Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa
The Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA), ISSN 3006-6492, which publishes from 2022, is the peer-reviewed open-access journal of DHASA. Since its foundation in 2016, DHASA has become the official network of digital humanities scholars in Southern Africa. DHASA members come from a wide variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences. The DHASA Journal is an important initiative aimed at making the research output of our members and other interested scholars publicly available. If you are interested in joining DHASA, please follow this link.
Artificial Intelligence: A New Global System, a Genocidal Project or the revival of the tokoloshe culture?
In the context of inclusive innovation, artificial intelligence (AI), presents opportunities to address inequality and social exclusion by integrating fairness, inclusivity, and representation. Despite AI's advantages, such as being a transformative force in the global landscape, affecting our traditional labour systems, and becoming a part of our daily lives. It is important to consider the potential downsides, including deepening inequalities and enhancing the digital divide. This article explores the multifaceted nature of AI, examining whether it implies developing a new global system, risks becoming a “genocidal project”, or challenging traditional African ways of being. We illustrate this by comparing AI usage and African Epistemologies to understand how both have a dual nature in their adaptability and versatility in shaping our everyday lives. Using the African Epistemological lenses of ubuntu and African folklore of the tokoloshe, we incorporate evidence from academic sources and policy, we argue that AI's replacement of human labour is a form of economic genocide, mainly impacting less advantaged people by intensifying inequalities and unemployment. This paper aims to contribute to the growing study of Inclusive Innovation by incorporating AI and African experiences; emphasising the philosophy of ubuntu by bringing to the fore humanness in the development of AI in Southern Africa. We offer policy recommendations for policy development that emphasise the challenges and influence of AI’s potential for inclusive innovation. These recommendations promote equitable access to technology and prioritise ethical considerations to avoid harm and marginalisation.
Artificial intelligence, Inclusive Innovation, African epistemology, Capitalism, Traditional Labour.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lebogang Khoza, Zikhona Necolette Ngqula https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
An empirical content analysis of posts made to the r/depression subreddit
Online fora are one of the oldest spaces for internet communication. These fora provide internet users the opportunity to connect with others of similar interests and experiences. Online mental health communities are fora for individuals that wish to connect with others based on a shared mental health experience. These digital ecosystems offer an avenue for seeking advice or validation, as well as for freely sharing experiences with similar others within a culture of reduced stigma and social support. Reddit is a popular and readily accessible platform that hosts moderated communities known as subreddits, which include communities for mental health concerns such as depression, anxiety, trauma and eating disorders. This study is an analysis of data collected by way of the Reddit application programming interface (API) from the r/depression subreddit. A conceptual framework was developed for preparing and evaluating the data by way of an empirical content analysis. The content analysis was conducted on 11975 posts made by 9593 unique user accounts over a 56-day period. The analysis of user behaviour in this subreddit relates to general engagement, the temporal attributes of the dataset, and the demographic and geographic attributes of the users. This investigation provides insights into the words most frequently used in posts made to this subreddit, the time of day and day of the week that most individuals posted to the forum, the age and locational distribution of r/depression subreddit users accounted for in the dataset and how these insights relate to the global prevalence of depression.
Copyright (c) 2024 Kurt Marais https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Decoding Southern African Folktales using Hylistic Analysis
In this submission, the potential of hylistic analysis for the domain of Southern African folklore is demonstrated. For that purpose, narrative sequences of folktales are carefully re-constructed according to the new hylistic theory and analysed on a subset of 30 folktales from Henry Callaway's Nursery Tales and Histories of the Zulus, a unique parallel resource in English-vernacular isiZulu. The dataset, consisting of 5176 distinct narrative statements, so-called hylemes in 384 narrative sequences, is presented as a freely accessible resource which holds transformative potential for the re-interpretation and (automatic) processing of folktale narratives. It is the first step towards a thorough investigation of Callaway's collection, and an effort to the analysis of the tales' narrative structures. The dataset can be used as a resource for many future studies on folktale characters and plots as well as the study of historical isiZulu.
