Discostan and Hamnawa: Between erasure and preservation in South Asian digital diasporic archives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines how South Asian archivists in the North American diaspora engage with endangered and lost media, constructing informal, vernacular archives that embody narratives of belonging, change, and displacement. Focusing on the preservation of endangered musical media, it reveals how these archivists challenge dominant Western frameworks of categorization and representation. Through case studies of Discostan and Hamnawa, the essay demonstrates how diaspora-led efforts fill the gaps left by insufficient preservation practices in India and Pakistan. Using Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) and semi-structured interviews, the research explores how digital tools influence social memory. It also examines the “double helix” model of digital cultural memory, where one strand emphasizes remixing and transformation, while the other focuses on preservation. These initiatives blur the lines between creation and preservation, highlighting the evolving relationship between digital culture, memory, and media in diasporic contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".