The Digital Poetics of Lost Waterscapes in Coimbatore, South India

This chapter explores the potential for digital literature and creative visualisations for work in the DEH. This work emerges from a project on water stress in the Southern Indian district of Coimbatore. Our aim was to compile an open-access dataset of water in the district in the past and present and to find ways of making that data available and resonant in new ways. Working with local activists and communities, the interdisciplinary project aims to create robust digital resources for activists, educators, and scholars and, in doing so, frame datasets about lost and precarious landscapes of water in ways that challenge the presumption of imperial pasts and state science. A key outcome of the project is a series of digital literary visualisations. The rationale and development of these visualisations are presented here as a means to explore their potential in the DEH.