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We aim to develop a multilingual metadata ontology specifically designed for the large body of oral, unpublished, and informal literary materials that have been, and continue to be, a major part of literary production on the continent.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Our major outcome will be a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished and informal African literatures.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’s Gloria Ajami Makokha held a Majina ya Khanga/Leso Awareness and Publicization Drive at Kenyatta University’s Mombasa Campus on 23rd December 2025, funded by the British Institute in Eastern Africa’s Impact Grant Award. The event, in which Makokha’s research findings from field work in the region were shared with her…
Ashleigh Harris and Nicklas Hållén will both present their recent research at the “Lost & Found” Archives and Multilingualism in the (Post)Colony, to be held at the University of Liège on 12 January. Ashleigh will address how the ALMEDA project is working on a multilingual ontology for its knowledge model…
ALMEDA case researcher Erik Falk, visited Kampala and the site of FEMRITE, Uganda Women Writers Association, 17-26 November to collect data on the organisations formal and informal publications. FEMRITE, which will celebrate 30 years of work in 2026, is active across the literary field by organising poetry clubs and writers’…
Our Annual Report for 2025 is available here: