Vinayak Das Gupta is Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University. His research looks at digital humanities, archival theory, and how technology shapes our understanding of the past. He studies how systems of language, classification, and memory affect the way historical knowledge is organised and shared. He is interested in infrastructures in a wide sense, including digital tools and platforms, rules and procedures within institutions, and everyday habits and practices shaped by care and belief.

He trained at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, where he worked on Bichitra, a large digital archive of Rabindranath Tagore’s writings. This early work with digital texts and archives helped shape his later research. He has worked in this area for nearly fifteen years.

One part of his work focuses on using computational models of language, like topic modelling, with low-resource languages such as Bengali. He is especially interested in how these methods can be made clear and useful to people who are not experts in statistics or coding. His project anvay is a web-based tool that helps users explore patterns in Bengali texts using language processing and visualisations.

He also works on public archives and memory. He has published research on photographs and material culture, especially on how to understand images that are incomplete or removed from their original context. His writing often explores curatorial methods for making such materials meaningful.

His research is guided by a strong interest in how knowledge is built, preserved, and passed on, even when the systems that hold it are weak or broken. He is on the governing body of DHARTI, the Digital Humanities Alliance of Research and Teaching Innovations in India, and has taken part in several international digital humanities projects. He received his PhD in Digital Humanities from Trinity College Dublin and has published with Bloomsbury, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, and other academic publishers.