Values Statement
The Cornelia Sorabji digital humanities project is a continuation of the work established by the One More Voice project where the lives and the works of minoritized voices from the nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives become the center of attention. It attempts to give more exposure to the contributions of Cornelia Sorabji as the process of presenting some contextual information about the author and her works using digital platforms will ensure that more people, especially those in the academic field, will have access to these materials and are capable of engaging them in ways that further broadens the scope of related scholarship.
The project aims at creating an open sphere that can help expand such scholarship through providing access to the materials of which the project is composed and allowing future contributions to the project. In that light, Lisa Spiro (n.d.) suggests that "instead of trying to pigeonhole digital humanities by prescribing particular methods or theoretical approaches, we can instead focus on a community that comes together around values such as openness and collaboration".
The openness of the project is very important feature that can make it more accessible to users and possible future contributors. Being a satellite project that stems from One More Voice, this project will support the vision of OMV by taking into consideration what Jeremy Boggs, Jennifer Reed, and J. K. Purdom Lindblad (n.d.) suggest in terms of being aware that we are "caretakers of content, not owners or custodians who exert rights on archival materials".
Given the background of Cornelia Sorabji as an Indian Christian woman who was active during the Britain's colonization of India, it is necessary to emphasize the role she played through her social activism and her profession as the first Indian female lawyer. Even though she is a proponent of the British Raj, most of her work is mainly focused on women's rights in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century India.
Engaging such points in the project is one of the ways through which we can ensure that there is transparency as the website simultaneously focuses on the positive and negative, which is fully supporting foreign rule of her country, aspects of Soabji's political views (Boggs, Redd & Lindblad n.d.). Working on such a project also necessitates looking at the author's works and views from different perspectives in order to account for the factors that have might have affected how these works are presented by the author and received by the reader. For instance, this will include focusing on how Cornelia Sorabji's views collided with those of prominent Indian figures like Mahatma Gandhi.
Therefore, presenting some excerpts from her work, especially her autobiography titled India Calling, will provide the website user with an overview of the text along with some key quotations that relate to some of the important topics the text is discussing. Since the website focuses on Sorabji's life and work, I chose to include some scholarly articles that have different perspectives through which her work and her political feud with other activists, like Gandhi, in order to ensure that the website user can easily access such materials which can further contextualize such important occurrences that matter to the history of India under British colonization.