The Role of Digital Humanities in Fostering Open Knowledge
Authors: Kar, Sanjoy
Type: Journal article
Published: 2026-08-01
Keywords: Open Knowledge, Open Access, Digital Preservation, Digital Archives, Knowledge Democratisation, Humanities Computing, Information Justice, Knowledge Commons, Text Encoding Initiative, Global South Scholarship, Vernacular Digitisation, Manuscript Culture, Cultural Heritage Digitisation, Knowledge Infrastructure

<p class="MsoNormal">Knowledge has always carried both a promise of liberation and a history of control. From the oral traditions of the ancient world to the manuscript cultures of medieval scholarship, and from the print revolution to the present digital moment, each transformation in how knowledge is produced and shared has also reshaped who gets to hold it. This paper examines the role of <em>Digital Humanities</em> (DH) in the wider movement toward open knowledge, tracing a long arc from Roberto Busa's early experiments in humanities computing to the present landscape of open access publishing, digital archives, and national knowledge infrastructures. It argues that DH is not simply a technical adaptation of older scholarly methods but a genuine rethinking of how knowledge is produced, preserved, and made available across languages, regions, and communities.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The paper begins by situating open knowledge within a philosophical and ethical frame, asking who benefits when knowledge becomes digitally abundant and whether openness in a technical sense automatically translates into openness in a social or cultural sense. It then traces the historical passage from oral and manuscript knowledge systems through the print revolution, showing how the printing press reorganised both the language and the politics of knowledge, giving rise to newspapers, public opinion, and eventually to the modern research university. From there, the discussion moves into the twentieth century, following the emergence of humanities computing, the Text Encoding Initiative, and landmark digital archives such as Perseus, the Rossetti Archive, and the William Blake Archive, before turning to the open access movement associated with arXiv, the Budapest and Berlin declarations, and platforms such as SciELO and Redalyc.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A substantial part of the paper is devoted to the Indian context, where DH has developed alongside a linguistically and culturally diverse knowledge tradition. It surveys major national initiatives including the Digital Library of India, the National Digital Library of India, Shodhganga, e-ShodhSindhu, and the recent One Nation One Subscription scheme, alongside institutional efforts such as the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University and its Bichitra project on Rabindranath Tagore. Regional disparities in infrastructure and language support are noted as an ongoing concern, particularly for north-eastern India.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The paper closes with a discussion of digital ethics, arguing that questions of access, ownership, and interpretive authority remain central to any serious account of open knowledge. It suggests that DH, understood in this way, offers not just new tools but a renewed ethical framework for scholarship, one that treats knowledge as a shared and evolving inheritance rather than a fixed possession. The paper concludes that the future of humanities scholarship will depend on how successfully these technical, cultural, and political dimensions of openness are brought into dialogue with one another.</p>