African Literary Metadata
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Publications

Case Studies

Welcome to our new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow, Anna Marie Skråmestø Nesheim

We are delighted to be joined by Anna Marie Skråmestø Nesheim who has received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project ‘Monetizing Performance Culture in French North and West Africa’. The project examines how the introduction of copyright systems affected the production of African performing arts in the…

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Research findings shared with community stakeholders in Mombasa

ALMEDA’s Gloria Ajami Makokha held a Majina ya Khanga/Leso Awareness and Publicization Drive at Kenyatta University’s Mombasa Campus on 23rd December 2025, funded by the British Institute in Eastern Africa’s Impact Grant Award. The event, in which Makokha’s research findings from field work in the region were shared with her…

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FEMRITE case study underway

ALMEDA case researcher Erik Falk, visited Kampala and the site of FEMRITE, Uganda Women Writers Association, 17-26 November to collect data on the organisations formal and informal publications. FEMRITE, which will celebrate 30 years of work in 2026, is active across the literary field by organising poetry clubs and writers’…

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The African Short Stories Online dataset: an interview with Gilbert Braspenning

Gilbert Braspenning has recently published a dataset of 902 online African short stories and had donated that data to the ALMEDA project for inclusion in our database.  Online publishing of African short stories and poetry has increased significantly in the last decade with online small magazines, literary journals, and blogs…

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Database

Kiswahili Lexicon of Literary Terms

We are delighted to announce that Miriam Osore of Kenyatta University, Kenya, has compiled and translated a list of Kiswahili literary terms for the ALMEDA project. The lexicon is available on our Zenodo page. Osore, Miriam Kenyani. ‘Kiswahili Lexicon of Literary Terms’. Zenodo, 17 November 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17628263.

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Gĩkũyũ Lexicon of Literary Terms

Mbũgua wa Mũngai (Kenyatta University) has compiled a ‘Gĩkũyũ Lexicon of Literary Terms’ for the ALMEDA project (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17507422). We are seeking Lexicons from as many languages as possible for the purposes of making our database multilingual. Read more about contributing a lexicon and publishing it with us here.

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New East African Little Magazine datasets

We have just published three new datasets on East African Little Magazines Darlite and Umma, as well as Transition Magazine (the Ugandan years). All our data is freely downloadable and reusable. Van Loenen, M. (2025). Content from Darlite Magazine, Dar es Salaam, 1966 – 1970 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17433216 Runefelt, M.…

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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

Locating Film in the Multiple Geographies of the Audiovisual Archive: 26 March 2026, Uppsala University

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…

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Materialities of Oral Cultures in East Africa: An Online Symposium, 12 March 2026

Join us for a symposium organised by ALMEDA postdoctoral fellow, Gloria Ajami Makokha, on the ‘Materialities of Oral Cultures in East Africa’.

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AI and African Literary Studies: a new ALMEDA working paper

Ashleigh Harris has a new ALMEDA pamphlet reflecting on the problems and potentials of AI in and for the field of African Literary Studies. Harris will be participating at the Charting New Territory: Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies organised by Frédérick Madore, Vincent Hiribarren in Hanover in February,…

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Two presentations on Multilingualism in the African Archive

Ashleigh Harris and Nicklas Hållén will both present their recent research at the “Lost & Found” Archives and Multilingualism in the (Post)Colony, to be held at the University of Liège on 12 January. Ashleigh will address how the ALMEDA project is working on a multilingual ontology for its knowledge model…

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