Sustained Programs
Staff of the Southern Asia Department are co-organizers of an international collaboration to preserve, digitize, and make accessible audio and visual archives. The most recent event in the program combined intellectuals and practitioners in a Colombo workshop on metadata titled "Sonic and Visual South Asia in Space and Time: Connecting Objects, Texts, People and Places" with support from the University of Chicago Center in India and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. An inaugural element of the program was supported, in part, by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago.
The South Asia Open Archives Initiative is a collaborative program initiated in 2016 to create and maintain a collection of open access materials for the study of South Asia. The Initiative is addressing the current scarcity of digital resources for South Asian studies and making collections more widely accessible to researchers worldwide.