Copyright (c) 2025 Franziska Pannach https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The complex morphology, conjunctive orthography and widespread occurrence of morphophonological alternation in the Nguni languages have given rise to several efforts towards morphological segmentation of tokens of Nguni languages. For supervised methods, annotated data is required, which currently exists as canonically segmented data in the NCHLT corpus and surface segmented data in the Ukwabelana corpus. In this paper, we present a method and segmentation strategy based on a computational grammar for isiZulu. The grammar, which itself has some limitations in processing speed and robustness to unexpected input, is used to create a new set of segmentations for the tokens of the Ukwabelana corpus. By training various models with the same architecture but on different datasets, we first show that our approach enables us to match the performance of a model trained on pre-existing data. We also show that our approach provides the flexibility to determine a suitable segmentation strategy and to generate data that reflects this strategy.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sthembiso Mkhwanazi, Laurette Marais https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Advocating for the Digitization of the History of China-Africa Diplomatic Relations
This article delves into the examination of research pertaining to the historical establishment of diplomatic relations between China and African countries, intersecting with the domain of historical digitization, focusing on the fusion of oral history and the digital preservation of historical documents. After underscoring the significance of investigating the history of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and African nations, the study conducts a literature review, delving into the status quo of historical digitization research in both Chinese and African academies with both sides’ current study on each other’s history and Sino-African relations, thereby furnishing a robust technical and scholarly groundwork for this research. Afterward, the article deliberates upon the prospects and challenges intrinsic to digitizing the history surrounding the initiation of diplomatic relations between China and Africa. Conclusively, the article proffers recommendations aimed at catalyzing the digitization trajectory of this historical narrative, spanning two tiers, including the official multilateral cooperation mechanism and collaborative endeavors involving private academic institutions.
Copyright (c) 2024 LI Chensi, CHEN Xi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Re-discovering Narratives of South African Defence Force Servicemen through the Informal Digital Archive
The South African Defence Force (SADF) has become a point of contention in post-Apartheid South African public memory. From 1966 until 1989, approximately 600,000 white males were conscripted into the SADF to fight in conflicts around Southern Africa as well as at home in South Africa. While much academic work has been done on the SADF during the latter half of the Apartheid era, it is filled with rampant apologia relating to the actions of the SADF as well as the narratives of those that served within it. The stories and experiences of SADF conscripts and soldiers has essentially been ‘sanitized’ by academics and authors attempting to make them suitable for the post-Apartheid era. Yet, on internet forums and social media websites, many SADF veterans have found a space to express their narratives freely without the input of reconciliation conscious reviewers. In this informal digital space, a plethora of material has been deposited by these ex-servicemen which now serves as a digital archive from which researchers can gain valuable insight into the actions and experiences of SADF veterans. The unfiltered narratives found in this informal digital archive shines new light on the current academic understanding of the SADF. Instead of the narrative pushed by many academics and authors of young men filled with remorse for fighting a war they understood little about, this material tells a different story. White supremacism, braggadocio and light-hearted discussion on war crimes committed by the SADF fill these digital spaces, creating a counter-narrative to the apologetic stance of many historians and sociologists who have written extensively on the Border War. This paper will explore some of these informal digital archives and seek to answer not only why SADF veterans feel comfortable expressing their narratives freely in the digital space, but also why they have been largely ignored by mainstream academia.
Copyright (c) 2024 Thomas Hartley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Empathic Engagement and Aesthetic Appreciation Between Readers’ Ethnicity and Narratives’ Literary Prestige
Scholars of postcolonial studies have highlighted the role played by identity features in both the production and the reception of literary works. In this paper, we apply computational methods to a corpus of reviews of South-African post-colonial novels, downloaded from the Goodreads platform, in order to assess the influence of sociocultural and intersectional factors on the level of appreciation and identification potential of narratives. In particular, we investigate the effect, on the one hand, of the reader’s ethnicity and, on the other, of the work’s literary prestige on the appreciation and the empathic transportation elicited by narratives in the reader. To operationalize our hypotheses, we collected information on the reviewers’ country of provenance (self-declared by Goodreads users) and on the book’s critical appreciation (via either the award of or the nomination for a literary prize). Such information was compared with: (a) Goodreads star rating scores, indicative of success in the online reading community; (b) usage of empathy lexicon (identified via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool – in short LIWC), indicative of the reader’s identification in the narrative. Results indicate that readers typically empathize more with works that reflect themes from their own country and tend to award them with slightly higher ratings. Furthermore, we found that critically appreciated books, though collecting higher ratings, elicit a smaller empathic response in the reader than those that did not win or were not nominated for any literary prize.
