you for this opportunity. So I'm going to start off and I've timed it so it's not going to be hopefully too long so I won't bore you too much but as you can see on your screens right now that's the title of my dissertation as it's ongoing. The digital afterlife of India's partition, memories and borders and as Janet is there kindly introduce me I'm a doctoral candidate I'm a fourth year student in the School of Communication Studies of course at OU. Just to start off the sort of large broad question that I'm looking at in my dissertation is in what ways really are digital archives in terms of structure form and various projects which I'll introduce you to in just some time involved in remaking, making, altering the heritage that many in South Asia have received and world over called this event historical event called partition. So that's sort of this large overarching question that influences or triggers the way in which I think about my project. So there are of course various like in all research projects there is some significance to conducting this sort of research. So one of the main questions is that I'm thinking through is how can we sort of further understand the very intricate relationship that memory and history making share but in the digital realm and just because it is digital in nature does that influence it, change it, not change it so those kinds of questions. Of course we already know for those of us who come from humanities in the arts we know that there is already symbiotic relationship between memory and history making but what really happens to that in when it goes into the digital realm. I also think that the work advances or pre-existing work that is already available to us on archives, borders, memory, oral history and of course rhetorical studies which is my home in the Global South. Just to kind of take you very briefly of how the presentation is going to look like or the next 20 minutes I'll obviously be introducing my dissertation take you through the broad research questions that I'm looking at. I'll also give you a glimpse of behind the scenes in terms of how I arrived at the dissertation which has been a long sort of longitudinal commitment to this project then I'll introduce you to the idea of the digital oral history archive and then of course I'll conclude with how the library in Alden in particular have been very beneficial and important for conducting this research and just in general because it's sort of a meta situation here because I know there are many archivists and library librarians present in the audience and of course this is supported by Alden Library and the work is looking really at the structure of archive so it's sort of a very interesting moment to present this kind of work. So for those of us who are in the audience who might be unfamiliar with the historical context I'll just briefly introduce you to it. So the partition of British India of course as you may already know happened in 1947 so what really in essence happened right? So partition is this critical moment in South Asian history that rendered 1 million people dead and forcibly displaced an estimated 15 to 20 million people under very tragically violent circumstances that led to the creation of India. East Pakistan which today currently in current day is known as Bangladesh and West Pakistan which in current day is known as Pakistan. Mass killings women children often were the very site of this unprecedented violence that was religious or communal in nature so it was mostly a sort of this violence erupted between Hindus Muslims and Sikhs so these were the three sort of community among which the violence took place. There were rapes genital mutilation sort of very horrific instances of violence that were happening across the northern western parts of the of the subcontinent. So in the last decade almost 70 years after partition there have been several projects that have come up in the digital space that are committed to collecting preserving through of course recording and in the form of oral history archiving and also curating these memories of first hand partition witnesses and survivors. Now there are several ways in which this is happening and technology is also being deployed in several ways in doing this. Also just to give you further context the moment of partition coincides with the continent also gains independence from the British rule in 1947. So several historians would say over 200 years of rule but almost the first 100 years went into the British trying to gain sort of gain claim on the subcontinent and then the next 100 years they ruled over the subcontinent area and then that moment when decolonization formal decolonization happens coincides with the very tragic event of partition. So it's also a very interesting moment in history in that sense. Now the digital sort of nature and like I said it's happening in various ways right so like for my dissertation I'm specifically looking at the digital oral history archive I'm looking at projects that are only solely committed to oral history or collection of primary memories. However having said that there are also a couple of other projects that are happening that I'm not looking at in the dissertation but just to give you a scope of the work that is going on. So like this for instance there's a very interesting project called the project Dastan which uses virtual reality to sort of reconnect people from across the borders and for those of you who might be unfamiliar in the the borders that India-Pakistan share are quite tense geopolitically. So these are two nuclear armed countries that are constantly in a moment sort of can erupt into a war and that's happened thrice before we have since independence. So it's also interesting in that sense because these are these are really very not just tense borders but they're also not porous in that sense but the border that India shares with Bangladesh or it was earlier known as East Pakistan is very porous in that sense so it's also different sort of areas of geographically have very different ways in which the border operates but so a project like a project Dastan would say that using virtual reality and all of these are part of the South Asian diaspora so that also kind of helps them to transfer of transfers