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.
By Max van Loenen and Malin Runefelt During the spring of 2024, we collected metadata on African literary magazines published during the decolonization period of the 60s and 70s. ALMEDA creates data on and then links these ephemeral works. An important aspect of the collection process has been linking authors…
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”…
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:…