26 August 2026
On 19 August 2026, the Department of Applied Languages at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) hosted the Mini DH-IGNITE: Digital Text Analysis & Annotation workshop, ahead of TUT’s Inaugural Symposium on Sociolinguistics. The day brought together researchers, students, and practitioners for a programme covering digital tools, methods, and career pathways in Digital Humanities.
Programme Overview
Following registration and a welcome from TUT, the morning included an introduction to SADiLaR and the ESCALATOR programme, an update on DHASA’s upcoming conference call for submissions, and a session from Mmasibidi Setaka on the ethical use of digital tools and the importance of keeping the human touch in research.
Hands-On Sessions
After the morning tea break, participants worked with Voyant Tools to explore word frequencies, trends, and patterns in text. Marissa Griesel then introduced the SADiLaR repository and its hosted tools, returning after lunch to demonstrate the NCHLT text services — SADiLaR’s tokenisers, taggers, and analysers for South African languages. The day closed with a discussion on the role of digital tools in research and a wrap-up session.
Career Pathways
The workshop also connected these skills to potential career paths, including data and language annotation, corpus linguistics and digital archiving, NLP and language technology, and policy analysis or DH consultancy.
SADiLaR’s Broader Mission
The workshop reflected SADiLaR’s mission to build digital resources, tools, and skills for all 12 of South Africa’s official languages, including South African Sign Language. The ESCALATOR programme’s Digital Champions Initiative — with its Explore, Embarker, Empower, and Educator Champions tracks — offers further opportunities for participants to continue building on what they learned.
The workshop set the stage for TUT’s Inaugural Symposium on Sociolinguistics hosted on 20-21 August, where the digital methods introduced at DH-IGNITE connect to broader questions of language policy and practice.
Delivered Message of Support
Speaking on behalf of SADiLaR, Marissa Griesel framed South Africa’s linguistic diversity as rich material for sociolinguistic research, but noted that this richness also demands infrastructure to document, analyse, and preserve it — which is where SADiLaR’s mandate comes in. She explained that SADiLaR’s resources and tools exist to let researchers ask questions that would otherwise be difficult to pursue, and cautioned that as AI and large-scale data become more central to language research, careful linguistic understanding matters more, not less.
Marissa pointed to SADiLaR’s ESCALATOR programme as the space where sociolinguists, corpus linguists, and language technologists increasingly need to intersect, and closed by congratulating TUT’s Department of Applied Languages for organising the symposium and reaffirming SADiLaR’s continued support for its work.
Interested in staying connected? Explore the ESCALATOR Digital Champions tracks, engage with DHASA, or browse SADiLaR’s free Language Resource Catalogue at www.sadilar.org.
ESCALATOR Team