Paper short abstract:

We plan to explore the potential of a variety of AI tools for decolonial epistemic ends using a corpus of digitised West African Economic Journals, aiming to generate lenses on technological development discourse that offer a radical departure from traditional Global North analytical norms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on previous collaborative analysis of the British Library for Development Studies Legacy (BLDS) Collection (Corble, Graves and Millum, 2023), which involved using metadata from the collection to create a mapping tool to contrast its provenance with that of the main library collections at Sussex and use this to explore the potential for applying decolonial approaches to library discovery and research.

We now plan to move from metadata to the data itself, as part of a new project digitising another part of the BLDS collections, the rare West African Economic Journals. This will provide a unique corpus on which to explore the potential of a variety of AI tools, including chatbots, text and image analysis, and visualisation. Outcomes will include developing a large language level chatbot, with the intention being to compare the responses this generates with that produced by generic ChatGPT. We will focus on the Camel Forum Working Papers from the Somali Academy of Sciences and Arts, hoping these will generate lenses on technological development discourse that offer a radical departure from traditional Global North analytical norms. We are looking forward to the opportunity to test this hypothesis and problematising the outcomes!

What we discover as we apply the technology to the scanned texts will iteratively inform our next steps, with this methodology highlighting the co-productive benefits of combining the expertise of librarians with the critical analysis of an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of DS and Library Information Studies for decolonial epistemic ends