Where scanning is the new spinning

Mahatma Gandhi believed in bread labour, the idea that people should perform physical work to earn their daily sustenance. He saw it as a way of reducing social inequality. A Bengaluru-based non-profit has reimagined this concept to make knowledge freely accessible. Its volunteers scan and digitise books, gazettes, photographs and other materials housed within institutions, “liberating” them from bureaucratic barriers, paywalls or copyright restrictions.Servants of Knowledge (SoK) was founded in 2018 by American technologist Carl Malamud and Bengaluru-based digital archivist Omshivaprakash H L. The initiative has since hosted 1.75 lakh books and manuscripts on the Internet Archive, an open-access digital library. This Gandhi Jayanti, Metrolife highlights its efforts to make “Gandhi studies and research publicly available in the digital era”.The JaiGyan collection on the Internet Archive alone contains more than 20,000 search results related to Gandhi. These span the Hind Swaraj section, digitised from Carl’s personal archives, and 1,399 works from Gandhi Bhavan Bengaluru. The latter includes early editions of ‘Indian Opinion’, the weekly newspaper Gandhi published in South Africa, and his autobiography, ‘My Experiments with Truth’. “Most works were by or about Gandhi, or referred to him. They ranged from his collected works and biographies to personal accounts, books on freedom fighters and Kannada translations,” Omshivaprakash recalls.The partnership with Gandhi Bhavan began four years ago, when SoK scanned around 100 of its publications. The institution wanted “to take Gandhi’s literature to more people”. It subsequently invited the team to digitise material from three of its libraries. For two and a half years, a 15-member team worked on-site with high-resolution scanners, processing 15 lakh pages a month. “We have digitised over 11,000 works at Gandhi Bhavan. This includes both general and Gandhi works.”Through Gandhi Bhavan, SoK collaborated with two more Gandhian institutions in Hyderabad and Madurai. This enabled them to archive Telugu- and Tamil-language works related to Gandhi. During the same period, SoK digitised 4,300 MPhil and PhD theses submitted to Kannada University, Hampi. A little over 1,000 of them mentioned Gandhi or Gandhian institutions. “That tells us something about Gandhi’s place in research and the public consciousness,” Omshivaprakash says. Emphasising the lasting impact of the “Gandhian way of living”, science communicator and Kannada writer Kollegala Sharma would tell the team that Gram Swaraj, or village self-governance, paved the way for the adoption of technologies such as solar energy in rural India.SoK is currently digitising more than 20,000 negatives from the pre-Independence era. The photographs were taken by Narayan Rao Kulkarni of Kalanidhi Photo Studio in Bijapur and shared by his granddaughter, Madhuri Katti. They include some rare photographs of Gandhi. “He had accompanied Gandhi from Bijapur all the way to Bangladesh.”For the team, “scanning is the new spinning”, a form of labour that can feed society intellectually. They are, thus, keen to work with more Gandhi-related institutions. “Gandhi would have liked knowledge to spread. As a typesetter, he used the power of journalism to communicate ideas to people.”Visit archive.org

Source: Deccan Herald