Faculty at School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Vinayak Das Gupta

Vinayak Das Gupta

Associate Professor

School of Humanities and Social Sciences


Contact Information

My research engages with the ways in which technologies, especially those concerned with language, memory, and classification, mediate the human experience of history. I work across digital humanities, public memory, and archival theory, with a particular emphasis on infrastructures. These may be technical infrastructures (algorithms, platforms), institutional infrastructures (evaluation systems, grant protocols), or affective infrastructures (care, belief, habit).

One strand of my work investigates how computational models of language, such as topic modelling, can be made intelligible in low-resource languages like Bengali. I am interested in interpretability, not simply as a technical challenge but as a philosophical and pedagogical one. How do we make pattern-seeking systems legible to those unfamiliar with statistical reasoning? What forms of visualisation can support critical reading rather than obscure it?

Another strand focuses on digital curation and public history. I have been involved in the design and development of online archives, most notably Recalling Jewish Calcutta, and continue to reflect on the ethical and infrastructural dimensions of building public memory online. My collaborative work on Letters of 1916 explored how historical correspondence can be made visible through experimental visualisation and geospatial tools. Many of these projects were explicitly participatory, involving public contributors and community members in the act of annotation and curation, thus reframing the archive as a shared, rather than sealed, space.

I also write on material culture and photography, with a focus on the fragmentary life of images and the interpretive challenges they pose. My work has examined colonial-era photographs as synecdochic objects: images that gesture toward absence, rupture, and the impossibility of complete recovery. I reflect on the curatorial possibilities of thematic arrangement in the face of archival loss. I have explored how mismatched captions, incomplete metadata, and handwritten annotations complicate the legibility of family photographs and private albums. Across these essays, I attend to the tactile, visual, and mnemonic dimensions of photographic materials, and the ways in which they persist as anchors of memory even when severed from their original contexts.

Across all these domains, my research is guided by a concern with care: how knowledge is held, transmitted, and transformed across systems that are often fragile or incomplete.

  • PhD in Digital Humanities, Trinity College Dublin
    Thesis: From Evidence to Essence: Curating Thematic Collections with Photographs from the British Raj
  • MA in English Literature, Jadavpur University
  • BA (Hons.) in English Literature, Jadavpur University

02/17 08/17 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Maynooth University, Ireland

02/16 02/17 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Maynooth University, Ireland

10/15 02/16 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Maynooth University, Ireland

03/11 07/11 Project Fellow, Jadavpur University, Calcutta

  • TEI-C Research Grant, 2018
  • Postdoctoral Research Award, DARIAH-EU, 2017
  • Open Education Grant, DARIAH-EU, 2017
  • Nominee, Paul Fortier Prize, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, 2016
  • Postdoctoral Research Award, Digital Repository of Ireland, 2015
  • Digital Arts and Humanities Scholarship, Higher Education Authority of Ireland, 2011

  • Das Gupta, Vinayak. ‘Memories and Mixed Media: the Event and the Archive.’ Cinema and the Indian National Emergency, eds. Parichay Patra and Dibyakusum Ray. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
  • Das Gupta, Vinayak. ‘Jewish Calcutta, Recalled: Lessons from Building a Digital Public Memory Resource.’ Practices of Digital Humanities in India: Learning by Doing, eds. Maya Dodd and Nirmala Menon. London: Routledge, 2024. DOI: 10.4324/9781003325239
  • Das Gupta, Vinayak, Neale Rooney, and Susan Schreibman. ‘Notes from the Transcription Desk: Modes of Engagement between the Community and the Resource of the Letters of 1916.’ English Studies, vol. 98, Taylor and Francis, 2017. DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2017.1333754
  • Das Gupta, Vinayak. ‘Albums in the Attic: An Investigation of Photographic Metadata.’ Studia Digitalia, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 57–74.
  • Das Gupta, Vinayak. ‘The Aftermath of Digitisation: Studying the Synecdochic Photograph from the British Raj.’ Critical Imprints, Department of English, Loreto College, Kolkata, 2015. Print.
  • Das Gupta, Vinayak. ‘Photographs of the Kolkata Book Trade.’ In Kolkata, Book City: Readings, Fragments and Images, eds. Jennie Renton and Sria Chatterjee. Edinburgh: Textualities, 2009. Print.