the border and travel across the border which sort of for instance if I know someone who's witnessed partition let's say New Delhi in India wants to go see their home that they were displaced from in Lahore in Pakistan. So project Dastan would help you do that through virtual reality so members of the team would actually travel to Lahore if you give them exactly sort of you know some sort of location that oh this was where I lived this was the village this is you know there was a temple next to my house or there was a small Sikh temple next to my house they travel record that entire area for you or the home if it's still exist in whatever way or what it looks like today bring back that recording and using VR technology show you your home so in a way the promise is that you can cross these closed frontiers in the digital space so giving you positioning these projects for you but of course like I said I'm not the city part of the future research but in a sense like all of this is also going on very interesting things. Now the digital nature also opens up possibilities on this renewed sort of comprehension of the relationship between the past and the present and focusing on public memory borders and archives I'm trying to examine the form of the digital archive in itself and if the form of the digital archive really illuminates and sort of organizes reorganizes this past present relationship which is critical to the historical project and in turn of course to rhetorical studies. Now in a in a sort of nutshell the dissertation is really examining the politics of memorization of partition narratives of British India in 1947 in the digital landscape like I've already mentioned to you several sort of these archives and projects have emerged in the last decade doing this kind of work. Now if we have to also giving you a little theoretical background of how I sort of come make these relationships between archives borders and rhetorical studies so how am I situating it all altogether. So if you really have to map a turn when the archive and this might be interesting for those of us who are already invested in archival studies goes from being simply a neutral repository of artifacts objects for examination and today we know that the archive simply isn't neutral it is an objective we know that there is a politics at play that goes on in selection of the material and curation of those materials. So sort of that moment when that turn shift happens is really a post-modern influences that when we start thinking of archives as objects to archives as process and here I'm borrowing from Laura Amstoller's incredible work on colonial archives so for those of us who also study this may already be familiar that one of the sort of most significant scholars who work influences especially in the post-modern context is Derrida's archive fever that he writes of which we get an English translation of from French in 1995 is that key text where Derrida also of course as Derrida would in several ways provides us to think of the archive but really he's trying to sort of shift that focus and say that yeah like we have to start thinking and considering of the archive really as a source of power and of course I'm this is one of the readings of Derrida's of there would be several others. Now post-modern approaches towards archive like I said are just sort of largely responsible for the archive return. Now archives then also become sites where struggles over memory history are happening and are very integral to the premise of engaging in constant historical and narrative revisions so that's also sort of the base from where my dissertation moves further. Now in the context of our time has been approached of course in several ways the archive has been looked at as a point which elicits polysemic meanings silences erasures right if rhetoric if we really truly understand rhetoric to be as something that is making a absence present or like really defining relationship between knowledge opinion belief on one hand to sort of knowledge systems on the other so like really in essence archives have a potential rhetorical force that they represent within the context of memory and sort of to put that further the fluidity of archival memory and its openness to emergent and even contradictory social and political uses sort of points us towards processes of interpretation and meaning making and that becomes very key to my project. Now sort of three broad research questions that I'm looking at so the first one I've already introduced you to in what ways are the digital archives and projects or the digital oral history archive involved in remaking altering this inheritance that we have called the partition or the heritage called partition it has a history right of these long 70 years behind it too and secondly what role do digital archives and projects play in shaping partition history or going further how might the event of partition itself impact the way we the digital archives and these projects have shaped up so sort of looking at that play here too then third is how are borders really understood in this emergent digital landscape in relation to partition now borders are pretty key to the study of partition I mean like I've already explained to you how it was literally the division of land and the creation of new borders so the partition studies the emphasis on borders has been immense and has been looked at in several ways um and then of course borders also becomes very important to rhetorical studies so all three areas borders public memory archives are all sort of important for rhetorical studies and obviously key to my own project uh now how did I arrive at the dissertation right um so right after my masters and as as you can see this is me six years ago shorter hair younger um I sort of looked up I was figuring out what to do with life as many people do after getting a master's in in in in sort of humanities um so I looked up and there was this project called the 1947 partition archive and they were looking for citizen historians to go around and do sort of this memory collection work or what they sort of position as oral history work and interview partition witnesses and survivors so this image is actually from 2015 and uh this was a paid fellowship so I thought