KIIT School of Languages Organizes Online Lecture on ‘World Literatures and Web 2.0’
An Online Lecture on “World Literatures and Web 2.0” by Dr. Koel Mitra from the Department of English, The Neotia University was organized by the School of Languages, KIIT Deemed to be University on August 17, 2021.
The lecture aimed to explore the relationship between the interconnections among different literary fields and cultures and the interactive platform of Web 2.0. Dr. Mitra is an awardee of gold medals in both the graduation and postgraduate degrees from Jadavpur University. She has completed a PG Diploma in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics in the First Class, and has been working in the education management industry for over eight years and is skilled in setting up departments of English at both college and university levels. She pursued her PhD in Digital Humanities from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University.
Dr. Mitra began the lecture by defining Web 2.0 as a multidirectional model where the server and the user both can contribute, as opposed to the unidirectional model of Web 1.0. She clarified that instead of discussing the digital archives and digitization processes of literary and non-literary texts which are few of the common research areas in the field of digital humanities, she would be focusing on digital writing and how it changed the notion of authorship and copyright, as it has been understood by conventional market.
The lecture addressed the issues of collaborative authorship and the way it challenged the traditional method of reading and readership, where the typicality of context-text-supplement is questioned and reversed. Dr. Mitra used the example of the multilingual platform of Wikipedia, where multiple authors contribute to creating a text, the language is standardized and the readers are allowed to modify the content.
The lecture was followed by a lively interaction session and many from the audience asked questions on field literature as well as digital humanities. To answer a question on the availability and accessibility of digital media to the indigenous communities of different countries, Dr. Mitra acknowledged the existence of the digital divide and said that the divide existed even before the advent of the internet. However, she expressed her hope that one day, people would overcome the divide and welcome Web 3.0. She also addressed questions on the issues of surveillance and moderation in Web 2.0.
The Online Lecture was attended by people from different Educational Institutes from India and abroad and all of them expressed their willingness to attend more of such lectures and webinars. The event was moderated by Ms. Prerna Guha, a student of M.A. in English, KIIT-DU. The poster of the Webinar was designed by Ms. Vaishali Gupta, M.A. English and logistics were handled by Ms. Shatabdi Mishra, M.A. English.
The event was graced by Dr. Biswajit Das, Dean, School of Languages and other faculty members from the School. The Online Lecture was organized and curated by Dr. Gourab Chatterjee, Assistant Professor, School of Languages.