SADiLaR Team: Setswana Researcher

Mrs. Valencia Wagner is SADiLaR’s Setswana language researcher. She finds sociolinguistics, phonetics, phonology and digital humanities particularly interesting within the language of Setswana.

Currently she is working on the writing of articles and organising virtual workshops. Other projects that is currently consuming Mrs. Wagner’s time is focusing- and working on her PhD studies. She is also planning to write more articles within the next few months. Furthermore Valencia will be working on two projects:

  • The Setswana and IsiXhosa grammar portal
  • The speech data collection project

Upon asking her what she thinks about the contribution that Digital Humanities can make in the African context she had the following to say:

“Africa still has a limited exposure to various digital tools, resources & methodologies, therefore, many African researchers and scholars still rely a lot on traditional methods of conducting research. Digital humanities can transform traditional humanities by creating and integrating digital technologies into African research. Research that would have taken years to complete manually, will be much easier to undertake with the use of digital tools.”

She concluded by saying that these digital platforms could also help us to share information and grow our indigenous communities.