Copyright (c) 2024 Gabriele Vezzani, Simone Rebora https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Integrating Technology in Teaching African Languages in South African Universities: A Call for Digitalisation
The strategic role of integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) when teaching indigenous languages continues to become increasingly apparent within language planning and policy discourse. The integration of ICT in teaching African languages is a complex and diverse research area, making it challenging to identify common factors that define fundamental methods. The argument put forth is that higher education institutions should invest in implementing continuous and intensive awareness-raising seminars about the value of linguistics, language technology, and practice. This paper aims to investigate a comprehensive plan for emerging digital practices and learning design expertise to enable digital democracy in South African higher education by exploring the various opportunities for integrating technology and African languages. Descriptive themes are developed after an intensive existing literature review and analysis. The Language Management Theory (LMT) guides the paper. The author highlight suggestions to ensure that South Africa meets the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 4, which aims to provide inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning, primarily using ICTs. By presenting various ICT-based models for education as a transformational approach towards integrating ICTs in teaching African languages, the higher education sector will be revolutionized in the African continent and all developing countries that lack understanding of the power of incorporating technology in teaching and developing native languages. Practice recommendations are also made to ensure successful adaptation to the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Information and Communication Technology
Copyright (c) 2024 Zolile Celiwe Xulu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Bringing Children’s Dictionaries to Digital Life
South Africa is facing a literacy crisis, with the latest PIRLS results showing that 8 out of 10 learners cannot read for basic comprehension by the time they leave the foundation phase. In this climate, the development of strategies to assist educators in harnessing the available resources to maximum effect is needed. However, most teaching resources are not digitally available, and even fewer are available in formats that make them readily available for use in natural language applications. The Ngiyaqonda! project aims to provide an interactive, multimodal digital environment within which learners can practise their reading and writing skills. Computational grammars and speech technology are combined in a mobile application to facilitate the transition from oral competency in a language to written competency. In this paper, we show how words from a multilingual dictionary for foundation phase learners can be brought to digital life within the Ngiyaqonda! application to enhance the learning experience of core concepts and vocabulary. We use the official foundation phase CAPS English-isiZulu dictionary (Mbatha et al. 2018) to ensure that the content of the computational grammars is aligned with relevant learning outcomes. The result is a fully parallel, multilingual computational grammar that is aligned at the semantic level, ready to be included in the Ngiyaqonda! application.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ilana Wilken, Laurette Marais https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Possibility of Using African Languages as Media of Teaching and Learning in South Africa
This study sets out to examine the possibility of using African languages as media of teaching and learning in South African schools. Literature is consistent that (a) language is a crucial means of communication and gaining access to important knowledge and skills, and (b) mother tongue is the only language that promotes effective teaching and learning and that any language, which is not a mother tongue, is a barrier to teaching and learning. In South Africa, there are nine African official languages, but English is the media of instruction used by South African learners, which is a barrier to teaching and learning. This study revealed that using one or two African languages may improve teaching, learning, and the academic performance of the learners, but the problem is how to implement because it will be difficult to use many African languages as media of instruction. The use of nine African languages as media of instruction in South Africa will promote tribalism, which was dominant during the apartheid era, and it will be costly to the government. Therefore, this study supports the use of English as a media of instruction because it will promote unity in South Africa, it will not be costly, and it is an international language.
