African Literary Metadata
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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.
  • 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).

Zonk! African People’s Pictorial

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…

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Data modelling: Edi Ganzel’s serialised Swahili novels

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:…

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Events: African Digital Humanities Symposium, Accra 15-16 February 2024

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…

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Case Study: Zimbabwean Theatre Manuscripts

In August 2023, Ashleigh Harris partnered with ALMEDA researcher Pedzisai Maedza (University College Dublin), Nkululeko Sibanda (University of Pretoria), and Kelvin Chikonzo (University of Harare) to catalogue the manuscript collection of Rooftop Productions’ Theatre in the Park, directed by Daves Guzha. In addition to cataloguing the 253 manuscripts in Rooftop…

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