why not and of course I have a personal investment in partition to my grandparents from paternal grandparents actually come from Pakistan my paternal grandfather comes from this very small village called Ahmadpur Sirkia in Multan region which is the southern part of Pakistan and my grandmother migrated from Lahore now um I couldn't sort of I don't really have much information about my father my grandfather's side of the journey but I have listened to my grandmother growing up um and she would very often tell us of these very horrific memories of traveling in a train and she had a very sort of difficult time she was a child back then but the family faced a lot of violence while trying to migrate from Lahore to Amritsar in India which is a very short trip like it's barely an hour by uh on road but it was very hard during that time in the midst of all of these riots and violence that was going on to kind of make that journey um so a lot of work around partition and it's not unusual emerges from personal experiences so we already have a lot of memoirs fiction non-write fiction writing cinema photography that has already been done around partition and of course oral history work too which is critical to partition work um now like I said so I saw this project and I thought it might be interesting to kind of like engage with it and see what comes out of it and so during the summer of 2015 like about January to June I actually spent a lot of time interviewing oral history partition witnesses and survivors in Delhi that's where I'm from I was born and raised there so New Delhi and its surrounding area so that's really when I very deeply started thinking about these projects and for me it was like something else is also at play here now all of these projects um are based around the world uh but sort of the majority of them are based in the US and the project the 1947 partition archive which is sort of the more uh the big sort of project on this they have managed to collect more than 9500 uh witness testimonies from around the world over 10 12 years and so that's actually that was born out of Berkeley like I said the South Asian diaspora is very deeply involved in this work and majority of the work is being done by them so again interesting politics in that sense sort of at play here and uh so then after working as an oral historian for them in the field with the archive I also sort of then went in the behind the scenes I was doing fundraising for them organized a lot of traveling exhibitions so on and so forth so about for two years I was very committed to working with the archive and then that's the moment I sort of realized that maybe there is more to be investigated here and think about it really and then that's how the PhD came into being so just sort of giving you a sense of the sort of longitudinal commitment to the archives and I've been thinking about them and how I really arrive at the at the dissertation um also so what I call the digital oral history archive and these are my sites of analysis projects that I'm looking at uh yeah so like I've already mentioned to you if you can see on your screens on the bottom left is the 1947 partition archive that's their website all of these projects are hosted on their websites um so that's the project that I was working with and so now you can see that this is a screenshot from just two three days ago so the stories that they managed to collect is uh or at least they're made available are 9275 now of course a majority of them as one would assume comes from the subcontinent but they've also managed to collect a sizable sort of a reasonable chunk from the US and UK that's also where a lot of the South Asian diaspora sort of lives today um and then there are two other projects that have also been involved in collecting oral history um testimonies survivor testimonies so then there's the second project that I'm looking at is called the citizens archive of India that is physically based in Mumbai but of course again completely digital in nature and their project is called the generation 1947 project uh the only sort of the difference between the archive and this is not just in terms of size the archive is sort of the 1947 partition archive is the biggest project out of all three but the other project they're also um very invested in collecting photographs or any kind of personal artifacts that the interviewee might would want to share and they digitize that and store it as well um so the both these projects are essentially looking also at what they call life history so it's not just the oral history the moment of partition how traditionally oral historians would kind of go about doing that work thinking through like okay so this event happens and then we kind of interview people around that event and try to construct sort of memories and you know research emerges from that but the generation 1947 project 1947 partition archive and the third one is the citizens archive of Pakistan all three of them are also sort of conducting these long um life histories so you're not just asking people about their memories of partition or the moment of partition but you're also asking them very deeply about their lives pre partition life's post partition also sort of playing into this idea of nation building right so these how are these post colonial nation states coming up what happens then right but how does modernity sort of set in here and like what really works here so it's sort of interesting things are going on not just like the moment of partition but also they are building up relationships between independence partition and kind of that those kind of relations the third project that I'm looking at um is the as I mentioned is the citizens archive of Pakistan they have a very singular project called the oral history project they're also doing a lot of other things but uh part sort of collecting partition witnesses uh their stories is key to their entire sort of gambit of projects um again the citizens are Pakistan is actually very similar to citizens archive of India and they also work together so there are many times that they'll host exhibitions together they'll host talks together invite people also a lot of cross border work happening in that sense um I thought it might be interesting for