Overview
The Digital Himalaya project was designed by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Dr Mark Turin as a strategy for archiving and making available valuable ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. Based at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the project was established in December 2000. From 2002 to 2005, the project moved to the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University and began its collaboration with the University of Virginia. From August 2011, Digital Himalaya is colocated at Cambridge and Yale Universities.
At inception in 2000, the Digital Himalaya project had three primary objectives:
1. to preserve in a digital medium archival anthropological materials from the Himalayan region that are quickly degenerating in their current forms, including films in various formats, still photographs, sound recordings, field notes, maps and rare journals
2. to make these resources available over broadband internet connections, coupled with an accurate search and retrieval system useful to contemporary researchers and students
3. to make these resources available on DVD to the descendants of the people from whom the materials were collected by making them both easily transportable and viewable in a digital medium
Five ethnographic collections representing a broad range of regions, ethnic groups, time periods and themes were slated for digitisation in the first phase of the project, along with a set of maps of Nepal and important journals on Himalayan studies. Over time we expanded our work to include a further 8 collections, bringing the total to 13.
This website introduces the objectives of the Digital Himalaya project and showcases some of our content. The site is updated on a regular basis with additional film clips, viewable photos, PDF downloads of rare journals, maps and other relevant information. If you would like to be updated when new material is added to the site, please register your email address with us, or check the news page when you visit the site to see what's new.
