About ALMEDA

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.

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.

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 our database where it will be searchable through an interface (to be launched in 2025) that will also be able to visualise data for easy exploration. The interface will further allow for entry of ground-up metadata, meaning that the repository will continue to grow beyond the five years of the project’s funding.