Digital Migration Infrastructure in return-writing: visualizing the migration landscape of India.

Area of Science:

• Digital Humanities
• Migration Studies
• Postcolonial Literature

Background:

• Digitization and technological advancements are significantly altering migration patterns and infrastructures.
• Return migration narratives are increasingly prominent in contemporary literature due to globalization and migrant experiences.
• Digital infrastructures, encompassing hardware, software, and mediating actors, are crucial facilitators of migration.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the role of digital migration infrastructures in return migrations to India.
• To analyze the genre of return-writing in Indian English literature.
• To explore the nuances of return migration and external conditions of travel through literary analysis.

Main Methods:

• Close reading of three selected Indian English novels: Amit Chaudhuri's *A New World* (2000), Amitav Ghosh's *Gun Island* (2019), and Devika Rege's *Quarterlife* (2023).
• Review of postcolonial literary theories.
• Utilizing conditional operations in Python to analyze the presence of digital migration infrastructure keywords within the novels' texts.
• Generating bar plots and charts for visual representation of classification results.

Main Results:

• The study identifies and quantifies the presence of digital migration infrastructure keywords in the selected literary works.
• Visualizations demonstrate a trend indicating increased intervention of digital migration infrastructure in recent migration literature.
• The analysis highlights the evolving portrayal of return migration influenced by technological advancements.

Conclusions:

• Digital migration infrastructures play a significant and growing role in contemporary return migration narratives.
• Literary analysis, supported by digital methods, offers valuable insights into the complexities of modern migration.
• The selected novels provide a panoramic view of return migration within the context of technological interventions over two decades.