The Digital Himalaya project was established in December 2000 by Mark Turin, Alan Macfarlane, Sara Shneiderman, and Sarah Harrison. [1] The project's principal goal is to collect and preserve historical multimedia materials relating to the Himalaya, such as photographs, recordings, and journals, and make those resources available over the internet and offline, on external storage media. The project team have digitized older ethnographic collections and data sets that were deteriorating in their analogue formats, so as to protect them from deterioration and make them available and accessible to originating communities in the Himalayan region and a global community of scholars. [1]
The project was founded at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Cambridge, moved to Cornell University in 2002 (when a collaboration with the University of Virginia was initiated), and then back to the University of Cambridge in 2005. From 2011 to 2014, the project was jointly hosted between the University of Cambridge and Yale University. In 2014, the project moved to the University of British Columbia, where it is presently located, and maintains a distant collaboration with Sichuan University. [2]
Digital Himalaya has a team of 9 individuals who work together to develop user-friendly and accessible online resources: [3]
The project is supported by an active international Advisory Board, including the following individuals: [3]
Since its establishment, the Digital Himalaya project has benefited from skilled student interns and research assistants in Canada, Nepal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. [1]
For the first five years of active development, Digital Himalaya was successful in receiving competitive grants from many organizations. Once the site was launched and most of the collections were digitized and accessible, it became increasingly difficult to find resources to maintain the online collections. The project still receives support through donations from individuals and foundations, in addition to experimenting with small referral commissions through Amazon. [1]
Financial and institutional partners:
The Digital Himalaya archive has more than 200,000 pages of scanned texts, hundreds of hours of video and audio, over 1,000 maps, and a large collection of original ethnographic content. [1] The project has digitised an extensive set of back issues of Himalayan journals and maps. There are currently 13 collections available, and the newest addition to the archive is a collection of bird reports from Nepal. [4]
Thanks to Tim Inskipp and Carol Inskipp, this collection has 2,155 references on birds in Nepal available to the public, dated from 1975 to 1999. The archive contains multiple sources, from books and scientific papers to published and unpublished reports, offering a valuable source for researchers interested in Himalayan bird populations. [5]
This collection contains census data from the National Census of Nepal 2001. The Digital Himalaya team sorted the data for Nepal's 75 districts and their VDCs (Village Development Committee) making this public data available for any user to search and download. [6]
This collection contains interviews with Professor Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and footage of his research in the Himalaya. Fürer-Haimendorf was an Austrian anthropologist based at the University of London who travelled across much of the Himalayan region, and conducted field research with Naga communities in India, and Sherpa communities in Nepal. The full collection is hosted at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). [7]
Digital Himalaya is continuously expanding its online collections to include both historical and contemporary film and video. Below is a list of films available through the project's archive: [8]
Digital Himalaya archives contain scanned copies of many journals, magazines and publications of Himalayan studies for free download. Here is a list of available titles: [9]
The web-based map collection includes: [10]
The Digital Himalaya music and audio archive includes: [11]
The Naga Videodisc is a multimedia resource created by Alan Macfarlane at Cambridge University in the late 1980s. It includes a large amount of ethnographic material about Naga communities. With the support of Sarrah Harrison, the contents of the videodisc were converted into an online database that uses Bamboo as a retrieval system, with easily searchable XML files. Some film clips can be downloaded directly from the Digital Himalaya page, but the full collection can be seen on the Shanti Database at the University of Virginia. [12]
This collection offers digitized versions of multiple rare books and manuscripts that are in the public domain. The archive contains files in PDF format, and are free to download. [13]
This is a multimedia archive with photographs, films, census data, and economic and social data of the Gurung village of Thak in central western Nepal. These ethnographic records cover more than 30 years of work, and were collected by Alan Macfarlane and Sarah Harrison. The archive is regularly updated. [14]
This is an emerging collection of linguistic and cultural data relating to the Thangmi community of northeastern Nepal. These collections were deposited by Mark Turin and Sara Shneiderman, who have been working in partnership with Thangmi communities in Nepal and India since 1997. This archive gives users access to an online trilingual Thangmi - Nepali - English dictionary (in PDF format), recordings of Thangmi songs from the Reng Patangko collection, and film clips of Thangmi rituals, all available for streaming and download. [15]
This collection contains films and photographs from Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet, in the 1930s. The films and photographs were taken by Frederick Williamson, a British Political Officer who documented his travels through the region with his wife, Margaret. The full collection is located at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), at Cambridge. [16]
This collection contains 18 short films from 1996 showing the Wutu ritual, an exorcism ritual performed by the Monguor (Tu) people of the Gnyan thog Village. The films were shot by Zhu Yonzhong, with editing by Gerald Roche. The collection is stored in an archive at the University of Cambridge. [17]
The Himalayas, or Himalaya is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the Earth's highest peaks, including the highest, Mount Everest. More than 100 peaks exceeding elevations of 7,200 m (23,600 ft) above sea level lie in the Himalayas.
