Dear All: You are invited. And, kindly share this invitation to people you think would be of interest. *Azim Premji University is organising a symposium on 'Open access to archives, to support humanities research in India'* Archives, libraries, museums, and other institutions around the world increasingly digitize their collections and provide web-wide access to them to all users. New tools and standards have enabled such institutions organising their digital collections in open repositories in a structured way and providing seamless interoperability between the repositories. This symposium will focus on maximizing access to the materials housed at different archives in India which are primary sources of information for humanities research, and the issues and possibilities in providing open access to archival materials. Date: 3 February 2021, Time: 3-5 PM Kindly register: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_krs3C3t3T02OlpMvkFQplg Host: Tarangini Sriraman, Azim Premji University Digital archives and open access By Maya Dodd A focus on open access is much needed for the actualisation of knowledge societies, and this is easily possible with digital archives. Such archives especially afford the tools to catalogue and cross reference under-examined narratives of community knowledge, and can kindle new ecosystems of storytelling and inspired research in addition to academic study. These new registers, created through digital technologies, often cross-question official narratives and enable a multiplication of viewpoints, languages and forms for the co-creation of public interest. Toward an archival commons By Venkat Srinivasan Through examples of various kinds of archival objects, this talk will be an attempt to perhaps state the obvious: that the production of knowledge is heavily dependent on what enters these spaces we occupy for research. The talk will bring out ideas from a recent art installation on the idea of an archive, where we aimed to reflect on the very existence of the archival object. Venkat will also touch upon some archival resources in the field, obstacles in getting archival material more broadly accessible and finally talk about a new collective, Milli, that we are part of. Milli is building open source tools for the public to find and annotate archival resources, along with seeing narratives develop from them. *Speakers * *Maya DoddProfessor @FLAME UniversityMaya is Professor of FLAME University. She currently serves as the Assistant Dean for Teaching, Learning and Engagement as well as the Chair of the Department of Humanities and Languages. Her recent work is featured in Exploring Digital Humanities in India: Pedagogies, Practices, and Institutional Possibilities (Routledge, 2020) Maya Dodd completed her Ph.D. from Stanford University and did subsequent post-doctoral fellowships at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at JNU, and with the Committee for South Asian Studies at Princeton University.Venkat SrinivasanArchivist @National Centre for Biological SciencesVenkat is the archivist at the Archives, National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India (http://archives.ncbs.res.in/ http://archives.ncbs.res.in/), a centre for the history of contemporary biology in India. Together with software developers at Janastu, he is also developing an archival commons to find and share archival material and narrate stories from these (http://milli.link/ http://milli.link/). Prior to this, he was a research engineer at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University (https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu/overview https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu/overview). He is an independent science writer, with work in The Atlantic and Scientific American online, Nautilus, Aeon, Wired, and the Caravan (http://porterfolio.net/vns http://porterfolio.net/vns).Tarangini Sriraman (Host)Professor @Azim Premj UniversityTarangini Sriraman's research over the last six years has been invested in the histories of identification documents in the disparate colonial and postcolonial spaces of India. She has looked at debates over the material forms, the legal and cultural aspects of identification documents at various moments like epidemic control in late 19th century India, rationing during the Second World War, compensation for Partition-displaced persons, the resettlement of slum residents post 1990 and the implications of Aadhaar for urban poor subjects. OUP India published her book 'In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India' in 2018.* -- Madhan, M -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.