• I was in Kundapura Taluka for 2 days, working in the Samagra Arogya ref 1, ref2 cluster of villages. We were setting up the Samagra Arogya Resource Center, a place imagined to host and enable many of our engagements in the cluster.

    Archit was already there while I joined to help him with the resource center and join him on a visit to Hara. In Hara we were continuing to engage with children there to learn how they see and understand their place, and introduce them to the notion of the community network, ref1, ref2.

    This visit, we wanted to engage with digital maps and annotations as a way to record and share audio-visual narratives. I had fun struggling to explain directions and attempting to understand their descriptions of the vegetation around, I also reflected later with the complete lack of digital sounds the kids grow up under. In a internal message documenting our engagement, I write:

    Our focus today was directions, location, district, taluka, Hara, here, there, within, outside, nearby. This contains some of the conversations we and children had to communicate through descriptions over nouns. Today’s focus with the map was over trees, plants, who lives in and around them.

    I could manage conversation around these things with the help of direction-nouns from @archit , other conversations were normal, they understood me and Archit and when they didn’t id consult an offline dictionary.

    When they couldn’t communicate, they described it. Fruit names (most i could understand, when they talk about seasons, they would talk of colours) drumstick tree (what they put it in sambar and they point).

    We were using OSMAnd with a few plugins that allow audio and visual annotation.

The children show us snakeskins near a bawdi (a well) and recall the name of the snakes based off the skin
They take photographs that go onto the map
Sunrise on the way from Kundapura to Hemmadi Village in a town bus. The waters of the Varahi river bask in the red of the sun rise
We just finished putting up the Cluster map and hanging posters and Archit observes them.
the OSMAnd interface that puts video, audio, photo and text annotations directly on the map
A cluster of vegetation the children mapped
Looking North, a view from our Hemmadi Nodal Center
  • I had not been to Kundapura in many months and it appears that visiting the beach in Gangoli is a ritual everytime I am there. Those are some very fine sands. There are big crab homes and unbroken shells, and they accomodate me as I lie down. I stare at the blue sky turning pink and the waves allow my feet to sink whenever I visit them. I have only often visited beaches that sleep quietly into the evening like in Chennai. In Chennai, the beach becomes dark and the sands have grown wider because of the port. We must walk back in the dark, keep walking until we lose track of where one parked. In Gangoli we see the sun go down, and the pink is what we walk in.
I saw these beautifully formed sand bubbles on the beach near crab holes. Learnt these are balls crabs make after feeding on algae and other organisms from the sea water. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/watch-sand-bubbler-crabs-transform-a-beach-into-a-field-of-tiny-sand-balls

From a visit in October
From a visit in October
Shell hunting! Sometime in December
From a visit in October
  • I have been working with the Bidar Heritage Center Archives this week. Recataloguing and understanding Omeka S, a publishing platform for cultural archive collections. Much of the fieldwork happened in 2017 - 19, meeting with communities, people and interviews and the material has to be re-organised and re-annotated.
Eshwari handles prints

  • I have been reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath this past week. It is fiction that I am thouroughly engrossed in after a long long time. It is haunting at times and surprises me with how some sentences can be really small. On a related note, and with the happenings of the past few months across the seas. Aman wrote this, which I share without context:

    you go across the Atlantic you live in the past,

    is that not a death?

  • I have been working on the Spatial Archive of Ethno Political News Reportage. It has been nearly 2 years since I began this work. I aim to publish/share soon. There is a lot of curatorial work left.

a visual experiment with geography specific word clouds
a interface closer to release
  • I got tagged by Thejesh on a series of questions on his Blog. I respond to it here: why blog