Digital Humanities, the African Perspective? Insight from Language Documentation

The field of Digital Humanities (DH) with a cursory projection might be perceived today as novelty rather than a redefinition, reconstruction, and expansion of the scope of apprehension of all genres of texts, artifacts or human recordings (manipulations) with the aid of advanced (computer-assisted statistical analysis) technological tools and methods. This interdisciplinary approach of humanities corpora management and development is geared at revealing implicit properties and unique socio-cultural traits that are hidden within native forms of human beliefs, languages,traditions, philosophies, experiences, ethno-ecological practices and general world view. The issues to be discussed are ‘what does DH mean to African humanities scholars? How do they implement DH in their research and teachings? What are the different significant ramifications of DH operationality to most of the African society and the scientific world at large?’ In this presentation, we will unveil our discussions by examining the different perspectives of DH and how the African humanities scholars manifest it in their works; how DH is implemented (the development and challenges) in fields of endangered language documentation (especially in multicultural settings, experiences e.g. in Cameroon) and how DH addresses the Africans’ needs, aspirations and development of the indigenous communities and academia. We will finalize our discussions by exposing some of the rich potentials of DH in Africa that can immensely contribute to knowledge production and the current DH debate.

Key words: Digital humanities, African perspectives, DH operationality, endangered language documentation, multiculturalism