Paper short abstract:

Drawing and reflecting on a recent published article, this paper investigates digital resources on African history with a European connection. It discusses the factors enabling digitisation and the kinds of content this may produce, as well as the extreme fragmentation of these resources.

Paper long abstract:

This paper surveys the plethora of digital resources for African history that have developed out of Europe's long, entangled histories of engagement with Africa, and the very extensive collections these have produced. These websites provide rich and extensive resources for researchers in some areas, but are still thin and patchy in others.

This paper analyses the key drivers of digitisation in this area, asking how a variety of factors - including scholarly interest, the priorities of the cultural sector, and financial issues - affect the nature of content being digitised. For example, visual collections are often selected to go online, arguably because their wide appeal chimes with the democratising impulse behind major initiatives such as Europeana. I also look at the main barriers to digitisation - cost, copyright and privacy concerns - and how these have been overcome.

These issues are discussed in my recently published article of the same title, on which I reflect further here. Its writing involved much more research than anticipated and brought into stark relief the fragmentation of digital resources in this area.

The paper aims to contribute to a broader discussion. Things have moved on since, at a 2012 conference, Peter Limb asked the then visionary question 'Can we now write a PhD from online resources?'; in this context, understanding what makes it to the internet, and why, is ever more crucial for the practice of African history.

References

http://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-338?rskey=JXicm4&result=1

Referencesavailableonrequest(wordcountproblem!

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how sources from the past combined with new digital technologies and new active learning teaching methods could be used to engage and connect undergraduate students to Africa's past.

Paper long abstract:

Increasingly undergraduate history course outcomes emphasize historical thinking, lessons are inquiry based and students are required to apply evidence-based reasoning in answering historical questions. Studies have also shown that students become more engaged and interested in coursework with improved academic skills and course outcomes when primary source research is integrated in the curriculum. Other studies reflect a trend towards increased use of online primary sources instead of published sources by faculty in their teaching. The growth of digital primary sources related to Africa through subscription databases and freely available repositories online has vastly expanded access to rare materials making it possible to integrate such materials in teaching historical research on Africa. African history and culture transmitted broadly through language, documents, material objects, images, rituals and oral traditions, which preserved are used to engage with the African past. The materials used to be only housed in archives, libraries, museums, privately owned, published or at times in precarious conditions in Africa, restricting access and visibility to users outside the country, region or institutions of origin. Advent of digital technologies have transformed access by removing barriers, allowing access in transnational spaces. Selected freely accessible online collections of African primary sources will be examined as well as their discovery and access. The role of faculty, librarians and archivists in driving adoption in an African history classroom will be explored.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the digital library to find the unarticulated narratives of African women in the expeditions of David Livingstone. It will present alternate narratives of exploration through which we can restore these women and their role to the historical record.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the digital library to find the unarticulated narratives of African women in the expeditions of David Livingstone. This paper uses the digital library to look at the available manuscripts and documents as palimpsests, identifying how they erase or reassure each other in the stories they propose of events. By reading across multiple interpretations of an event and seeing them as variable renderings of a specific location it is possible to present alternate narratives of exploration through which we can restore these women and their role to the historical record.

While revisionist and postcolonial scholarship has engaged in a substantial reappraisal of the European explorer in Africa, it is the digital library, as a technology of recovery that is today extending and expediting the process. The digital library enables the user to explore information contained in explorers' original documents - written in situ, during their travels - often revealing complexities that are lost in the official expeditionary narratives that they published on their return. It is in reading these texts digitally, against the grain of the traditional archive, that it becomes possible to uncover the appropriation of local knowledge, the interactive processes of intellectual production, and other material-based contributions that are embedded in such male-authored accounts. This paper will reappraise the Anglocentric male focus of nineteenth-century exploration narratives, via the opportunities digital humanities tools provide, to provoke the identification of lost or muted voices in the historical data.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows the increasing importance of websites like Wikimedia Commons for open access to snippets of the African past. Such archival websites also function as a portal, as an aggregator for cooperation and as an open access sharing platform.

Paper long abstract:

Uploading and sharing photographic collections via Wikimedia Commons is a fairly recent but popular development. Wikimedia Commons started in 2004, and now hosts 51 Million "free" images. It is connected to Wikipedia, but also serves as an independent platform. Open access and the possibility of re-usage are key functions.

In this paper, two issues will be addressed: access and copyright & control.

Access: the files in Wikimedia Commons are used across the 300 different language versions of Wikipedia, which amounts to enormous numbers of image views. Many libraries, archives and museums (incl. the Metropolitan Museum and the Dutch National Archives) see their collections used 8 to 100 times more via Wikipedia compared to views on their own websites. The impact on access cannot be underestimated. Including collections about Africa in Commons also helps to fight the under-representation of southern continents in Wikipedia.

Copyright and control: every file in Wikimedia Commons needs to have an open licence (Public Domain or Creative Commons), so that images can be re-used freely, even commercially. In fact, a "donating" person or organization has no control over their "own" images anymore. There is a positive side to this: because anyone can contribute to Commons, the descriptions (metadata) of the images can be improved by anyone.

Some disadvantages of using Wikimedia Commons are also discussed, and some ethical issues will be briefly addressed. Practical examples from donations by the African Studies Centre in Leiden (Sierra Leone 1930s, Guinea Bissau 1970s, Cameroon 2000s) will be shown.

Paper short abstract:

While online geographic photo collections grow, there has not been a serious review of how these collections are used, especially those pertaining to the African continent. The paper will examine access, publication use and incorporation into instruction of 19th and 20th century African photographs.

Paper long abstract:

Photographs are a snapshot in time, that help provide context and a more thorough understanding of people, places, artifacts, events and activities of the past. When used effectively, they can be testimony, serve as educational tools and promote discussion. This paper investigates the ways in which photograph collections at the Herskovits Library of African Studies are accessed, utilized in teaching and analyzes their role in (print. media, popular) publications. Examples will be from the Winterton Collection of photographs, a collection "that documents both African life and European life in Africa in all its manifestations. It chronicles the daily experience of colonial residents: how they traveled, the lives they created for themselves, their social activities, and their early interaction with the rest of Africa". There will also be a discussion, on the potential use of the Duckworth Collection, a collection of 5,000 photos documenting Nigerian life in the decades just before independence.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation concerns preparing the Jose Adelino Macedo Collection which is located at the Library of Congress for a world-wide audience of researchers.

Paper long abstract:

Materials from Jose Adelino Macedo (1907-1983), a Portuguese colonial officer who worked in Mozambique and in South Africa from 1928 to 1971, were acquired in 2009 by the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. This collection of thousands of items in Portuguese and English reached the Library somewhat organized by format (publications, documents, photos, personal objects, artifacts) and for years, it was totally inaccessible to researchers. The Preservation Office provided appropriate housing and with the help of many student volunteers, from 2012-2015, scans were made of this collection and were copied to CD's. This allowed the African Section to offer onsite access in the African & Middle Eastern Division Reading Room. Original items could only be viewed under supervision. Since the collection's arrival, one main challenge was to provide for its security in a public reading room, but the onset of the digital age has presented new options for preserving the material and keeping it safe. In 2018, the Library made the decision to process and to digitize this unique collection, both to make it accessible to researchers worldwide and to help protect, preserve and secure fragile items for future generations. This paper will present an overview of the Macedo Collection and the ways in which the Library has worked to preserve, process, and present its valuable contents in the new digital environment. Among the topics to be explored are the Library's complex process for proposing digital projects, and the challenges presented by shifting Library policies and the constant changes in technology.