Copyright (c) 2024 Raesebe Florah Mabaso-Nkuna, Nyikelani Davis Mabasa, Brian Valoyi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A Minimal Computing Approach to Southern African Language Resources
This new collaboration between a historian of Southern Africa (RC) and a specialist in computational methods (WJT), is designed to draw on our respective backgrounds and provide opportunities to enlist students and other collaborators in research and teaching. Our goal is to create tools that can be used to help explain unfamiliar languaging in historical contexts. We follow the tenets of minimal computing (Risam & Gil 2022) and take the perspective of language as a complex adaptive system (Kretzschmar 2015). We also situate our work within the postcolonial digital humanities generally (Risam 2018) and the specific critique of knowledge production and racism that Fields & Fields (2012, pp. 5-6) identified as ‘racecraft’, which “highlights the ability of pre- or non-scientific modes of thought to hijack the minds of the scientifically literate”. As practitioners of academic language research and computing, we must be attentive to the history of colonizers trying to not only kill ‘native languages’ but their speakers and cultures (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 2009). To date, we have partially implemented one prototype for automating interlinear morphemic glossing of chiShona and English as shown in Figure 1 (Charumbira et al 2023). Here our intent is speculative design: to imagine a more inclusive space of computational tools and practices that jettisons some of the assumptions that have shaped the digital cultural record in the Global North.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ruramisai Charumbira, William J. Turkel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Role of Social Media in Xenophobic Attack in South Africa
Xenophobia is a pressing issue in South Africa, with frequent instances of violence against immigrants. With the rise of social media, platforms like Twitter reflect public sentiment on this matter. This study examines tweets from 2017 to 2022 about xenophobia in South Africa, using NLP, sentiment analysis, and machine learning to understand public feelings and predict potential xenophobic incidents. The findings aim to help policymakers devise strategies to enhance social cohesion and promote a more inclusive society.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mpho Raborife, Blessing Ogbuokiri, Kehinde Aruleba https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Towards Including South African Hansard Papers in the ParlaMint schema
The ParlaMint project, a CLARIN flagship initiative, seeks to standardize the representation of parliamentary data across diverse languages and regions. Version 3.0 of ParlaMint encompasses corpora from 26 European countries and autonomous regions, available for download and search under the CC-BY license. These corpora adhere to a common XML encoding schema, ensuring interoperability. This study evaluates the feasibility of applying the ParlaMint schema to the proceedings of the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa. Through the conversion of a randomly selected parliamentary session, we scrutinize how various elements are modelled, delineating the steps required to initiate a comprehensive encoding endeavour. The experiment starts with data retrieval by downloading Hansard records from the South African Parliament website. An English session was selected to streamline processing for non-South African researchers. The original format consisted of session headers, metadata, introductory messages, and debate records. Speeches were identified by uppercase headers and segmented into paragraphs. Transcript conversion entailed extracting data from the PDF, eliminating technical elements, and ensuring continuity of utterances. Speaker names and functions were identified, and the session was transformed into ParlaMint-compliant TEI XML format. Meta-comments, including applause, laughter, and interruptions, were categorized based on typical phrases. Quotations, marked with indentation in the original transcript, were manually encoded as TEI elements. Foreign-language fragments were treated as gaps, with English translations provided. Multi-paragraph foreign utterances were encoded paragraph by paragraph. Speaker metadata was stored in separate XML files, listing organizations and individual speakers. Speaker names and roles were converted into XML IDs, and web pages were linked for additional information. Speaker type was designated based on metadata, distinguishing between chairs, guests, and regular speakers. The encoded session comprised 95 utterances, with varying distributions among speakers. The proposed conversion process serves as a starting point for the larger endeavour of encoding South African parliamentary data in the ParlaMint schema. While not exhaustive, this study lays the groundwork for expanding the ParlaMint dataset to include African parliamentary records.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maciej Ogrodniczuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Exploring ASR fine-tuning on limited domain-specific data for low-resource languages
The majority of South Africa’s eleven languages are low-resourced, posing a major challenge to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) development. Modern ASR systems require an extensive amount of data that is extremely difficult to find for low-resourced languages. In addition, available speech and text corpora for these languages predominantly revolve around government, political and biblical content. Consequently, this hinders the ability of ASR systems developed for these languages to perform well especially when evaluating data outside of these domains. To alleviate this problem, the Icefall Kaldi II toolkit introduced new transformer model scripts, facilitating the adaptation of pre-trained models using limited adaptation data. In this paper, we explored the technique of using pre-trained ASR models in a domain where more data is available (government data) and adapted it to an entirely different domain with limited data (broadcast news data). The objective was to assess whether such techniques can surpass the accuracy of prior ASR models developed for these languages. Our results showed that the Conformer connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model obtained lower word error rates by a large margin in comparison to previous TDNN-F models evaluated on the same datasets. This research signifies a step forward in mitigating data scarcity challenges and enhancing ASR performance for low-resourced languages in South Africa.
