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We aim to develop a multilingual metadata ontology specifically designed for the large body of oral, unpublished, and informal literary materials that have been, and continue to be, a major part of literary production on the continent.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Our major outcome will be a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished and informal African literatures.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.
Gilbert Braspenning has recently published a dataset of 902 online African short stories and had donated that data to the ALMEDA project for inclusion in our database. Online publishing of African short stories and poetry has increased significantly in the last decade with online small magazines, literary journals, and blogs…
We are delighted to announce that Miriam Osore of Kenyatta University, Kenya, has compiled and translated a list of Kiswahili literary terms for the ALMEDA project. The lexicon is available on our Zenodo page. Osore, Miriam Kenyani. ‘Kiswahili Lexicon of Literary Terms’. Zenodo, 17 November 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17628263.
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.