As we wade through the murky waters of the generative AI era, and the ingestion and regurgitation of information by large language models, the need to create new archives through human intervention has increased. In recent decades as the digital textual paradigm has taken shape, digital archives have come to play a more important role in helping readers access and interpret texts; the creation of new archives has become a legitimate intervention especially by the scholars from minoritized communities and the Global South. Archives such as Bichitra Project (on Tagore) and, more recently, Bhashavaad are bound to change the scholarship on Tagore and translation from South Asia. Similarly, scholars in their individual capacity and with institutional support are either creating new archives or working with archives focused on marginal literary figures and literature. Right from Rekhta, which archives Urdu writings to Hindwi documenting writings in Hindi to the Tamil archive Project Madurai, these initiatives not only challenge the traditional methods but also presents new problems in archiving. 

This seminar invites scholars and creators who work with digital archives either in terms of analysis or creating a new artefact. The reason to focus on the nuts and bolts of creating something is significant as it underlines the labor, coordination, and time taken to search, verify, imagining, thinking and execution of a workflow. In academic scholarship, at times the analysis, or the theoretical paradigm takes the center stage. The process of archiving is equally important as it forces scholars to think about curation, presentation and inquire about different questions through data points which enriches the close reading. In this era of artificial intelligence where all our knowledge is crawled and trawled, it is important to understand how building a new knowledge-pool makes scholars think critically in multiple directions. 

Amardeep Singh points out that there is an “archival gap” in existing archives whereas Roopika Risam contends that creation of digital artefacts should be seen as a postcolonial intervention. The field of digital humanities for long has focused on the computational methods to read texts in newer ways but the need and significance of creative new archives have been underlined by many scholars as they have indicated the ‘silences’, Eurocentric nature and at times total absence of archives and materials from the peripheral cultures and languages. The seminar invites digital scholars working on Global South texts to think about the process, present their archives and underline the significance of these archives on a global scale.