You can follow the activities and developments of the ALMEDA project here.
Case Studies: these have two major functions in ALMEDA. First, researchers collect data for inclusion in the database. The materials they collect are also used to model the ALMEDA ontology, which will make it easier for similar materials to be included in this and other databases in future.
Database Development: the work on creating the ontology for our database is a major part of the ALMEDA project. Here subject specialists in African literature work in close conversation with metadata and information scientists and with research engineers.
Our database work can be also followed directly and commented on our ALMEDA project site in Wikidata.
Events: ALMEDA is a project that requires extensive networking and close collaboration with numerous experts in a wide range of African literatures and languages. Our events will be mainly aimed at extending this network and in opening discussions with experts across the continent. Information about our online seminar series, ALMEDA: method and theory, will also be posted here.
We’re delighted to share the completion of a project carried out by poet and Swahili lecturer (at the Centre for African Studies, Copenhagen University) Lisa Mumbi Macharia. This dataset documents over 10 years of spoken word poetry performances in the city of Nairobi. Mumbi recorded 628 performances from between March…
The Khanga/Kanga/Leso is a traditional cotton cloth with mixed designs, colors and messages worn by women along the coastal regions of Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar. The popularization of the Khanga can be traced back to 1887, when the Kaderdina family founded the Hajee Essak Limited company, which pioneered the mass…
La revue malienne _Sankoré_ pourrait être considérée comme reflétant un processus de valorisation des langues et littératures africaines dans le cadre du projet de décolonisation des années 1970. Sankoré – une revue de vulgarisation scientifique avec, entre autres, des sections consacrées aux nouvelles, légendes, proverbes, poèmes, devinettes, est un produit…
The South African magazine, Zonk! African People’s Pictorial, ran from August 1949 until June 1964, during which time it published 298 literary works, predominantly short stories and photo plays. The rise of the popularity of the photo play in the 1960s is evident in Zonk!, which began publishings 23-page photo…
Edi Ganzel was a prolific writer of serialised novels in late 1960s and early 1970s Tanzania. Ursula Oberst has been using his work in Kenyan magazine Taifa Weekly to model serialised fiction in our metadata ontology. Give her feedback and see her current modelling on our Wikidata project site. Image:…
Poetry Africa is an annual international poetry festival curated and presented by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban each year during October. The festival features Spoken Word & Publish Poets in performances and dynamic engagements which includes panel discussions, campus and school visits, poetry exchanges, book…
Join us for the next lecture in the ALMEDA seminar series! Flora Losch (EHESS – Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) will present her research on West African audiovisual archives – past and present. The lecture will be held on Zoom Time and Date: Wednesday 27 November, 13:15-14:45 CEST,…
On Tuesday 15 October, our case-study researcher Riaan Oppelt (Stellenbosch University) gave a lecture on his ALMEDA case-study material. You can watch the lecture here:
ALMEDA was officially launched with a meeting of all team members and some of the members of our distinguished advisory board. We were also joined by Tinashe Mushakavanhu, who presented a lecture titled ‘Metareading a Country’, in which he spoke about the value of “rogue archival” methods, which create “interference”…
ALMEDA is proud to co-sponsor this year’s African Digital Humanities Symposium, Digital Humanities, African Stories and Agency organised by Brian Rosenblum and James Yékú of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. The ALMEDA team will also partner with Karen Ijumba (Poetry Africa, Open…