SADiLaR organizes monthly Digital Humanities colloquia. These typically take place on Wednesdays (in the middle of the month) from 10:00 to 11:00 SAST. During these DH colloquia a wide variety of topics are discussed, mostly on content related to Digital Humanities, sometimes focusing more on the techniques or methodologies used, sometimes focusing more on the applications or application areas.
The DH colloquia are part of Escalator’s Explorer track. You can find more information on Escalator here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/, on Escalator’s championship programme here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/champions/overview/, and on the Explorer track within Escalator’s championship programme here: https://escalator.sadilar.org/champions/explorer/. Also check out the other tracks within the Escalator championship programme as there may be tracks directly related to your interests. If you want to be a member of the Digital Humanities community, you may also want to consider joining the DHCSSza Slack. This page will provide more information on how to join (this is also free): https://escalator.sadilar.org/connect/.
If you have suggestions for speakers at the DH colloquium (or if you want to speak yourself), or if you want to provide feedback, please do not hesitate to contact Prof Menno van Zaanen: menno.vanzaanen@nwu.ac.za.
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Title: “Are they human or are they data?” Digital archives and the creation of humanising stories
Abstract:
Our “archive fever” has given rise to the creation of digitised archives of non-public records, including prison and medical case files. In the United Kingdom, the Wellcome Collection has digitised the medical case files for several nineteenth-century lunatic asylums (psychiatric hospitals). The case files are available for online viewing and allows a global audience to scrutinise scandalous stories of suffering, as well as to gawk at sensational photographs of patients in the throes of mental anguish. The Wellcome’s digitised content has a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) licence that allows users to share or adapt the material “for any purpose”. To this end, the suffering of others, their misery and melancholy, as well as their secrets and stories are freely at our disposal for our own gain. The material can be used for many “purposes”. For example, the public may peer upon the private lives of others to satisfy morbid curiosities or ‘peeping Tom’ motives, the media may look upon the images as source material for the opening sequence of a horror film, and politicians may disseminate the material as propaganda for right-wing interests. For academics, the material has been mined for big data. Scholars in digital humanities have successfully and commendably used the digitised archives to explore nutrition and health, mortality rates, as well as the prevalence of illnesses and the efficacy of various treatments. In this paper, I call for scholars who work with digital archives to move beyond the analysis of big data, to include the analysis of individual lives. Armed with the methodologies from the arts and humanities, we are equipped to see the person and not a unit of data. We can explore their records to present a respectful and affirmative telling of their life stories. Potentially, such a telling may restore their humanity.
Speaker: Rory du Plessis
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| Johannes Sibeko Is it written to be read? A case of readability in Sesotho. | 15 May 2024 | |
| Iris Auda and Pule kaJanolintji isiBheqe: First additional script Language Pedagogy in African Digital Orthographies — The case of isiBheqe soHlamvu digital tools for use in language and linguistics learning | 10 April 2024 https://isibheqe.org.za/ https://github.com/baruchlubinsky/isibheqe https://www.youtube.com/@TraditionalLibrary https://isibheqe.org.za/demo/ https://riker.itch.io/isibheqe-translator https://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/30286/OER%20-%20Introducing%20Orthography%20and%20Writing%20Systems.pdf | |
| Robyn Berghoff and Emanuel Bylund What do we study when we study multilingualism? A bibliometric(-adjacent) analysis of the field | 30 March 2024 Presentation | |
| Hanél Duvenage Data in healthcare: efforts digitisation and digitalisation | 21 February 2024 | |
| Phillip Ströbel Innovating Historical Scholarship: The Bullinger Digital Project | 31 January 2024 Presentation | |
| Burgert Senekal Network Science and the Digital Humanities: Applications, opportunities and challenges for interdisciplinary research in a South African context | 15 November 2023 Presentation | |
