Blog

African Studies in the Digital Age

This past weekend, I attended the 56th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Baltimore, Maryland. It was a fantastic event, bringing together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, from history and anthropology to public health and geography. In addition to sharing their research, scholars also reflected on future trajectories of African Studies. Aside from particular research angles that need to be explored, numerous scholars commented on the need for greater utilization of digital humanities in the study of Africa.

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CHI Fellowship Introduction: Brian Geyer

Hey everyone my name is Brian Geyer and I am a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department here at Michigan State. Though not formally a Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellow, I have joined the team this year to develop my technological skills and become a more robust candidate for employment once I complete my Ph.D.

Upon completion of my B.A.s in Music and Anthropology at Washington State University, I briefly entered the workforce as a clerk in my area’s court system. My first encounter with digital archives would prove to be eye-opening. The software packages we used to create, access, and update official court documents were cumbersome, awkward, and generally unfriendly to the average user. From that experience I have carried with me the importance of a well-thought-out interface with regards to archival software. As I’ve gone forward through life, other events far more specifically relevant to my career as an anthropologist have further informed my thoughts on web-based archival technology.

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Researching African Hip-hop Culture: The Role of Online Archives

For the last couple of years, I have been engaged in researching Hip-hop culture specifically, Kenyan Hip-hop. Owing to difficulties in finding original music albums, coupled with music piracy in the country, I have found myself relying mostly on online resources to do my research. One of the resources I have come to find very useful is Ghafla!  www.ghafla.co.ke/lyrics/.  I started using this site way back in 2009 when by then it was called Kenyanlyrics.com. It was interesting to read that the developer/creator of this site, Mr. Majani, was motivated to develop the site because of the same experiences and frustrations I was going through: Lack of ACCESS to Kenyan music content. In an interview, this is what he said:

After my discontinuation in college, I became an idler and I would listen to the collection of music I had accumulated from JKUAT. I had love for Kenyan music, and I remember looking online for lyrics of the song Jamani by Bamboo but never got it. Then I looked for other Kenyan Music but never found it. I saw this gap and started filling it while still at home. So I started running a website called kenyalyrics.com.

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Naangodinong kwii bekaayaa wii noondaagoyi

One of the issues that confronts those involved with Native American language revitalization is how to teach a language whose speakers are often few and far between and potential students are often spread out over a large area. In Michigan there are less than 50 speakers of Anishinaabemowin, or the Ojibwe language. While many reservation and urban communities are engaged in language revitalization, the number of people it reaches is limited, and the small number of fluent speakers and language resources only compounds the problem. One way to solve this is through digital media and web based learning. However, Native urban and reservation communities have lagged behind other communities in terms of their access to the technology and infrastructure that could make this possible.

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Digital Collaboration

One of the difficulties of being a historian of South Africa living in East Lansing (or really being a historian of any foreign place) is that, for most of the year, I am over 8,000 miles away from my subject matter. This is not to say that I do not have valuable resources at my disposal here; thankfully, I do have access to an impressive number of archival materials thanks to the stellar collections available through the MSU Library and MATRIX. However, for someone who centers their work on the testimonies and perspectives of South Africans, this distance becomes difficult. Recently, however, I have begun to consider the potential of digital platforms (particularly blogging and social media) to bridge this gap.

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