Introduction: Continuing Community Collaborations and the Transient Digital

54 Interface Pasang Yangjee Sherpa Introduction: Continuing Community Collaborations and the Transient Digital Interface provides “a space to highlight digital humanities projects that span both Asian American and Asian studies” (Koh 2015, 98). Specifically, Interface prioritizes digital cultural production and research about and by Asian and Asian diasporic scholars to showcase the extensive work currently being undertaken in this field (98). For this special issue of Verge, we explore digital humanities projects within Himalayan studies through Digital Himalaya and Voices of the Himalaya. In the following essays, team members from these projects share their experiences. In his essay on Digital Himalaya, Mark Turin reflects on community, continuity, and collaboration. Digital Himalaya is a web portal for historical multimedia collections relating to the Himalayan region. Turin discusses changing user demographics, constructive community responses, shifting expectations about the portal’s services and role, and the future of this collaborative partnership. According to Google Analytics records, since 2005, the Digital Himalaya website has had more than five hundred thousand unique “sessions.” Google (2017) defines a session as “a group of user interactions with [the] website that take place within a given time frame.” A single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and e-­commerce transactions. Users of the Digital Himalaya website have been from Nepal (19 percent), the United States (16 percent), India (10 percent), and the United Kingdom (8 percent). In their essay on the project titled Voices of the Himalaya, Nawang Gurung, Ross Perlin, Daniel Kaufman, Mark Turin, and Sienna R. Craig describe their collaborative process of documenting Himalayan voices in New York City. Their project recognizes the challenges of migration and the assimilation of thousands of Himalayan individuals from specific ethnic communities who have settled in New York City. The project is guided Interface 55 by the questions of how Himalayan New Yorkers are finding a sense of community as they navigate new transnational and intergenerational cultural dynamics and respond to the shifting relationships between “home” and being “over here” in New York. Connections between language , culture, and migration are central to this project. In the essay, the authors discuss how their work at once coheres with and departs from traditional language documentation efforts. Instead of focusing on one marginalized speech or valorizing language endangerment, the project showcases compelling stories of everyday life that capture aspects of happiness and suffering as well as those that are sensitive to politics of self-­ representation. This novel approach makes its contributions to understanding transnational Himalayan lives today invaluable. In little more than a year, this project has produced twenty-­five short videos and made them available to the public through YouTube and social media sites. As of November 2017, the Voices of the Himalaya videos have been viewed on YouTube more than seventy thousand times. Their viewership includes approximately 33 percent from the United States, 15 percent from Bhutan , 14 percent from India, and 6 percent each from Nepal, Switzerland, and Canada. In both essays, common themes of collaborative effort, community engagement, and “creative exploration of the potential” surface. The Digital Himalaya Project was initiated by a group of four anthropologists and historians at the University of Cambridge to explore ways that would widen access to the Himalayan multimedia materials through emerging digital platforms. Similarly, a team of five anthropologists, activists, and linguists started Voices of the Himalaya to reach a wider audience through newer platforms. The Interface contributions presented herein also bring out the question of sustainability that lurks amid the progress and promise the programs represent. Whether it is the seventeen-­year-­old Digital Himalaya or the one-­year-­old Voices of the Himalaya, they inevitably have to deal with the financial and technical challenges of keeping the programs running. In Himalayan Anthropology: The Indo-­ Tibetan Interface, James Fisher (1978, 2) remarked on the need for clearing ethnographic provincialism and to make scholarly communication possible for the vast majority, who tended to work on one side of the mountain more than the other. Fisher was referring to those working with communities living on the southern, northern, eastern or western side of the Himalayas. He was also responding to the scholarly scene of forty years ago, before electricity had...

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