Gurung or Tamu are an ethnic group living in the hills and mountains of Gandaki Province of Nepal. Gurung people predominantly live around the Annapurna region in Manang, Mustang, Dolpo, Kaski, Lamjung, Gorkha, Parbat,Tanahun and Syangja districts of Nepal.
Pokhara is a metropolitan city in central Nepal, which serves as the capital of Gandaki Province and the tourism capital of Nepal. It is the second most populous city of Nepal after Kathmandu, with 599,504 inhabitants living in 120,594 households in 2021. It is the country's largest metropolitan city in terms of area. The city also serves as the headquarters of Kaski District. Pokhara is located 200 kilometres west of the capital, Kathmandu. The city is on the shore of Phewa Lake, and sits at an elevation of approximately 822 m. The Annapurna Range, with three out of the ten highest peaks in the world—Dhaulagiri, Annapurna I and Manaslu—is within 15–35 mi (24–56 km) of the valley.
Khas tribe, popularly known as Khashya, according to the 2015 constitution of Nepal are an Indo-Aryan ethno-linguistic group native to the Himalayan region of the Indian subcontinent, in what is now the South Asian country of Nepal, as well as the Indian states of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Sikkim.
Alan Donald James Macfarlane is an anthropologist and historian, and a Professor Emeritus of King's College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of 20 books and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China. He has focused on comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world. In recent years he has become increasingly interested in the use of visual material in teaching and research. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.
Mark Turin is a British anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio broadcaster who specializes in the Himalayas and the Pacific Northwest. From 2014–2018, he served as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and Acting Co-Director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, cross-appointed between the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Turin served as Interim Editor of the journal Pacific Affairs from 2023-2024.
Charles Albert Edward Ramble is an anthropologist and former University Lecturer in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. Since 2009 he has been Professor and Directeur d'études at the Ecole pratique des hautes études, Paris. Between 2006 and 2013 he was elected president of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS) and convened the 10th seminar of IATS at Oxford in 2003.
Melung is a Rural municipality located within the Dolakha District of the Bagmati Province of Nepal. The municipality spans 86.54 square kilometres (33.41 sq mi) of area, with a total population of 20,210 according to a 2011 Nepal census.
Sudama is the ward number ten of the Balara municipality in Sarlahi District in the province two of south-eastern Nepal. At the time of the most recent census, it has a population of 3,634 people, of which 99.6% are Hindus and 0.4% are Muslims.
