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

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