Posted on 14, Aug 2012

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE IN THE INTERNET AGE

Reflections on 12 Years of the Digital Himalaya Project
A Talk by Mark Turin

In 2000, Digital Himalaya began as a strategy for collecting and protecting the products of historical ethnographic collections of maps, films, photographs and textual documents on or from the Himalayas–for posterity and for access by heritage communities. The project has now become a collaborative digital publishing environment, bringing a new collection online every month, with close to half a million web visitors since its establishment in 2000. In today’s talk, I reflect on this extraordinary digital decade and imagine how the project might develop in the future.

Mark Turin is a linguist and anthropologist who has been working in Nepal since 1992. He holds joint appointments at the universities of Cambridge and Yale- writing on and teaching ethnolinguistics, visual anthropology, digital archives and fieldwork methodology. He also directs both the World Oral Literature Project and the Digital Himalaya Project. He is the author or coauthor of four books, the editor of five volumes and has published numerous articles and book chapters.