{{Infobox settlement |name = Baluwa Madanpur |other_name = Baluwa Madanpur |native_name = बलुवा मदनपुर |nickname = बलुवा मदनपुर |settlement_type = Village development committee |motto = |image_skyline = |image_caption = |image_flag = |image_seal = |image_map = |mapsize = 300px |map_caption = Map of the village development committees in Rautahat District |pushpin_map = Nepal |pushpin_label_position = bottom |pushpin_mapsize = 300 |pushpin_map_caption = Location in Nepal |subdivision_type = Country |subdivision_name = Nepal |subdivision_type1 = Zone |subdivision_name1 = Narayani Zone |subdivision_type2 = District |subdivision_name2 = Rautahat District | |government_footnotes = |government_type = |leader_title = |leader_name = |leader_title1 = |leader_name1 = |established_title = |established_date = |unit_pref = |area_footnotes = |area_total_km2 = |population_as_of = 1991 |population_footnotes = |population_note = |population_total = 1903 |population_density_km2 = auto |population_blank1_title = Ethnicities |timezone = Nepal Time |utc_offset = +5:45 |timezone_DST = |utc_offset_DST = |coordinates = 26.95°N 85.39°E |elevation_footnotes = |elevation_m = |postal_code_type = |postal_code = |area_code = |blank_name = |blank_info = |website = |footnotes = |ward. = 5 | total popolation. Approximately = 2243 Higest caste = Yadav
Journey of a Red Fridge is a 2007 documentary film about 17-year-old porter Hari Rai working in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal. It was directed and produced by Natasa Urban and Lucian Muntean, a Serbian independent documentary production duo specializing in telling the stories of working children. Journey of a Red Fridge was produced in association with The Global Fund for Children.
Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf or Christopher von Fürer-Haimendorf FRAI was an Austrian ethnologist and professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London. He spent forty years studying tribal cultures in Northeast India, in the central region of what is now the state of Telangana and in Nepal. He was married to British ethnologist of India and Nepal, Betty Barnardo.
Thangmi, also called Thāmī, Thangmi Kham, Thangmi Wakhe, and Thani, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in central-eastern Nepal and northeastern India by the Thami people. The Thami refer to their language as Thangmi Kham or Thangmi Wakhe while the rest of Nepal refers to it as Thāmī. The majority of these speakers, however, live in Nepal in their traditional homeland of Dolakhā District. In India, the Thami population is concentrated mostly in Darjeeling. The Thangmi language is written using the Devanagari script. Thangmi has been extensively documented by Mark Turin.
The Nepal and Tibet Philatelic Study Circle (NTPSC) exists to promote interest in and the study of the stamps and postal history of Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and Sikkim. The NTPSC was formed in 1974 as The Nepal Study Circle by Dr. Wolfgang Hellrigl and Colin Hepper with the aim of encouraging the study of stamps and postal history of Nepal. Over the years Tibet was included in the name, while also attention was given to stamps of Bhutan and Sikkim.
Dor Bahadur Bista is a Nepalese anthropologist, social scientist and activist. Bista is considered the Father of Nepali anthropology, and has published popular books such as Fatalism and Development and People of Nepal. Bista mysteriously disappeared in 1995.
John Henry Hutton FRAI was an English-born anthropologist and an administrator in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) during the period of the British Raj. The period that he spent with the ICS in Assam evoked an interest in tribal cultures of that region that was of seminal importance. His research work was recognised subsequently with his appointment to the chair of William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and with various honours.
Martin Chautari is a non-profit organization in Kathmandu, Nepal established to foster public dialogue and contribute to discussions on current social issues such as democracy, development, civil liberties, and social justice.
The Tibet–Nepal salt trade route is an ancient salt trading route running between the Tibetan Plateau and the Middle Hills of Nepal and further on to India. After the annexation of Tibet by China in 1950 and the Sino-Indian War in 1962, patterns of trade changed and the use of the old trading route between India and Tibet dwindled and the salt-carrying caravans became redundant.
Betty von Fürer-Haimendorf, born Elizabeth Barnardo, was a British ethnologist in India and Nepal. She was married to Austrian ethnologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf.
Kalinchowk is a Rural municipality located within the Dolakha district of the Bagmati province of Nepal. The municipality spans 132.49 square kilometres (51.15 sq mi) of area, with a total population of 22,954 according to a 2011 Nepal census.