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We aim to develop a multilingual metadata ontology specifically designed for the large body of oral, unpublished, and informal literary materials that have been, and continue to be, a major part of literary production on the continent.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Our major outcome will be a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished and informal African literatures.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 has a new ALMEDA pamphlet reflecting on the problems and potentials of AI in and for the field of African Literary Studies. Harris will be participating at the Charting New Territory: Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies organised by Frédérick Madore, Vincent Hiribarren in Hanover in February,…
The ALMEDA project is committed to a broad multilingual framework, not only to ensure excellent and substantial multilingual inclusion across as many African languages as possible (see our work with literary lexicons), but also to provide data on African literature’s global movements and circulation in non-African languages. To this purpose,…
Our latest lexicon of literary terms has just been published by Maurice Simbili Mwichuli, Kenyatta University. All ALMEDA’s data and lexicon publications are open for download and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4 Licence. If you are a linguist or literary scholar working in an African language and are…
We are delighted to be joined by Anna Marie Skråmestø Nesheim who has received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project ‘Monetizing Performance Culture in French North and West Africa’. The project examines how the introduction of copyright systems affected the production of African performing arts in the…