Design, implement, and evaluate a digital archive of minority religious practices in urban India

Thesis Abstract

This study addresses the erosion of visibility and accessibility of minority religious practices in urban India by designing, implementing, and evaluating a digital archive that aggregately documents rituals, sites, artefacts, oral histories, and contemporary expressions across multiple metropolitan contexts. The aim is to create an open-access, interoperable digital repository that enables ethnographic documentation, community participation, and scholarly analysis, while ensuring ethical governance and sustainability. Specific objectives are to (1) map urban minority religious communities and their practices in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru; (2) develop a standards-aligned metadata schema and digital ontology for archiving rituals, artefacts, audio-visual materials, and textual narratives; (3) implement a web-based archive platform with tiered access, multilingual support, and reproducible data workflows; (4) evaluate usability, cultural sensitivity, and scholarly utility among community interlocutors and researchers; and (5) assess archival impact on public understanding and policy discourse regarding religious pluralism. A mixed-methods design is employed, integrating participatory action research with a design science research approach. The population includes thirty-five community custodians, twenty-nine religious functionaries, and a sample of two hundred and fifty urban residents across the three cities, selected via purposive and stratified random sampling. Data collection instruments comprise semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, community-owned artefact inventories, field notes, and a 4,000-item multimedia corpus encapsulated within the archive. The platform employs the Dublin Core plus an extension ontology for ritual phenomena, with audio-visual metadata, provenance records, and consent metadata informed by the CIOMS guidelines. Validity and reliability are ensured through member checking, triangulation across interviews and artefact inventories, intercoder reliability checks for content categorisation, and pilot testing of the metadata schema with twenty-five informants. Data analysis adopts thematic analysis for qualitative materials, descriptive statistics for user engagement metrics, and network analysis to explore interconnections among rituals, communities, and urban spaces. A functional analytical framework combines the Community-Engaged Archival Theory with the Digital Humanities approach, drawing on theories of secular pluralism and performative religion to interpret archival significance. Expected findings include a high degree of heterogeneity in ritual expression across the three cities, with convergences in urban spatial practices such as sanctuaries, street processions, and festival marketplaces. The archive is anticipated to reveal underdocumented syncretic rituals and inter-community collaborations, alongside challenges related to sensitive artefacts and consent in contemporary contexts. Usability testing is expected to yield positive scores on perceived usefulness (mean 4.2/5) and ease of use (mean 4.0/5), while ethical governance indicators should demonstrate robust consent management and clear provenance chains. Thematic analysis is expected to identify core dimensions of minority religious practice in urban spaces sacred space and everyday mobility, memory and orality, material culture and digitisation, and interfaith engagement. Network analysis may reveal central nodes where minority practices intersect with urban governance, civil society organizations, and digital media ecosystems. The study contributes to knowledge by operationalising a replicable design for urban minority religious archives in resource-constrained contexts, expanding methodological interdisciplinarity across Religious Studies, Digital Humanities, and Information Science. It offers a theoretically informed, practically sustainable model for community-owned archiving that foregrounds consent, benefit-sharing, and cultural sovereignty, while advancing empirical insights into how digital archives influence public discourse, policy discussions, and academic inquiry into pluralism in contemporary India. The main conclusion is that a co-designed, standards-based digital archive can significantly enhance visibility and scholarly access to minority religious practices without compromising community control or ethical norms. Recommendations include institutionalising community governance boards for ongoing curation, expanding multilingual metadata to capture oral histories in minority languages, adopting machine-actionable metadata for interoperability with national and international archives, and conducting longitudinal studies to monitor archival impact on intercultural understanding and policy reform.