ALMEDA is exploring new methodological and theoretical approaches to the problems faced by African expressive cultures in the formal archive. In this spirit, we will be publishing a series of exploratory pieces, meant to encourage discussion with other scholars and stakeholders in the field of African literary and expressive cultures and cultural heritage. These ALMEDA Pamphlets will allow us to make public our results more immediately than we can through formal academic publishing.
We will also be engaging in more traditional publications, all of which will be full open access and will be made available on our results page.
While we are building our searchable data repository, we will also be publishing some of our preliminary data sets here, since these may be useful even in their raw and unlinked versions. Let us know if you find our datasets helpful or if you have any suggestions, corrections or additions: almeda@uu.se
The ALMEDA pamphlet series is a space for preliminary discussion of the methodological, theoretical or empirical challenges and opportunities of critically investigating and engaging with literary metadata in the field of African Literary Studies.
ALMEDA Pamphlet #2 Oulia Makkonen ‘Métadonnées et archives audiovisuelles’, August 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16875367.
ALMEDA Pamphlet #1 Ashleigh Harris ‘The Literary Metadata of African Little and Popular Magazines’, January 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16871236
All publications of data and articles are open access and can be freely accessed via the links below.
Datasets:
Alfieri, Noemi. ‘Poesia de combate, nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir, black orpheus: lusophone african literatures and their networks’. Zenodo, 29 January 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14763590.
Harris, Ashleigh. ‘Literary Content in MOTO Magazine, Zimbabwe 1972–1999’. Zenodo, 30 January 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14773072.
Harris, Ashleigh. ‘Literary Content in ZONK! African People’s Pictorial 1949–1964’. Zenodo, 1 February 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14784842.
Hållén, Nicklas. ‘Jalada Literary Magazine: Full Catalogue’. Zenodo, 10 February 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14844153.
Sarkar Nilsson, Eric. ‘Digital Comic Books in Nigeria: Comic Republic’. Zenodo, 31 January 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14782125
Sarkar Nilsson, Eric. ‘South African Sci-fi and Horror: Something Wicked Collection’. Zenodo, 1 February 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14784457.
van Loenen, M., et al. Poets’ Biographical Data: Poetry Africa Festival 1997–2022. Zenodo, 3 Mar. 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14963202
Journal articles:
Harris, Ashleigh. ‘African Literary Metadata and Makerere University’s Library’ Research in African Literatures, vol. 55, no. 1 (Spring 2024). 1–27; https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.00042
‘African Literary Metadata and the Semantic Web’ 16–17 August 2023. Decolonisation and the Archive: Languages and Method in the Digital Era, WiSER, Johannesburg. Ashleigh Harris.
‘Digital Archives, Colonial Classifications, and the Problem of Sustainable Cultural Heritage in South Africa’ 28–31 March 2023. South Africa-Sweden University Forum, University of the Western Cape. Ashleigh Harris and Riaan Oppelt
‘The problem of colonial classification in contemporary African literary metadata’ 6 February 2023. Symposium, Materiality in the Digital Age, Uppsala University. Ashleigh Harris
‘African literary metadata’ 23 November 2022. Seminar at Amazwi: The South African Museum of Literature, Makhanda, South Africa. Ashleigh Harris
‘African Ephemeral Literatures and the Future of the Literary Archive’ 17 March 2022. Fellow’s seminar, Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Ashleigh Harris
‘Book Metadata and Africa’s Literary Futures’ 10 March 2022. Seminar at the Department of English, Stellenbosch University. Ashleigh Harris.
‘Linked Open Metadata for African Literary Heritage’. 15-16 February 2024: Symposium African Digital Humanities, African Stories and Agency: University of Ghana – Legon. Ashleigh Harris
‘Poetry Africa Digital Map: An example of how selective and curated digitisation of ephemeral material in collections can enable new pathways of knowledge production’ 15-16 February 2024: Symposium African Digital Humanities, African Stories and Agency: University of Ghana. Karen Ijumba
‘Wikidata Solutions for Informal Literary Archives’ 15-16 February 2024: Symposium African Digital Humanities, African Stories and Agency: University of Ghana. Ursula Oberst and Ashleigh Harris. Workshop facilitators included Nicklas Hållén, Karen Ijumba and Oulia Makkonen.
‘African Literary Metadata: What? How? Why?’ 23 February 2024: Forum for Africa Studies, Uppsala University. Nicklas Hållén and Ashleigh Harris
‘Wikidata solutions for informal literary archives’ 28 February 2024: Seminar for Students at Leiden University. Ursula Oberst
Round table discussion on ‘Interrogating prose in African Literature’ 22 March 2024: Forms and Formations of African Literature, Uppsala University, Oulia Makkonen, Nicklas Hållén and Ashleigh Harris
‘African Literary Metadata’ 5 April 2024: Lecture to undergraduates on Knowledge Organisation in the Librarian program (Bibliotekarieprogrammet) at Södertörns högskola. Nicklas Hållén and Ashleigh Harris
‘Metareading a Country’ 14 May 2024: ALMEDA Open Seminar 1. Online. Tinashe Mushakavanhu (Oxford University)
Panel: ‘Endangered Cultural Archives of Southern Africa’ 15–17 May 2024: SASUF Sustainability Forum. Malmö, Sweden. Ashleigh Harris, Pedzisai Maedza and Nkululeko Sibanda
‘Introduction to ALMEDA: African Literary Metadata’ 24 May 2024: Kolloquium »Phänomenologie der Digital Humanities« (Sommersemester 2024), Freie Universität, Berlin. Ashleigh Harris
‘The Appropriation of African Literary Labour from Colonial Copyright to Corporate Paywalls’ 6–8 June 2024: DFG Network Towards a History of Work in the Cultural Economy, Getting a fair share? Cultural work under intellectual property regimes. Oslo, Norway. Ashleigh Harris
‘African Literary Metadata: what, why and how?’ 9 July 2024: iSchool/University of Washington, Leiden. Ursula Oberst
‘Afrikaaps and the Literary Archive’ 15 October 2024: ALMEDA Open Seminar 2. Online. Riaan Oppelt (Stellenbosch University)
‘Postcolonial Technopolitics. Radiotelevisions, Audiovisual Archives, and the Return of the Past in Africa (20th and 21st centuries)’ 27 November 2024: ALMEDA Open Seminar 3. Online. Flora Losch (EHESS – L’ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
ALMEDA researcher Nicklas Hållén has been granted funding for a 3-year project titled “Reading beyond the close/distant divide: Nairobi’s formal and informal literary field.” His project investigates how the informal and formal sectors of the literary field shape each other in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Hållén will explore ways of mapping how formally…
Mbũgua wa Mũngai (Kenyatta University) has compiled a ‘Gĩkũyũ Lexicon of Literary Terms’ for the ALMEDA project (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17507422). We are seeking Lexicons from as many languages as possible for the purposes of making our database multilingual. Read more about contributing a lexicon and publishing it with us here.
We have just published three new datasets on East African Little Magazines Darlite and Umma, as well as Transition Magazine (the Ugandan years). All our data is freely downloadable and reusable. Van Loenen, M. (2025). Content from Darlite Magazine, Dar es Salaam, 1966 – 1970 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17433216 Runefelt, M.…
ALMEDA in collaboration with the Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University invites you to an online workshop on Thursday 4 September at 13:15 – 16:00 (Central European Summer Time). In this workshop scholars will discuss the implications approaching street preaching as performance and oral literary genre. Viewing publicly delivered sermons…