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“Publishing, Platforms, & African Literature in the Digital Age” – SCOLMA 2024 Online Seminar Series

Join us ONLINE for the fourth of five seminars in “African Studies in the Digital Age” – SCOLMA’s 2024 Seminar Series

About the Seminar: Publishing, Platforms, & African Literature in the Digital Age

Wednesday March 13th Online from 13:00-14:00 GMT. Register now!

“In the last decade social media, ebooks, and other digital platforms have been transforming how and where writers are read. This seminar explores the ways in which these changes have affected the production, circulation and collecting of literature from the African continent.

Chaired by Professor Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol), this session brings together Professor Ainehi Edoro-Glines (UW-Madison, Brittle Paper) and Julian Russ (Baobab e-Book Services). Each panellist, in very different ways, brings a career-long perspective on promoting African writing and exploring the technical, economic, social and cultural implications of digital platforms for authors, for publishers and for reading publics. In this roundtable we will explore the implications of their work for those who manage library and archive collections.”

About the Series:

This FREE and ONLINE series of 5 seminars returns to the theme of a SCOLMA publication from 2014, ‘African Studies in the Digital Age’. Through a programme of discussion events we will be exploring some key ways in which this field has changed over that decade.

The season will address a variety of topics including digital repatriation projects, new modes of sharing, researching and teaching with digital collections, collecting born digital records, and the creative re-use and curation of digital heritage.

Each event in the season is intended to be structured as a conversation or round table, and the season will include collection holders, researchers, digital experts and artists from the UK, the African continent and beyond.

The focus, given our key audience, will in large part be on the practicalities and challenges of doing this kind of work. Our aim is to share knowledge, stimulate discussion on best practice, and identify key opportunities in the field.

Seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 13:00-13:55 GMT:

January 31st
February 14th
February 28th
March 13th
April 17th

The topics, speakers, and registration information will be posted ahead of the respective seminar.

Support SCOLMA

UK Library & Archives Group on Africa (SCOLMA) is a registered charity (No. 325086). As a non-profit organisation, we would love your help in continuing our mission to provide the best possible service for academics, students and other researchers working in African studies. We publish a journal, Africa Bibliography, Research and Documentation, run a directory of African Studies libraries, organise conferences and seminars, and network with other librarians, archivists and researchers, in the UK, Europe, Africa and the US. We also act as an expert body providing specialist advice.

Please consider donating any amount you can when you get your free ticket.

“Digital (Re)Connections and Dispersed Collections” – SCOLMA 2024 Online Seminar Series

Join us ONLINE for the third of five seminars in “African Studies in the Digital Age” – SCOLMA’s 2024 Seminar Series

About the Seminar: Digital (Re)Connections and Dispersed Collections

Wednesday February 28th Online from 13:00-14:00 GMT. Register now!

This seminar brings into conversation researchers working with material that has been dispersed by colonial violence. What forms of work are necessary to reunite, make sense of and generate access to historically dispersed collections? What role can the digital (from the high-tech to the ad hoc) play in these processes? Where does the technical meet other kinds of social, cultural and political challenges?

Chaired by Jenni Skinner (University of Cambridge), Imogen Coulson (Independent Researcher) and Osaisonor Godfrey Ekhator-Obogie (University of Benin) will discuss some of the possibilities and challenges raised by the project ‘Digital Benin’ which provides a virtual overview of the artefacts looted from the Benin Kingdom in the nineteenth century. Tim Livsey (University of Northumberland) will present his ongoing work in the project ‘Stolen Archives’ that explores the ‘migrated archives’, FCO 141, including the history of the extraction of records from former colonial territories by the British government, and their potential use for historians of Africa today.

About the Series:

This FREE and ONLINE series of 5 seminars returns to the theme of a SCOLMA publication from 2014, ‘African Studies in the Digital Age’. Through a programme of discussion events we will be exploring some key ways in which this field has changed over that decade.

The season will address a variety of topics including digital repatriation projects, new modes of sharing, researching and teaching with digital collections, collecting born digital records, and the creative re-use and curation of digital heritage.