anvay: A Bengali Topic Modelling Dashboard
Conceptualised and developed at Shiv Nadar University, 2023–present
Anvay is a web-based tool for exploring latent thematic patterns in Bengali corpora using topic modelling. Designed for both researchers and non-specialists, it combines interactive visualisations with interpretability-focused reporting. The platform includes detailed documentation that introduces users to the basics of topic modelling and corpus preparation, making it a pedagogical as well as analytical resource. Anvay reflects an ongoing concern with building accessible digital infrastructures for low-resource languages.

Humanities at Scale
Researcher, Maynooth University, Ireland, 2017
An open-source, multilingual platform designed to support community-driven e-learning in the digital arts and humanities. The project focused on building sustainable infrastructure for pedagogy and training in digital methods across European institutions.

Letters of 1916
Software developer, Maynooth University, Ireland, 2015–2017
Ireland’s first public digital humanities project, Letters of 1916 created a crowd-sourced digital archive of letters written between 1 November 1915 and 31 October 1916. The project brought together materials from institutional and private collections, covering a range of topics including the Easter Rising, the Great War, literature, politics, and daily life. The project was collaborative, participatory, and critically engaged with questions of access and representation.

Recalling Jewish Calcutta
Curator, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 2014
A public memory project documenting the history of the Baghdadi Jewish community in Calcutta. Combining oral histories, photographs, and artefacts, the project offers a layered portrait of a diasporic community and its archival afterlife.

The Thomas MacGreevy Archive
Curator, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 2013
A digital archive of the Irish poet, critic, and curator Thomas MacGreevy, featuring both published and unpublished manuscripts. The archive contributes to modernist studies and to the broader field of literary digital archives.

Bichitra: The Online Tagore Variorum
Project Fellow, Jadavpur University, India, 2011
The largest integrated knowledge site devoted to a single author in any language. Bichitra brings together most extant versions of Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali and English works. It includes advanced tools for textual collation, allowing users to compare different versions across editions—a major contribution to Indian textual scholarship and digital philology.

Music and Social Affect: Building Genealogies in Asia
International conference co-convened at Shiv Nadar University, 2021
Organised in collaboration with Urmila Bhirdikar (SNU) and the Music Archive of Monash University, this international conference brought together scholars, artists, and archivists to explore the genealogical and affective dimensions of music-making in Asia. The event created a space for critical conversations across musicology, ethnography, and sonic archives.

Invited Lectures and Panels

  • “Mathematization of the Arts”
    Plenary Address, DHARTI Biennial Conference, 2024
  • “Online Repositories and Disclosure”
    Panelist, Workshop on Science, Technology and Democracy in Contemporary India, CSDS, 2021
  • “Archives and Afterlives: Literary Studies Now”
    Panelist, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), 2021
  • “Humanities, Technology, and Publicly Engaged Research”
    Lecture, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, 2019
  • “Easter 1916: An Interpretation of Correspondence Networks in Ireland”
    Speaker, National Conference on Cross-disciplinary Applications of Complex Networks, Shiv Nadar University, 2018

Workshops and Training (Instructor Roles)

  • Digital Humanities Winter School
    Instructor, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, 2025
  • Digital Humanities Summer School
    Instructor, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania 2015
  • Data Visualisation Workshop
    Instructor, Trinity College Dublin, 2015
  • Data-Driven Humanities Workshop
    Instructor, Queen’s University Belfast, 2015

Academic Service and Governance

  • Elected Member, Governing Body, DHARTI (Digital Humanities Alliance of Research and Teaching Innovations in India)
  • Curriculum Reviewer, M.Sc. Digital Humanities Programme, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, 2020
  • Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) – Grant Reviewer, 2025
  • Science Foundation Ireland & Irish Research Council (SFI–IRC Pathway Programme) – Grant Reviewer, 2022
  • Science Foundation Ireland & Irish Research Council (SFI–IRC Pathway Programme) – Grant Reviewer, 2021
  • UK–Ireland Collaboration in Digital Humanities (AHRC–UKRI and IRC) – Grant Reviewer, 2021