Hi!! I’m back.
Somehow, the past few months flew by faster than anticipated, and here we are. The CHI Fellowship has just wrapped up, and I have something to show for it—something that looks kind of neat, especially for someone who started out with exactly zero coding experience. You can check out the project-in-progress here: https://madihag.github.io/Mapping-Kashmir/
This project is far from complete- what you’re seeing right now is more of a scaffolding, a living prototype that continues to evolve. I see it as an ongoing experiment in archiving, storytelling, and digital design.
As I mentioned in my last post here, Mapping Kashmir is a multi-layered digital heritage initiative that seeks to create, preserve and disseminate knowledge about Azad Kashmir—its literature, culture, history, and politics. The project is motivated by a desire to recover and foreground the region’s overlooked histories, especially given how often Azad Kashmir is invisibilized in both South Asian and global narratives. It pushes back against frameworks that flatten Kashmir’s story into just the Indo-Pakistani conflict. Instead, Mapping Kashmir foregrounds the region’s global entanglements—tracing its labor migration to Britain, the ecological displacements of dam-building, and even its entanglements in Cold War politics.
Technical Backbone
The project’s technical foundation is a custom-built website. I began with a free HTML5 template (shoutout to open source communities!) and customized it with additional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to add functionality that the base template didn’t offer. The site’s aesthetic is intentionally clean, minimal and kept keeping access concerns in mind. I know there are people who get overwhelmed by cluttered interfaces (I am one of them), so I wanted something visually simple and accessible—both for myself and for users from diverse digital literacy backgrounds as well as access needs.
Pages to Explore
1. Writings
This section is home to short essays, cultural commentaries, and literary reflections. At the moment, you’ll find two essays:
- One on the Kashmiri poet Nazir Anjum and his legacy
- Another on literary mourning as resistance—focusing on the tradition of shahr ashob in response to the displacement caused by the Mangla Dam.
Over time, I hope to grow this section by featuring more of my writing and inviting others to contribute.
2. Maps
Using StoryMapJS (developed by Knight Lab), I created an interactive visualization, which is embedded on this page. The map visualizes the migration history of Azad Kashmiris to the UK, beginning with Kashmiri lascars (sailors) in the middle to late eighteenth century and continuing with an overview of later waves of migration and connected ephemeral histories.
3. Ephemera
The ephemera section—also known as the section that tested every last ounce of my patience. It curates digitized cultural materials—photographs, documents, and scanned letters—that tell micro-histories of the region. It’s a living archive aimed at preserving Azad kashmir’s cultural memory. Technically, this section uses a responsive CSS grid to organize material. To display images in an interactive lightbox like a gallery where users could scroll horizontally , I integrated GLightbox. Working with that feature was a… character-building experience, to say the least. And suffice it to say lightboxes and modals became the bane of my coding existence.
4. History + Intro
These pages provide context—framing the project, outlining the stakes.
Challenges and What’s next
Like a lot of digital humanities projects, this one had to be scaled down from the original proposal to fit into the length of the fellowship. Some of the most ambitious features—like geospatial mapping and network visualizations of literary correspondence—are still on my to-do list.
One of the biggest hurdles has been access: many key archives are private and located in Azad Kashmir, and interviewing certain interlocutors has proven challenging across time zones and borders. As a result, data collection has been slow and much more labor-intensive than I anticipated.
I’m planning to pick that thread back up over the summer. My next goal is to map the literary and political entanglements between Azad Kashmir and other global resistance movements during the Cold War era.
Closing Thoughts
As someone who started this fellowship knowing nothing about code, I’m very proud of my learning, growth and what I was able to build over the course of this fellowship,
Over the summer, I’ll continue developing Mapping Kashmir. My immediate focus is on mapping the literary and political connections between Azad Kashmir and other resistance contexts during the Cold War era. This phase will combine archival recovery with spatial storytelling and (hopefully!) more advanced digital visualizations.
My sincere gratitude to LEADR and the fellowship’s brilliant PIs Drs. Gillian MacDoanld and Ethan Watrall for this opportunity and for their mentorship. And a big shout-out to my wildly smart and supportive cohort: Madison, Riley, Priyanka, Morgan, Ashley, and Marissa, for being the most warm, funny, and generous group of colleagues one could ever ask for.
That’s all from me—from here. Hop onto Mapping Kashmir and let’s interact there!
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