Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) scholarship has begun to examine religion and spirituality; yet, devotion as a lived, material, and world-making practice remains largely overlooked. For millions across the Global South, devotional labor such as sculpting, tending to, or worshipping sacred figures forms a primary mode of engaging with the divine and shaping everyday social and technological imaginations. Drawing on a four-month ethnography with an idol-maker community in Kumartuli, Kolkata, India, this paper examines how artisans bring gods into being through materials, gestures, obligation, and collective care. Their practices reveal forms of knowledge, intentionality, and agency that complicate HCI’s predominantly secular and instrumental understandings of craft, creativity, and technology. Building on anthropological craft studies, postcolonial computing, and scholarship on religion and materiality, we show how sacred making foregrounds relational, embodied, and cosmological dimensions of practice. We argue that devotional craft constitutes an under-recognized site from which HCI can critically rethink its assumptions about materiality, mediation, knowledge, and the sacred.

Slides for the Abstra paper (EDBT'24)

Digital data sharing leads to unprecedented opportunities to develop data-driven systems for supporting economic activities, the social and political life, and science. Many open-access datasets are RDF (Linked Data) graphs, but others are JSON or XML documents, CSV files, Neo4J property graphs, etc.