Digital Himalaya and the Collaborative Publishing Experience

Abstract

Digital Himalaya, an online repository of ethnographic and scholarly materials focusing on India, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Tibetan Plateau, was partly inspired by an anomaly in anthropological scholarship. Anthropologist and linguist (Yale and Cambridge) Mark Turin describes how in the 1990s he and his colleagues observed that even though anthropologists [and funders] were becoming ever more concerned about cultural endangerment . . . very few social scientists were working to ensure that anthropological collections from previous generations were maintained, refreshed and made accessible, both to the research community and to the descendants of the people from whom the materials were collected. [Turin 2011a:40]