Murali’s “Visualizing the Interwoven World” Receives Grants from AIIS

Dr. Deepthi Murali has received a Digital India Learning Scholarship grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies in support of a new digital art history project. Visualizing the Interwoven World of Eighteenth-Century Indian Textiles will collate and analyze more than five hundred images and associated metadata of South Indian textiles from publicly accessible museum collections to produce a searchable aggregated database on these textiles, the first of its kind. The project will also publish interpretive results on patterns of use, circulation routes of textiles and merchant communities, and centers of production. Digital output will include data visualization in the form of interactive maps, visual charts, blogs, and audio recordings. This is a pilot project for a larger born-digital project on the material histories of Indian Ocean World with a focus on South Asia. The work for this project will take place over 2020 and 2021.

After receiving her PhD in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dr. Murali joined RRCHNM as a postdoc. She is an expert on the history of the art in India, and she has contributed to a number of digital art history and digital history projects at RRCHNM and other institutions, including World History Commons, the Masala History Podcast, the Humanities Without Walls Consortium Podcast, and the Consolation Prize Podcast.

Hanging Depicting a European Conflict in South India, before 1763, southeast India (for the British market), Cotton, plain weave (drawn and painted, mordant and resist dyed), 296.5×261.6cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 2014.88).