Hamilton’s project to digitally archive video-taped readings, personal documents, letters and manuscripts of the celebrated Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) was featured in The Kashmir Reader.
The article noted, “The project named after one of Shahid’s prominent works, ‘The Beloved Witness,’ is a collaborative effort launched by the Digital Humanities initiative (DHi) at New York’s Hamilton College. The DHi is a collaboratory for a research and teaching collaboration where new media and computing technologies are used to promote humanities-based teaching and research.”
Professor of English Patricia O’Neill, who is principal investigator on the project, noted that Hamilton had its first visitor to the Shahid collection in the library this week. “An undergraduate from Yale wanted to research the manuscripts for Shahid’'s last poem and Will Newman, our student researcher this summer, assisted her,” said O’Neill. “She returned the favor by identifying some pages written in Urdu.”
