Africa Seminar: Messy Data, Ephemeral Literatures, and the Future African Archive

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 presentation 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.

Ashleigh Harris is Professor of English at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she is Primary investigator of the African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). She works on Southern African literatures, as well as print and online ephemeral literatures from across the sub-Saharan continent. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of African literary metadata.