| Inge van de Ven Change my view? a Digital-Hermeneutics Approach to Dialogism in Online Culture | 13 September 2023 Presentation | |
| Amandla Ngwendu and Jacques De Wet Building the IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive: Challenges & Solutions | 19 July 2023 Presentation | |
| Karolina Rudnicka Can Grammarly and ChatGPT accelerate language change? AI-powered technologies and their impact on the English language: wordiness vs. conciseness | 16 August 2023 Presentation | |
| Geesje van den Berg and Lebo Mudau Postgraduate student involvement as co-developers of sustainable OER | 14 June 2023 Presentation | |
| Barbara McGillivray Publishing data papers in the humanities: my experience from the Journal of Open Humanities Data | 17 May 2023 Presentation | |
| Imke van Heerden Making Strange: Co-Creating Afrikaans Poetry with a Boutique Language Model | 12 April 2023 Presentation | |
| Hiwa Asadpour and Arash Amani An NLP method in the corpus analysis of Central Kurdish definiteness marker | 15 March 2023 Presentation | |
| Elsabé Taljard, Danie Prinsloo, and Michelle Goosen Creating electronic resources for African languages: challenges and opportunities | 15 February 2023 Presentation | |
| Thea Pitman and Janet C.E. Watson CELCE: Playing Green Games: micha cárdenas’s Sin Sol / No Sun | 25 January 2023 Presentation | |
| Annemi Conradie How to hang paintings on digital walls: processes and challenges of translating a physical art exhibition into a virtual showcase on the Kunstmatrix platform | 16 November 2022 Presentation | |
| Yliana Rodríguez and Luis Chiruzzo Considering language varieties and language contact in Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation: the case of Guarani | 12 October 2022 Presentation | |
| Gordon Matthew Measuring the impact of subtitles on cognive load | 14 September 2022 Presentation | |
| Sibonelo Dlamini Cross-lingual transfer learning | 17 August 2022 Presentation | |
| Anelda van der Walt and Anne Treasure The ESCALATOR programme – a big vision for growing digital and computational skills and community in Humanities & Social Sciences | 20 July 2022 Presentation | |
| Franziska Pannach A short introduction to Digital Folkloristics | 15 June 2022 | |
| Maria Keet Natural Language Generation for Agglutinating African Languages – A brief overview | 18 May 2022 Presentation | |
| Amanda du Preez Thinking Through Images: Approaching Aby Warburg and the Digital Arts and Humanities | 4 May 2022 Presentation | |
| Emmanuel Ngué Um When Ideologies we live by stand at odds with Digital Humanities collaboration | 16 March 2022 | |
| Vanessa McBride Big data, astronomy for development, and cross disciplinary collaboration | 16 February 2022 Presentation | |
| Peter van Kranenburg Computational Modelling in Musicology: The case of Medieval Chant | 19 January 2022 Presentation | |
| Martin Benjamin Towards valid linguistic measurement: The Kam4D Linguistic Knowledge Graph: Putting Smurfs, Ducks, Lemurs, and Party Terms to the Service of African Languages | 17 November 2021 Presentation | |
| Karien van den Berg Towards valid linguistic measurement: what digital humanities can bring to the forensic linguistic table and vice versa | 13 October 2021 Presentation | |
| Marissa Griesel Creating linguistic resources for use in digital humanities: notes from one proudly South African adventure | 15 September 2021 Presentation | |
| Lizabé Lambrechts Digital humanities and the archive: Looking at the challenges of taking the Hidden Years Music Archive online | 11 August 2021 | |
| Vanessa Joosen Constructing Age for Young Readers – A Digital Approach | 14 July 2021 Presentation | |
| Iris Hendrickx Getting to know people by automatic text analysis of talks and tweets | 9 June 2021 Presentation | |
| Tunde Opeibi Digital Humanities and African Scholarship: Exploring Opportunities, Embracing Challenges | 19 May 2021 Presentation | |
| Barbara Bordalejo A Historical Perspective on Digital Editions | 14 April 2021 | |
| Viktor Schlegel Deep learning for natural language processing | 17 March 2021 Presentation | |
| Rachel Hendery Digital Humanities approaches to digitising, repatriating and exploring an historical Australian colonial archive | 17 February 2021 Presentation | |
| Umamaheswara Rao Garapati Language Technology, a Bridge Spanning the Linguistic Divergence | 20 January 2021 | |
| Ayodele James Akinola Resources, scholarship and DH practice: Reflections on resilience and coping strategies of an African scholar | 18 November 2020 Presentation Part 1 Presentation Part 2 | |
| Martin Bekker Everything I knew about protests was wrong | 21 October 2020 Presentation |
