African Literary Metadata
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About ALMEDA

ALMEDA addresses African Literary Metadata through three interlocking work packages.

History

In this work package the team investigates the history of how African orature, literature and performance cultures have entered into catalogues, libraries and archives across the continent’s colonial history, through its period of decolonisation, and through to the current period.

We investigate the ways in which various kinds of classification of African cultural forms have impacted their collection, preservation and visibility. We will also explore how cataloguing systems have prioritised book-based literature over other cultural modalities and will consider the consequences of this for African orature and performance cultures.

Ontology

In order to correct the ontological split in the field of African literature between oral and written forms (which has fragmented the field in multiple ways), ALMEDA will explore ontologies that do not reproduce this split and that attempt to disentangle colonial taxonomies of African literary and expressive culture. This collaborative work will be based on a wide variety of case-studies managed by researchers working on various regions of the continent and focusing on a range of different languages and literary modes across those regions.

The ontology will be multilingual and will be developed in such a way as to open to wider inclusion of African languages in future versions. You can follow our public-facing discussions on data modelling on our Wikidata project page.

Repository

The most important output of the ALMEDA project is the data repository of metadata that the project will collect and then make available through a linked, open and searchable database. In this work-package, team members collect extensive data on previously uncatalogued materials. This data will be entered into the ALMEDA wiki-base instance, which will be searchable through an easily usable interface (to be launched towards the end of 2025). The interface will further allow for entry of ground-up metadata, allowing the repository to grow beyond the five years of the project’s funding.

Formal collaborations

The ALMEDA project is based at Uppsala University and has formal collaborations with:

Two new datasets: Staffrider and Lawino magazines

We have published two new datasets on our Zenodo platform that will interest anyone working on print and online literary magazines. The classic anti-apartheid South African magazine Staffrider includes around 1770 individual texts and was published between 1978 to 1993, while the Ugandan-based Lawino content is much more recent (2014-2015).…

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Theatre and Television in Côte d’Ivoire

In our new ALMEDA pamphlet, postdoctoral fellow Oulia Makkonen interviews Coffi Abdoul Karim, a producer of the Ivorian cultural programs Théâtre de chez nous and Ce soir au village. The interview is part of a larger exploration in Makkonen’s work of the theatrical scene and its relationship to television history in Côte d’Ivoire from the…

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African Library Summit – Windhoek

Ursula Oberst and Ashleigh Harris attended the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) summit in Windhoek, Namibia from 19-23 May and presented a paper titled ‘Linking Multilingual Open Data on African Literature and Culture with Wikidata: Experiences, Challenges, and Vision of the ALMEDA Project’. AfLIA works with Libraries and National Library Associations, Governments and Government Agencies responsible…

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Radio and Television archives, Côte d’Ivoire.

On 10-21 February 2025, postdoctoral fellow Oulia Makkonen visited the Audiovisual Archives of Radio-Télévision Ivoirienne (RTI) in Côte d’Ivoire. Oulia’s ALMEDA case study focusses on remediations of Kotéba theatre performances. The archive includes some of the works of the famous Ivorian playwright, film director and musician, Souleymane Koly and his Ensemble…

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