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We aim to develop a multilingual metadata ontology specifically designed for the large body of oral, unpublished, and informal literary materials that have been, and continue to be, a major part of literary production on the continent.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Our major outcome will be a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished and informal African literatures.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.
Ashleigh Harris will present ALMEDA’s work with ‘Messy Data’ at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen at 15:00 on 6 May 2026. Abstract: A significant portion of African Literature and expressive cultures – from the late 19th century to the present – has been produced as print, audio, video,…
Join us for a talk by Ashleigh Harris on the ways in which the ALMEDA project uses Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web to create sustainable data on African Literature and expressive culture.
We are delighted to invite you to this symposium, which focuses on the ways in which audiovisual archives and film historiography in African and diasporic contexts are entangled with one another. Bringing together film and screen media scholars, filmmakers, curators, and archivists, the symposium will explore the impact of…
Join us for a symposium organised by ALMEDA postdoctoral fellow, Gloria Ajami Makokha, on the ‘Materialities of Oral Cultures in East Africa’.