Update on the FHYA’s Afridig work

22 Dec 2021
Slide from the Omeka workshop. Image courtesy of Robin Fay.
22 Dec 2021

The FHYA is part of a multi-institutional research consortium that was successful in 2021 in gaining a third tranche of funding from the Mellon African Digital Humanities initiative.

The grant supports:

-ongoing digitisation. This involves identification and digitisation of materials in a wide variety of institutions and private collections pertinent to the southern African past before colonialism, and the processing and uploading of this material including enriched metadata creation. Some of this is dictated by what the FHYA is able to find in institutions across the world and locally, as well as what we are offered. The FHYA prioritises early published vernacular texts and selections from the early Black press;

-projects of a wide variety designed to augment the digital holdings and to present digital archival materials in a variety of accessible formats. This involves extensive work in providing scholarly and imaginative points of access to the collections, including themed, commissioned, curated projects engaging scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields and drawing on archives outside the collection. Such projects produce smaller digital archival and related projects including films documentaries, podcasts and curations which are being added to the FHYA’s EMANDULO website. A select number are also being added to the FHYA’s 500 Year Archive website. See, for example, Spotlight on the Mfecane. One project in the pipeline due for release in the first half of 2022 is a project to present online the many kinds of texts produced by Magema Fuze and to create not only an archive of this material but also an exciting centennial digital curation commemorating the publication in 1922 of his book, Abantu Abamnyama. It will include amongst other things a podcast of his views on the 1873 Langalibaleleuprising;

-further development of the digital research infrastructure and the development of innovative digital research tools. A specific goal here is the development of simple software to support the FHYA’s novel Bibliomatrix project.

Also in the second half of 2021 the FHYA participated in online training sessions on OmekaS, an open-source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections, hosted by Wiser, Mellon’s Afridig funding partner.