Contribute and Collaborate

Would you like to contribute to, or collaborate with, ALMEDA? Here’s how you can help.

Share your data with us. All data on the ALMEDA project will be open and linked. Should you have information about oral, performed, ephemeral or informal African expressive forms and would like it included in our database and linked to our data, please be in touch.
Propose your own case-study. If you are working on materials that fall within our area of interest and would like methodological input on how best to capture data on your materials, contact us. PhD students are particularly welcome to propose case-studies, for which our team would be happy to offer mentorship.
Contribute a lexicon of literary terms in an African language. One of the biggest challenges with linked open data is to find ways of linking data across multiple languages. This is crucial to the development of African language knowledge resources. Please follow this link if you’re interested in working with us on a lexicon in an African language.
Review our data. If you are working on an area that we are including in our first batch of case studies and would like to review our data, let us know. All our data is available on request.

Existing Collaborations

We are excited to develop collaborations with existing initiatives in African digital humanities, cultural heritage, libraries or any other stake-holders. Please be in touch if you would be interested in collaborating with us. Our current collaborations include:

Poetry Africa has been running poetry festivals since 1997. They have shared data about all the performers and performances they have hosted and we will be using this data to help us model the best practices for collecting and collating data on festivals.
African Digital Humanities at University of Kansas runs an annual symposium on African Digital Humanities. We are co-funding the 2024 event in Accra, Ghana, where we will also be giving lectures and hosting a seminar on metadata ontologies (see events).
FEMRITE: Ugandan Women Writers’ Association
University of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s School of the Arts (MOU in process)
Modjaji Books, South Africa.

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…

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…

Dataset of Poets – Poetry Africa Festival, 1991–2022

A new dataset is the outcome of a collaboration with the Centre for Creative Arts, UKZN. This dataset includes biographical information on all the poets who performed at the Poetry Africa festival from 1997 to 2022. The dataset builds on data compiled by University of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts,…

New Publication: ‘African Literary Metadata and Makerere University’s Library’

This article provides a case study of the history of the cataloging system at Makerere University Library and discusses how this has come to shape the body of African literature housed there. The article is available as an open access publication. Harris, Ashleigh. “African Literary Metadata and Makerere University’s Library.” Research…