We’re delighted to share the completion of a project carried out by poet and Swahili lecturer (at the Centre for African Studies, Copenhagen University) Lisa Mumbi Macharia. This dataset documents over 10 years of spoken word poetry performances in the city of Nairobi.
Mumbi recorded 628 performances from between March 2015 and November 2024, extracting much of this data from posters and social media sites. The dataset highlights the creative voices shaping Nairobi’s urban culture, featuring poets’ names, performance dates, languages used, and links to many performance videos and posters.
If you are interested in this dataset, you can request a copy from almeda@uu.se. The data will be uploaded to the ALMEDA data repository, which will be available for searching towards the end of 2025.
We have published our first Yorùbá-content dataset! Atọ́ka was a Nigerian photoplay or fotonovella magazine that was published in Lagos by the West African Book Publishers. The Modern Endangered Archives Program has created a digitized collection of the magazine in collaboration with the Archive of Sound and Vision, at the Institute…
Read the BIEA’s recent blog on this collaboration.
This dataset covers poems published in Two Tone magazine from its first volume in 1964 to its final issue in September 1982. Two Tone was founded by Phillippa Berlyn and Olive Robertson and was published by the National Arts Foundation of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and the Department of English at University of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. An interesting aspect…
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,…