me to also share with you um a story that this uh 1947 partition archive actually uh has made visible sort of has uploaded on their youtube channel um like they are of course there they have these massive sort of like right they have about 9000 plus stories but they uh few years ago sort of curated and edited a few stories and put them up on youtube to kind of give a taste to people that how really are they um uh collecting these stories and what they look like the form of the story um just to give you a preview the story that I'm going to show you is of this migrant called Shani Ali um and he talks about his experience of what he witnessed during partition but this is a very heavily edited video uh and I think the archive made it as sort of a corporate pitch to the New York Times to sort of write about them and a couple of other publications this was years ago but uh that's not how the stories look like if you really go into the archive they're very they're unedited they're raw they're six hours long sometimes they span over three days sometimes in an hour short so that's this is just a very edited version of one of the old history like what would it look like um I think you should be able to see yeah just pausing Jenna are you able to hear the the sound yes we can see and hear it thank you one morning we were sleeping and uh there was a loud voices so there was I saw thousands of people surrounding the village with arms then my uncle came running so he took us to the center of the village he said go into the room and stay there and all the village women and children were in that room after about maybe two three hours which was like an eternity for us somebody banged the door and the guy shouted that open the door otherwise we will fire inside and set the room in fire so they told us to sit under a big tree and they started my cousin got shocked and then my brother he saw what was going on so he started running with a spear and hit him so my mother saw that and she ran after him so she fell over him and the both were till there I was very traumatized I was standing there not knowing what's happening he the gunman was only about 10 feet away sort of you know he shorted me a few times every time he missed so I started running then one guy came with a spear he tried to kill me in the meantime I bumped into the other guy he was killing two the other guy came to kill he said no don't kill him and the guy said why not and the one who was holding me he said no I won't take this kid with me we were traveling and I was always wondering what's going to happen to me and where he's taking me he didn't explain to me anything we walked two nights day and night to get to some village which I don't know the name now so there he left me with a family and then six months I lived with them because there was agreement with India and Pakistan that whoever I was left in both countries they should be recovered and brought back to the respective countries they came and I bought 9 30 10 o'clock my uncle's cousin who was there told me what my father's name and my uncle's names and all that so then I was kind of satisfied that he's he knows the family so he'll be okay to go with so I got into the refugee camp and my uncle he came because he was 30 miles away in town Karkasur so he came from there every day to look for us my uncle didn't realize what I needed that all I needed was hugged and loved and be sure that I'm safe now then when I was 20 years old then my life changed I met my friend with him I found that I belong to somebody and I was not alone anymore but my friend taught me I forgave to the even people who can my family my own way of thinking is that just love everyone hate no one that's where I look at it okay so like I said this is one of the many many videos that the archive has kind of made available on the youtube site of course they cannot make all stories available some stories have really graphic are also stories of perpetrators of violence who commit to having killed people in on video on camera so they don't have permissions to do that but instead so what the archive does in that in that case is so I'm trying to pull up the the presentation right so is that the archive has then partnered with the stanford libraries of stanford university and they have a spotlight exhibition of 51 stories that explores the personal sort of stories of partition right so also interestingly they use the term personal here uh sort of also the consequences of such a project in a sense so the 51 stories and this is a screenshot of the of the first page so it's accessible to everyone so you can log you can like just search for this and you can be able to see the stories but interestingly out of the 51 which is also like a sort of set right like it's a representative set of all the stories so it's also very heavily carefully selected what stories that they want to kind of make accessible to the public at this point only 30 are open access sorry rather 21 are open access you can log in right now see those two to three hour interviews of these various people from around the world um and then all the stories come from like 12 countries like India Pakistan Bangladesh of course US UK Canada Spain Israel also wherever you have people who witness partition want to share their story they've gone and recorded it but 30s 21 stories are open access but 30 are not publicly available it's only available to researchers or people who would apply for research in the archive so for instance i've managed to kind of get access to that so i'm analyzing actually 25 stories out of this 51 for my dissertation so it's also interesting to watch these stories there are currently no transcriptions or translations available with each of the stories so also they're they're not just recorded in English of course they're recorded in 22 languages like for instance there's one story that's recorded in this language called torwali that is a very specific dialects spoken in khyber pakhtunkhwa which is sort of the dark where the dardik tribes live in north northern pakistan so it's also a a um dialect that's only spoken by very few maybe thousands at this point so to find translations for that and the archive hasn't done that work yet because of funding or whatever reasons so also sort