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 launches, open mic sessions and the ever popular slam jam competition.
Poetry Africa has, under the lead of Karen Ijumba, created a digital map of all the poets and performances that they have hosted since 1997. Karen Ijumba is working with us to link Poetry Africa’s metadata to our database. This metadata includes around 600 individual poets, information about their works, lives, and performances and even links to extant published works and works online. We are also using Poetry Africa’s database to model festival data.
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…
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…
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,…
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…