Each event in the season is intended to be structured as a conversation or round table, and the season will include collection holders, researchers, digital experts and artists from the UK, the African continent and beyond.

The focus, given our key audience, will in large part be on the practicalities and challenges of doing this kind of work. Our aim is to share knowledge, stimulate discussion on best practice, and identify key opportunities in the field.

Seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 13:00-13:55 GMT:

January 31st
February 14th
February 28th
March 13th
April 17th

The topics, speakers, and registration information will be posted ahead of the respective seminar.

Support SCOLMA

UK Library & Archives Group on Africa (SCOLMA) is a registered charity (No. 325086). As a non-profit organisation, we would love your help in continuing our mission to provide the best possible service for academics, students and other researchers working in African studies. We publish a journal, Africa Bibliography, Research and Documentation, run a directory of African Studies libraries, organise conferences and seminars, and network with other librarians, archivists and researchers, in the UK, Europe, Africa and the US. We also act as an expert body providing specialist advice.

Please consider donating any amount you can when you get your free ticket.

“Digital Resources for African Studies – Teaching & Research” – SCOLMA 2024 Online Seminar Series

Join us ONLINE for the second of five seminars in “African Studies in the Digital Age” – SCOLMA’s 2024 Seminar Series

About the Seminar: Digital Resources for African Studies – Teaching & Research

This session explores the creation and use of collections of digital sources for teaching and researching in African Studies. In 2014 SCOLMA published an important volume of reflections on the impact of digital technologies on African-focused collections, African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects? The authors reflected on a wide-range of online collections for African Studies, including newspapers, photographs, as well as archived documents, subscription model databases, and open access collections. Discussion addressed the relation of digital collections to national identity and institutions, technical considerations for different users, and the impact (or lack of impact) of digitising collections on scholarship. Ten years later, how have practices and priorities changed? What new technologies have shaped the ways in which material is presented and used? How has demand or expectations changed from researchers and students? What innovations and examples of best practice might shape future work?

This conversation, chaired by Dr. Elizabeth Haines, Records Specialist Empire & Commonwealth, The National Archives, UK, brings together a group who have variously created, used and advised on the construction of digital resources for African Studies: Dr. Perpetua S. Dadzie, Associate Professor of Information Science at the University of Ghana; Elizabeth Robey from Africa Commons; Dr. Siyabonga Njica, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in African Studies, University of Cambridge; and Dr. George Njung, Assistant Professor of African History at Baylor University in Texas.

To receive the link, please register on our Eventbrite page.

About the Series

This FREE and ONLINE series of 5 seminars returns to the theme of a SCOLMA publication from 2014, ‘African Studies in the Digital Age’. Through a programme of discussion events we will be exploring some key ways in which this field has changed over that decade.

The season will address a variety of topics including digital repatriation projects, new modes of sharing, researching and teaching with digital collections, collecting born digital records, and the creative re-use and curation of digital heritage.

Each event in the season is intended to be structured as a conversation or round table, and the season will include collection holders, researchers, digital experts and artists from the UK, the African continent and beyond.

The focus, given our key audience, will in large part be on the practicalities and challenges of doing this kind of work. Our aim is to share knowledge, stimulate discussion on best practice, and identify key opportunities in the field.

Seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 13:00-13:55 GMT:

• January 31st
• February 14th
• February 28th
• March 13th
• April 17th

The topics, speakers, and registration information will be posted ahead of the respective seminar.

Support SCOLMA

UK Library & Archives Group on Africa (SCOLMA) is a registered charity (No. 325086). As a non-profit organisation, we would love your help in continuing our mission to provide the best possible service for academics, students and other researchers working in African studies. We publish a journal, Africa Bibliography, Research and Documentation, run a directory of African Studies libraries, organise conferences and seminars, and network with other librarians, archivists and researchers, in the UK, Europe, Africa and the US. We also act as an expert body providing specialist advice.

Please consider donating any amount you can when you get your free ticket.