of for me interestingly because i'm looking at borders i think there are borders that emerge in discursively in these ways too right who is the one then who can access these stories who is this knowledge being stored for who um who is consuming these stories who's able to do that right so this archive in these public um also the promise of digitality right like ease of access you're able to access and learn about you know histories that you might not have learned before also maybe like these archives are um seen in direct opposition to state official authoritarian archives but then again there are several borders that emerge linguistically uh religiously and so in many ways within these archives so for me those also interesting things to look at and think about um a little boring part just the theoretical framing and research practices that um determine or are guiding the dissertation at this point of course postcolonial theory is very key to understanding the entire project memories and borders again becomes one of the other two key theoretical anchors for framing the entire dissertation in terms of research practices of course it's a rhetorical dissertation so rhetorical analysis is key um and like i mentioned i just showed you a couple of sites before the three projects that make up the digital oral oral history archive are my sites of analysis alongside the like i mentioned i'm accessing i mean um analyzing 21 oral histories or the 51 present in the stanford collection i'm also um interviewing um sort of people so qualitative methods in using semi-structured interview in question as also is a part of the research practice and i'm only doing 15 interviews six are going to be with architects or curators of the three archives or people sort of who um have our owners or they call themselves in several ways like citizens archive of india the person who heads it now calls them and the ceo of the archive so several ways to also refer to themselves and then nine interviews are going to be with oral historians um or who are like collecting these memories or something that i did in 2015 too so like people like me who have volunteered their time somebody has won a fellowship and is doing this so there are also various ways in which people are contributing to this oral oral history work um now in terms of analysis um what's interesting and what sort of is emerging at the moment um is uh i'm trying to also engage with border rhetoric and seeing how borders in various forms are obviously engaged by rhetorical studies but also i think the push here is to develop uh and see if hopefully that that happens in the next few months is this idea of the digital border rhetoric or borders in digital rhetoric and we'll see sort of uh how that happens but i'm trying to think through these ideas because i think analyzing the relationship between memory and border especially in the digital landscape does allow for an analysis like this to happen um and like i mentioned earlier um of course the notion of borders as you know is super critical to partition at the same time uh like religious linguistic regional borders that were created so to also continue to persist in many this like projects is promising you like hey you can transgress this border cross you know uh cross the open front and see home but even within that they're discursively at least like these borders do continue to emerge and play out in many ways um so in the research i'm also trying to develop the temporal nature of borders in order to sort of further solidify their relationship that borders share with memory and especially that might happen in a multi-directional way in the digital realm right so like borders influence memory memory influences border in in various ways um then also like i said uh the relationship between borders and memory that is that exists in the digital oral history archive tempo in a temporal way in a spatial way especially spatiality becomes interesting to think about in a digital space how does that look like um and lastly i think the form of oral history in itself needs to be further thought through because if we are only like the 1947 partition archive adopts the model of crowdsourcing uh and they say that you know um as long as you have access to an internet you know they give out these they conduct free oral history workshops by monthly so if you attend one of those workshops they'll certify you as a citizen historian and the framing is also interesting that citizen historian sort of borrowing from citizen journalists and then if you attend the workshop you have access to an internet and somebody who's witness partition and is ready to give you an interview you can go uh go interview them using their expansive questionnaire which is about 100 pages long with 79 questions which is huge and for those of us who who are invested in oral history work have seen it also in other projects we know that at least in a non-digital oral history space that was not how that was happening so interestingly breadth over depth becomes important for these projects so it's more about numbers and even the projects how they're rhetorically positioning themselves is like time is running out you know these people are now in their late 80s early 90s they're sort of this push urgency to collect collect more and more and more so that's also interesting then to think about what what is happening to the form of oral history here the singular story what's happening to that um and lastly sort of coming to the library resources um we I think we have a brilliant collection of Southeast Asian sort of resources one of its very renowned and widely known at OU we have that collection but within that we don't have as much maybe for the South Asian resources and that also maybe for us you know who study who are invested in our work work in the libraries absences also become important to think about in collections then so for instance if you key in South Asia in the in the library website you'll come across 6070 results and about 1200 for partition now partition of course also has such a very South Asian context of South Asia partition is usually referred to with a capital P but also we know partitions have happened elsewhere around the world and also at the same time right um so again