The Beloved Witness project is a Mellon-funded digital archive of the video-taped readings, personal documents, letters, and manuscripts of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001). New technologies will organize, display and allow interaction with the archive from multiple formats and devices, including materials for mobile devices. Our aim is to show how technology might be used to reveal what is unique in a poet's oeuvre and how teaching and literary scholarship in a digital environment allow a new globalized approach to poetry and culture. Ali's life and work offer an exemplary model for humanists to bear "witness" to a world of lost tribes, of political and ethnic conflicts, of the pain of exile and of the possibility for transformation and reconciliation.
The archive is a collaborative effort which will expand through contributions of letters, documents, critical perspectives and creative responses from colleagues, friends and readers of Shahid's works. One of the goals of the archive is to assemble an advisory committee to help identify ways of building a community of Shahid's readers in South Asia and around the world.
Principal Investigators
Patricia O'Neill, Ph.D.
Professor of English and Creative Writing
poneill@hamilton.edu
Hena Ahmad, Ph.D.
Professor of English, Truman State University
hahmad@truman.edu
Material Donors
Iqbal Agha Ali, Ph.D.
Professor of Operations Management; Department Chairman
Isenberg School of Management
Hena Ahmad, Ph.D.
Professor of English, Truman State University
DHi Co-Directors
Angel David Nieves, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Digital Humanities Initiative, Hamilton College
anieves@hamilton.edu
Janet Thomas Simons, M.S.
Co-Director, Digital Humanities Initiative, Hamilton College
jsimons@hamilton.edu
DHi Collection Development Team
Gregory Lord
Lead Designer & Software Engineer, Digital Humanities Initiative, Hamilton College
glord@hamilton.edu
Peter MacDonald
Library Information Systems Specialist, Hamilton College
pmacdona@hamilton.edu
Lisa McFall
Metadata and Catalog Librarian, Hamilton College
lmcfall@hamilton.edu
Steve Young
ITS Network Services Unix/HPC System Administrator, Hamilton College
slyoung@hamilton.edu