Copyright (c) 2024 Franco Mak, Avashna Govender, Jaco Badenhorst https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Use of Augmented Reality in the Teaching and Learning of isiXhosa Poetry
Teaching and learning isiXhosa poetry continues to pose challenges for both teachers and learners in South African basic education. The abstract nature of poetry makes it difficult for both groups to grasp the figurative meanings embedded in each line of the poems. Teachers who rely on rote learning and learners who master cramming find teaching and learning poetry difficult, as these skills offer little or no results in the teaching and learning of poetry. It is against such a backdrop that this paper seeks to investigate the use of augmented reality (AR) in education and how it can assist in the teaching and learning of isiXhosa poetry. The use of AR in language learning has been extensively studied by several scholars. AR is found to enhance learning and decrease learners’ cognitive load. In contrast, some scholars argue that it is not ready for total integration into language classes. Despite strides that have been made in the study of augmented reality in language learning and teaching, there is a paucity of extended research on the use of augmented reality in teaching and learning isiXhosa poetry. In this paper, I will review existing data and examine augmented reality activities and technologies that can be used in the teaching and learning of IsiXhosa poetry. This paper will contribute towards improving the teaching and learning of isiXhosa poetry in basic education and assist literature educators in integrating modern technologies in their teaching.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lukhanyo Elvis Makhenyane https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Developing a Code-Mixed Sentiment Analysis Dataset of Xitsonga-English Music Reviews
Sentiment analysis is the process of classifying text emotions as positive, negative or neutral. Code-mixed sentiment analysis refers to the classification of text’s sentiments that contains two or more languages. There are limited studies developed for sentiment analysis on South African code-mixed languages and this is due to the absence of annotated dataset. The purpose of the study was to collect code-mixed text data for the Xitsonga-English language pair. The study collected Xitsonga-English code-mixed comments for music reviews from a YouTube channel. After the data was collected, tokenization using a python library called natural language toolkit was performed. Subsequently, we analyzed the comments for the presence of code-mixing. The collected Xitsonga-English code-mixed data would be suitable to build a sentiment analysis model.
