How you may engage

We and some of our collaborators have engaged with certain practices and materials in depth, scrutinised them in context, and published edited versions of the associated texts. However, most objects and texts in our collection await deeper engagement, especially the large collection of images of measuring instruments from parts of South India collected from various museums. We also have materials, provided by our wellwishers, which lack contextual details. We invite anyone interested to explore relationships between mathematical practices and social lives to further these inquiries and enrich this archive. 

In this sense we envision this archive to be an ever growing contextualised evidence repository, for illuminating the space of practices grounded in a particular geographical and temporal scope. The work on Kaṇakkatikāram texts, Encuvati and Muthukaṇakku serves as one possible model of inquiry; another is to follow practices of measuring and instruments in their actual contexts, to make them live again, rather than remain archival and static. This means conducting social ethnographies with makers of those tools, those subjected to them, and even putting those instruments to the test by ourselves. You may share your learning through our storyscape page. Please reach out to us if you wish to engage with some of our materials in depth or write stories.