we have about 1200 but those are valuable sort of resources but at the same time it's not as vast as collections go um but at the same time at least for my work my work is extremely interdisciplinary and I'm sure you must have a sense of that by now I'm borrowing heavily from geographies sociology anthropology besides just thinking about rhetorical studies and communication studies so that also helps in a way to sort of go into the into the library and think about more resources and that adds to the work um just sort of a future direction or where this work might go um so of course the hope is to publish theoretical essays that further our sort of collective understanding of public memory and borders in the digital landscape then the second sort of idea is to publish more conceptual essays that further think through the idea of the digital border rhetoric or borders in digital rhetoric and kind of really solidify that idea um and also because in the context of the presentation today if you're thinking really seriously about how this research might be useful for librarians archivists we also see are seeing more such projects emerge so the partition is one context in which digital archives are emerging we also have the palestine and oral history archive which is very interesting currently housed in the american university of berut which is also doing similar work then there's another very big oral history draft sort of push happening in the south african context and then there's south african oral history archive which is again independent people's archive people's participation so again thinking that this is not just in one context it's happening so we see more and more thought which i think might be useful for future direction of the work um with that thank you very much um i hope this was useful in some way and thank you for giving me the opportunity to think through more about my work and um yeah i'll pass it over to Jen now thank you ridica uh at this point we'll open it up for audience questions um if you would like to use the raise hand feature you're welcome to do so if you'd prefer to type your question in chat i'm happy to moderate um while you all are thinking of your questions i am going to put a link in the chat to just a brief survey about today's presentation if you wouldn't mind um taking a moment and filling that out especially if you're here as part of a guarantee plus milestone you'll want to fill out that and let us know that for sure so we'll we'll wait at this point to see if we have any questions from our audience i'm not seeing any questions today i think you were very very thorough ridica either that or it was absolutely nothing what can read so all right all right we have one okay so uh first we have a comment that says you you did it was an awesome presentation so yay on that uh and then brandy weaver has a question uh she's wondering was the process to gain access to the restricted parts of the archive difficult to clarify uh how much did you have to show that you were indeed an academic researcher and needed access so that's a great question so thank you simmer for i think if i'm pronouncing your name correctly thank you um and uh yes so um that's a great question in terms of gaining access so like i said i have i do also share a personal relationship with the archive since i've contributed to it i've recorded 60 stories for them and worked in various capacities as a research development like i was doing fundraising at one point in my life which i'm very terrible at i honestly didn't manage to even raise a dollar for them but i was doing that work for about 11 months but um yeah in all honesty uh so for me it wasn't that difficult because i already know the people and this is really small tiny team right like they're barely three sort of fixed permanent members in the archive the rest are all volunteers so um and then they also have a very good knowledge about my project so because i've been talking about it for years this is what i want to work on so personally for me the process wasn't that difficult but if for someone who isn't familiar with the archive the archive isn't familiar with them they do have many checks and sort of balances in place there is a long form that you have to kind of fill up get and you have to be a part of a university so again that's that sort of restricts access so for independent researchers i think the process is different but for academic researchers um you also need a letter of support from your advisor you need a sort of additional letters from people if you're getting sort of um other you know sort of uh external grants you need to also show that and then you have to answer about 10 15 questions in in various ways basically describing your research and what you're going to do with it and uh every time you use anything from the archive of course as the protocol would go you have to credit them from a picture to a story anything that you do so yeah for me the process was easy but at the same time it's not the same for everyone yeah great thanks for that uh we do have another question from um nick verseig nick would like to know uh might you be able to speak more about the diaspora over or under representation in oral history projects that is a really good question um so in terms of like i said all the projects that are being run right currently are also uh most of them not all but most of them are have been undertaken by the south asian diaspora and by south asia then i mean anybody from india pakistan or bangladesh and other countries but at the same time india is also centered within that notion of south south asia just to kind of like put in a caveat there but uh in terms of over representation or under representation it's interesting because um of course nobody has been able to analyze the archive it's in its entirety nobody has sat down or at least i don't know of any work that exists in the current moment where somebody's gone in all of these archives and looked at each and every story and seen you know like who who is being represented most in the archive and so on but at least in the 51st story that i'm analyzing um there are there is reasonable diversity but again that's a snapshot of the archive right so it's also curated in a certain way to make sure