Hello, everyone! My name is Ritesh Khandelwal and I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Michigan State University. My research lies in comics studies, specifically the transnational dynamics of comics publishing, and popular culture studies at large, including film and media studies. My proposed dissertation will focus on the affective impact of defunct comics intellectual property (IP).
Digital heritage was an integral part of my understanding around what is now poised to be my dissertation, even if I did not have the academic vocabulary to articulate it as such at the time. Being fifteen years old and contending with disappearing comics publications around me may have had something to do with the vocabulary issue. In essence, my research comes from my own experiences of reading international comics made available at cheap prices across local newsstands, making them a tangible source of a wider cultural appreciation for children and young adults growing up in India. From that fleeting context, I view digital methods as indispensable tools for the preservation, analysis, and dissemination of cultural heritage. Digital methods offer powerful opportunities to safeguard fragile artifacts, uncover hidden patterns in vast datasets, and democratize access to knowledge. Specifically, within the realm of defunct comics, digital methods are not merely advantageous but absolutely essential.
“My research comes from my own experiences of reading international comics made available at cheap prices across local newsstands, making them a tangible source of a wider cultural appreciation for children and young adults growing up in India.”
Many of the comics and related publishing ephemera I study are exceedingly rare, physically fragile, and geographically dispersed, rendering traditional archival research incredibly challenging. Digital archiving, encompassing high-resolution scanning, meticulous metadata creation, and robust database management, becomes the primary means of ensuring these invaluable cultural artifacts survive for future generations and are accessible for scholarly inquiry. This is also the reason I was ecstatic to be offered a place at Michigan State University (MSU) in the first place, due to its comics archives housed in the Special Collections at the MSU Libraries.
The CHI Fellowship represents an ideal, indeed critical, next step in my professional and scholarly development. The fellowship’s commitment to the development of a “significant and innovative digital cultural heritage project” is particularly appealing to me, offering a structured environment, expert mentorship, and dedicated resources to bring my envisioned digital archive or interactive exhibit of defunct comics to a public outcome. This personal project component will ensure that this overlooked cultural heritage is accessible to a wider audience.
Recent Comments