Validity and Verifiability: Toward a Hybrid Framework for Evaluating Digital Humanities in India

This article examines how evaluative infrastructures in Indian higher education — such as the UGC’s Academic Performance Index (API), NAAC’s accreditation rubrics, and NIRF rankings — continue to marginalise digital scholarly work by equating academic value with print-based authorship and closure. Taking digital curation as a diagnostic form, it traces how infrastructural, collaborative, and multilingual labour remains epistemically invisible within systems designed for singular outputs. Drawing on global debates in digital humanities, it situates the Indian case within broader questions of legitimacy and rigour. The paper proposes a hybrid evaluative framework that integrates processual, collaborative, and infrastructural criteria into institutional assessment. Grounded in Indian intellectual and policy contexts, it argues that recognising digital scholarship is an act of epistemic accountability, redefining what counts as knowledge, and who is authorised to produce it, in the contemporary humanities.