that you're getting a sense of all all voices so there are trans people that are included in the archive um in in south asia we have a very rigid caste system which is which many of you may already be familiar with which is sort of very similar to a you know if i had to make a comparison um a near comparison would be like the racial system right so you have a very uh the caste system divides social hierarchy in a certain way so you have a lot of representation from the upper caste communities upper classes you know people refugees who are even alive to kind of tell their story today um so it's interesting in that sense also um there are more Hindus in the archive are more muslim stories stories being represented so that kind of analysis i think will require a more in-depth study of the archive really and at some point hopefully someone's going to take you know take up that project and really look or maybe i might take you know if i get some kind of really great funding and yours to do it but really look through all the stories and think about that but at the current moment if i had to sort of tell you from those 51 stories there is diversity but at the same time there is also overwhelming sense of like um in terms of like caste and class definitely there is some sort of lopsided representation there as one would assume great thanks riddika so i'm not seeing any other questions at this point uh um janet holmes has excellent presentation and she does have a question can you talk more about the extensive questionnaire you referenced for the oral histories and the problems associated with that for the researcher and or the archive itself right um thanks janet but also um yes um so in a typical oral history project or at least like you know we do have like a whole sub-discipline dedicated book and researchers have spent a lot of time thinking about the form of oral history how that would look like the commitments of oral history and so on so it's not typical to use a hundred page questionnaire with 79 questions on it to interview one person it's very extensive in that sense one of the reasons that uh and this is of course also um emerged in the interview that i've conducted one of the reasons for that is because it's people like who have absolutely no training in such work uh academic training or any kind of like training fieldwork experience who are conducting this research so they really need a lot of hand holding and so that's the reason for these extensive interview uh question is uh like i said it's not typical so if a typical uh somebody let's say from the academy right was doing this kind of work was conducting an oral history project they would have about close to let's say 1215 main questions around the um the event that you want to ask or like which kind of is shaping up your research but those questions also tend to meander right like that's all the nature of oral history you go from one point a to c to f and then you come back to d and that's also how memory works so it's not like very linear in that sense but the way the archive questionnaire is the story becomes linear because you ask right for the first question is like what's your name what was your parents name you know where did you grow up so it's taking you from the moment of whatever you remember about your childhood from school from what did you eat what did you wear you know um questions about um were you living in an agrarian society were you living more in an urban place how was what were the materials used to build your house uh what games did you play as a child who were your friends so taking right from that to then arriving at the moment of partition it's a slow process and then taking the the interviewee after partition what happened how did you migrate how was life after migration what do you do currently right like the entire journey so like so there are both issues that emerge from such a process but they're also like they have their reasons for doing that is because people are doing this on a volunteer basis right it's like people who have zero sort of training and are just sort of doing this probably for the first time and they also don't have really any age limit on doing this so you could also be as young as 16 17 doing this work with your grandparents if you have if you have a grandparent who's witness partition you could take this training the oral history like free training and be certified to do this uh work by the archive and then you know deposit the story with the archive so that also happens and they have had uh I mean I was doing this interview with one of the founders and they were telling me that some of the oral historians are as old as 88 right so people of their generation interviewing so like a husband wanted to interview his wife and they both had witness partition so it was also interesting in that sense um so yeah I agree sort of document for rhetorical analysis um and over the years also the archive has been extremely receptive to feedback so I don't exactly know who all contributed but from the sense of it academics have contributed in the making of this questionnaire people partition scholars cultural commentators oral historians so it's not just like this one process like this one person decided that this is how it should look like it's been a community effort in that sense but at the same time they've also been very open to revising it and feedback so some of the times they were telling me that you know there have been many many versions of this questionnaire so the questionnaire that they were probably using in 2010 when they started off was a very small questionnaire but over a period of time they've expanded it to these hundred this hundred page questionnaire so it's been also in that sense but I my sense is that the archive's reasoning for it has been because people do require that kind of sense of direction to do this work especially for people who have zero experience or are doing this for the first time excellent thank you so much Riddica I think at this point we will say thank you to our audience uh and especially thank you Riddica for for your wonderful presentation I appreciate it very very much thank you everyone for spending a little bit of time with us this afternoon and I hope you all have a great day