Innovating Works

ALMEDA

Financiado
African Literary Metadata
Recent years have seen something of a renaissance in African literature, with African novelists becoming global best-sellers and achieving the world’s highest literary accolades. But published novels are restrictively expensive in... Recent years have seen something of a renaissance in African literature, with African novelists becoming global best-sellers and achieving the world’s highest literary accolades. But published novels are restrictively expensive in Africa itself and the novel form is ill-suited to African everyday life, where people are more likely to spend their leisure time engaging with informal, ephemeral and not-for-profit literary and oratory cultural forms, such as spoken-word poetry, street theatre, and a variety of online genres. These informal African literatures are rarely catalogued and therefore exist outside of any structured metadata system. The consequence is that formally published English and French African novels are hyper-visible globally, while the rich literary and oratory cultures of the continent itself are caught in a perpetual state of structural ephemerality. The ALMEDA project addresses this problem in three ways. First, by providing the first history of literary metadata on the African continent, the project will provide a diachronic understanding of how colonial cataloguing systems came to construct the idea of the ‘literary work’ as book-based and thus dismissive of Africa’s oral cultures. Secondly, ALMEDA aims to develop and publish a metadata scheme specifically designed for these informal literary materials. This scheme will be multilingual, which will enable a unique descriptive model that allows African-language genres to inhabit their own categories, rather than having to be forced into European literary ontologies. Thirdly, the project will develop a linked open metadata repository, populated via an interface that allows non-specialist entry of metadata on literary materials. By creating and linking metadata on this body of work, this repository will constitute a major intervention in African literature by making these literatures searchable and their records enduring, thereby opening up entirely new possibilities for scholarship. ver más
31/08/2028
UU
2M€
Duración del proyecto: 59 meses Fecha Inicio: 2023-09-01
Fecha Fin: 2028-08-31

Línea de financiación: concedida

El organismo HORIZON EUROPE notifico la concesión del proyecto el día 2023-09-01
Línea de financiación objetivo El proyecto se financió a través de la siguiente ayuda:
ERC-2022-ADG: ERC ADVANCED GRANTS
Cerrada hace 2 años
Presupuesto El presupuesto total del proyecto asciende a 2M€
Líder del proyecto
UPPSALA UNIVERSITET No se ha especificado una descripción o un objeto social para esta compañía.
Perfil tecnológico TRL 4-5