ALMEDA is a five-year research project with three interlocking ambitions:
By researching the history of literary metadata about African expressive cultures in libraries and archives, we aim to understand the ways in which colonial cataloguing constructed the idea of the ‘literary work’. How did colonial catalogues classify oral and performed expressive cultures and how has this impacted our continued understanding of the literary field up to this day?
We aim to develop a multilingual metadata ontology specifically designed for the large body of oral, unpublished, and informal literary materials that have been, and continue to be, a major part of literary production on the continent. By rethinking the organisation of the literary field around published books, we aim to improve the visibility and authority of non-book literatures in the field of African literary studies.
Our major outcome will be a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished and informal African literatures. By creating and linking metadata on this body of work, this repository will make these literatures searchable and visible despite their structural ephemerality. The repository, which is run as a Wikibase Instance, is currently in process and will be opened as soon as possible. Please contact us if you have any questions.
ALMEDA researcher Nicklas Hållén has been granted funding for a 3-year project titled “Reading beyond the close/distant divide: Nairobi’s formal and informal literary field.” His project investigates how the informal and formal sectors of the literary field shape each other in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Hållén will explore ways of mapping how formally…
Mbũgua wa Mũngai (Kenyatta University) has compiled a ‘Gĩkũyũ Lexicon of Literary Terms’ for the ALMEDA project (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17507422). We are seeking Lexicons from as many languages as possible for the purposes of making our database multilingual. Read more about contributing a lexicon and publishing it with us here.
We have just published three new datasets on East African Little Magazines Darlite and Umma, as well as Transition Magazine (the Ugandan years). All our data is freely downloadable and reusable. Van Loenen, M. (2025). Content from Darlite Magazine, Dar es Salaam, 1966 – 1970 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17433216 Runefelt, M.…
ALMEDA in collaboration with the Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University invites you to an online workshop on Thursday 4 September at 13:15 – 16:00 (Central European Summer Time). In this workshop scholars will discuss the implications approaching street preaching as performance and oral literary genre. Viewing publicly delivered sermons…