A homecoming for Digital Himalaya

Almost a quarter of a century ago, in December 2000, a group of four anthropologists and historians at the University of Cambridge set out to explore new methods for collecting, protecting and connecting historical multimedia collections relating to the Himalayan region in ways that would widen access to the materials through emerging digital platforms. 

Sarah Harrison, Alan Macfarlane, Sara Shneiderman and I named this pilot project ‘Digital Himalaya’. We began by digitising older sets of ethnographic data held in European collections to protect them from obsolescence and decay, forward migrate them as new standards emerged, and share them back with originating communities in the Himalayan region and with scholars everywhere through the web and other appropriate and increasingly accessible digital platforms.

The collections that we host have grown over the years, as has the geographic reach of our project and the network of partner institutions with whom we are affiliated. In all, the Digital Himalaya Project has widened and deepened over time, connecting with new audiences and users online and in person.

Digital Himalaya is now, by any estimation, a ‘mature’ Digital Humanities project. It emerged before Google was a household name and long before the term Digital Humanities had much traction. The very survival of Digital Himalaya for these 25 years is an indication of its staying power and endurance. 

That Digital Himalaya is still ‘here’ after all these years (wherever ‘here’ is in these ambiguously-sited digital spaces) when so many other projects of a similar vintage have folded, tells us something about agility and resilience.

The Digital Himalaya project has repeatedly had to make a virtue of a necessity. Born at Cambridge, the project moved to Cornell University from 2002 to 2005, where it also began its collaboration with the University of Virginia funded by a grant from the US Department of Education Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access Program.

The project then returned to Cambridge until 2009 when it moved, briefly, to Yale University but without any structural and formal support. From July 2014, the project relocated to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and became engaged in a loose collaboration with China’s Sichuan University.

In each case, rather like being part of a large extended and multigenerational family, these alliances helped to demonstrate to our partners, patrons and ourselves that we were mobile and could bend as new opportunities arose, and harness the particular skills and assets in each institution: Nepali language instruction at Cornell, Tibetan Studies at the University of Virginia, community engagement at the University of British Columbia. 

In 2024 Digital Himalaya developed a partnership with Archive Nepal, a non-profit entity that has taken over the day-to-day management and future developments of Digital Himalaya.

I have been worrying about the future of Digital Himalaya from the moment that I helped bring it into being. I was at once delighted that we were in a position to help protect, connect and digitally repatriate these precious collections and at the same time troubled by the fact that, once again, the initiative was housed at an elite Western university far from the communities whose cultural heritage we had the honour and responsibility of managing. I was also acutely aware that I embarked on the Digital Himalaya journey long before I had a permanent job adding an additional layer of vulnerability to an already somewhat fragile undertaking. 

Over the last decade, I have been principally concerned with two matters when it came to Digital Himalaya. First, ensuring that our collections were stable, secure and accessible to communities in the Himalayan region. Second, to find a way to make myself dispensable and disposable.

It was always our intention that one day the collection would either be repatriated to the Himalayan region or maintained and managed by professionals from the region. In April 2022, I was approached by Monish Singh, Founder and Executive Director of a new initiative called Archive Nepal, a non-profit based in New York and Kathmandu registered with the Social Welfare Council of Nepal. 

Its mission is to encourage the understanding of Nepal’s rich history and culture by curating, digitising, and improving accessibility to digital resources. Archive Nepal is run by an impressive collective of professional Nepalis with backgrounds in project management, software development, archives and information management, data visualisation, data analysis, and data migration. 

Our first partnership involved cohosting the Nepali Times collection which was such a success that we entered into a wide-ranging conversation about the Archive Nepal team taking over the management and maintenance of the Digital Himalaya website to ensure its continued accessibility.

On 29 May 2024, day-to-day management of Digital Himalaya was handed over to Archive Nepal. It was always the dream of the founders that Digital Himalaya would one day be run by professionals from the Himalayan region, and in Archive Nepal, we found just the partner we had been hoping for. 

Digital Himalaya was established to engage in a process of ethical connection and return, ensuring that the historical documentation of Himalayan cultures, languages and publications would be available to communities from the Himalayan region itself, whether online, in print or through local databases. 

Archive Nepal’s mission is closely aligned with ours: to encourage the understanding of Nepal’s rich history and culture by curating, digitising, and improving access to digital resources.

Beginnings are generally easier than endings, whether in relationships or projects. People generally don’t like to talk about endings as these are usually synonymous with death and decline, but those of us active in digital spaces must think critically about not only how we bring things into existence and life, but also how we bring them to a close. 

Creating dependencies in which projects (or children) cannot live without the people (or parents) who created them is not a position that should be fostered or cultivated, but rather an unfortunate by-product of unhealthy attachment styles and people becoming overly invested in their roles, authorities and importance.

Rather like the phoenix of ancient Greek mythology, I have now come to think of Digital Himalaya as an undertaking that will be cyclically regenerated and reborn, gaining new life by rising from the ashes of its earlier incarnation, under new management, as it were, at each transition.

As Kahlil Gibran so tenderly wrote, ‘You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.’ This is as true for the work we do as it is for the families of which we are part. With anticipation and excitement, I look forward to the next incarnation of Digital Himalaya under the leadership of Archive Nepal.

To look at the PDF archives of Nepali Times from #0 till this week, go to www.nepalitimes and click on the Archive dropdown menu.