Copyright (c) 2024 Blessing Nkuna, Thipe I Modipa, Simon P. Ramalepe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Importance of a Learner Management System in Implementing Data-driven Instruction in Higher Education Institutions
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in the worst downturn in the global economy since the Great Depression in the 1930s. To face the challenges of the global economy, a person needs to possess basic skills including educational skills. Education plays a vital role in building a competitive economy that will hardly be affected by crisis and will be able to ensure that there are high rates of social development. The student population has become very diverse over the decades, making it difficult to teach. Teaching has become very complex to handle because of the increase in a variety of teaching strategies and the diverse student population. There is therefore a need for inclusive and equity pedagogy where teaching considers the diversity of students and the need for teachers to develop teaching strategies that support all students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The most expensive education is the one that is not completed. This conceptual paper looks at the importance of the Learner Management System (LMS) in implementing data-driven instruction to achieve quality education for all types of students. The LMS is a software system that tracks students’ participation and progress through data systems and assessments. It’s a platform that stimulates an environment for learner achievement and engagement. ‘Data-driven instruction’ can be defined as using student data to enhance instructional practices in the classroom to address the needs and learning styles of individual students. Additionally, data-driven instruction will be explored to discover how it can be used as a systematic and purposeful work to maximise the students’ performance. The study will provide recommendations on how LMS and data-driven instruction can be used to give direction to decisions to improve the students' outcomes.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ayanda Deliwe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Results showed that 81% of South African children in Grade 4 cannot read for meaning, against an international average of 6%. Reasons for this poor result will be discussed in this paper. One of the resources used in schools in the fight against illiteracy is a school dictionary. There are excellent school dictionaries produced in South Africa, but the two complaints from learners are that there are not enough words, and that the dictionaries are too big and heavy to carry to and from school. Electronic dictionaries have been developed and are available online or from publishers. These offer more presentation space for each entry, more storage space for more entries, as well as more support for learners in the form of colour illustrations, audio, hyperlinks, and other features. However, most South African schools are not equipped to provide electronic dictionaries to learners – either on a central class computer, or on tablets. The devices are too expensive, data is costly and unreliable, and electricity is a problem. The solution that I will present is an updated version of a PED, a personal electronic dictionary, which has the capacity of an electronic dictionary, while being small and light enough for learners to carry to and from school. This device would not need data or electricity to run. The sample entries that I will present will be suitable for a PED and have been specially designed to contain more support for learners learning in their second language.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lorna Morris https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Uncovering Media Bias in Eviction Reporting: A Comprehensive Analysis Utilising Sentiment Analysis Framework and Social Media Data
This study investigates the prevalence of evictionsin South Africa and examines potential disparitiesbetween traditional media reporting and socialmedia discourse. Employing a sentiment analysisframework, we extend its application to comparethe reporting of evictions in newspaper articles(i.e. conventional media) and Twitter data (i.e.social media). Statistical machine-learningmethods are utilized to predict sentiment scoresfor both types of content, and a chi-square test isemployed to evaluate bias between news articlesand tweets. The test results reveal a significant biasin the sentiment distribution, suggesting that thedissimilarities observed between articles andtweets are not merely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ronny Mabokela Koena, Mpho Primus, Linda Mahlobo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Automated hate speech detection in a low-resource environment
The problem of hate speech on social media is a growing concern. Much work has been done to tackle online hate including work into the automated detection of hate speech. The problem of automated hate speech detection at scale, however, remains by and large unsolved. This is in part due to the difficulty of classifying short texts without contextual information, difficulties in ensuring consistent annotation quality, contextual differences in different regions and social settings, and the informal and nuanced language used on social media. Automated detection of hate speech is made all the more difficult in low-resource regions for which large existing hate speech corpora are unavailable. Here, I present a sampling framework to tackle some of these challenges. The framework uses sequential data annotation phases, each allowing for the training of a hate speech filter that further refines our ability to collect useful data in subsequent phases. This framework is implemented for two phases on Twitter data collected around discourses in South Africa, and its efficacy assessed through a cross-dataset analysis between phases, as well as an analysis to determine the classification performance of decision tree-based methods on relatively small datasets. I conclude that this framework is a viable approach for curating hate speech corpora for automated hate speech detection in a low-resource setting.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ethan Roberts https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Digital Archival Preservation and Cultural Heritage
