The women of Miranda House: Building archival collections, digital humanities and feminist digital history

These notes are based on an ongoing project for building an archive of a premier women’s college, Miranda House (established 1948), University of Delhi. We begin with a brief overview of the processes and methodologies involved in identifying materials to shape our collection, discuss processes of cataloguing, digitization, planning digital collections and a website. Our collection lies at the cusp of being an institutional archive, women’s archive, archive of college women as well as an archive for doing public history. Despite the challenges of infrastructure, trained staff, technological expertise, digital humanities offer us immensely exciting possibilities. We use social media to reach out to alumni to build our collections, social media presence to showcase our materials, digital tools to widen access, share skills and create awareness regarding the significance of archiving the history of college women. Our attempts at DH have been quite successful. However, as DH opens up a plethora of opportunities, doing digital history also has its methodological challenges as well as conceptual and financial concerns for feminist projects like ours.