Ashleigh Harris will present ALMEDA’s work with ‘Messy Data’ at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen at 15:00 on 6 May 2026.
Abstract:
A significant portion of African Literature and expressive cultures – from the late 19th century to the present – has been produced as print, audio, video, and (more recently) digital ephemera. From market pamphlets to YouTube videos, the materiality of the African expressive archive is often at odds with the standards and cataloguing practices of formal libraries and collections. This poses challenges to attempts to make these materials visible and findable in a dataverse dominated by literary data on commercial, formally catalogued, often English-language, works.
This paper will illustrate how the African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project addresses such challenges in its work with Linked Open Data and multilingual data modelling, raising ethical and political questions about the so-called ‘unruly’ archive and what is at stake when we try to curate it.
Join us for a talk by Ashleigh Harris on the ways in which the ALMEDA project uses Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web to create sustainable data on African Literature and expressive culture.
We are delighted to invite you to this symposium, which focuses on the ways in which audiovisual archives and film historiography in African and diasporic contexts are entangled with one another. Bringing together film and screen media scholars, filmmakers, curators, and archivists, the symposium will explore the impact of…
Join us for a symposium organised by ALMEDA postdoctoral fellow, Gloria Ajami Makokha, on the ‘Materialities of Oral Cultures in East Africa’.
We are delighted to announce that AfLIA (African Library and Information Associations and Institutions) and ALMEDA have formalised a collaboration in which ALMEDA will create an online course for AfLIA members titled ‘From Collections to Data Publications: a workflow for Librarians and Archivists’. The course aims to train librarians and…