This paper presents a current MA study that addresses the research problem, "What issues and insights about the role of digital archives in the preservation of South African cultural history are raised via the production of an archival documentary and archival website on the life and art of the late sculptor Mr. Bonginkosi Michael Gasa?". This study hopes to show, through the presentation of research and archival material curated thus far, not only the importance of the role archival documentary film and the digital platform play in the preservation of heritage but also how this archival project promotes the idea of an African gaze, which is essential for preserving an authentic cultural voice and heritage. This study is conducted by following a practice-led slant, meaning the research primarily leads to new information about the practice. In this case, the practice will investigate the key elements that go into the production of an archival documentary and secondly the digital archiving of the project online. Mr Bonginkosi Michael Gasa was a sculptor who passed away on the 18th of April 2019 at the age of 55. The film about Mr. Gasa will be reported in a critical reflexive MA dissertation, which will also serve to elucidate the critical, theoretical, and cultural matrix from which the film emerges. The documentary film will be preserved on a website, which will also serve as an online repository, curation, and record of Mr. Gasa’s sculptures. In detailing the study thus far, this paper aims to highlight the potential of digital archives to preserve marginalized voices, such as Michael Bonginkosi Gasa, whose life and work would otherwise remain largely unknown. Moreso, this paper and study hope to show that archives exist to be used for present and future generations, and in this way, to preserve our national heritage.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sfundo Cele, Michelle Stewart, Richard Asiedu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Investigating the Role of Digital Arts in Decolonizing Knowledge and Promoting Indigenous Standpoints
Preliminary studies indicate that African educational systems reflected their socio-cultural being, and fit into the moral, economic and physical developments of its generation before colonial inception. Marker (2011) noted that education is one of the significant tools for colonial exploitation in Africa. Even in this post-colonial era, the contemporary African education or knowledge system is predominantly centered on foreign educational structures and standpoints. This undermines or alters the focus of African belief systems and culture. Africans must preserve and promote their traditional knowledge-based system regardless of its co-existence with foreign education in order to sustain and restore their self-respect and total emancipation. In order to elevate the rich cultural heritage of Africans and to promote the indigenous perspective, there must be a paradigm shift from foreign epistemologies to a decolonized knowledge-based system. Decolonizing knowledge is an effort to theorize one traditional knowledge system and entrench into the imposed foreign epistemology theories and interpretations in order to promote indigenous standpoints. According to Dreyer (2017), it seeks to construct and legitimize other knowledge systems by exploring alternate epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of visual narratives/digital storytelling within Digital Arts in decolonizing knowledge and promoting indigenous African cultures and viewpoints. An exploratory research approach through a narrative literature review was utilized to come out with scholarly suggestions from the stance of digital arts researchers. Additionally, an oral interview was conducted to seek views from Digital Arts professionals and researchers.
Copyright (c) 2024 Richard Asiedu, Michelle Stewart, Sfundo Cele https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Convening Context: Reading the Bleek and Lloyd ǃxun Collection Digitally
This article demonstrates the possibilities the digital offers in convening material across time and place, and the new insights into historical collections that are thereby enabled. Drawing on the 19th century Bleek and Lloyd Archive’s visual works, notebooks, and dictionary cards of the northern San ǃxun language, I show that the convenor, Lucy Lloyd, devised a referencing system that allows the material to span across restrictive categories, and beyond the physical limitations of the page. Through two of my own digital curations of selected ǃxun material, and material beyond the collection, I demonstrate how digital affordances enable the material to be read together across time and place, and following Lloyd’s referencing system, to be mutually informative, arguing that Lloyd organised the material in a way that almost anticipates digital affordances nearly 150 years later.
Copyright (c) 2024 Magdaleen Du Toit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Unmasking Deception: An Exploratory Study of Viewers’ Attitudes Towards Romantic Betrayal
Although romantic deception is prevalent in many societies, it may not be readily acceptable to publicly acknowledge approval of acts associated with such deception. This article explores the publicly acknowledged sentiments of viewers of two YouTube channels aimed at the exposure of romantic deceit through two shows for facilitating a “couple switching phones” game. Specifically, we analyse videos where all participants are caught engaging in extra-relationship affairs. Our study reveals a prevailing trend of neutral comments from viewers, indicating a reluctance to openly acknowledge approval or disapproval of the depicted acts. Interestingly, the discussions primarily revolve around tribal issues [specially focused on the Xhosa tribe] rather than focusing on the subject of romantic deception itself.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nkazimlo Ngcungca, Johannes Sibeko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Algorithm for Assisting Grammarians when Extracting Phonological Conditioning Rules for Nguni languages
Text generation models, the core technology that underpins chatbots such as ChatGPT, that are created to support morphologically complex African languages require the modelling of sub-word processes such as phonological conditioning. Since we rely on explicit phonological conditioning rules that are manually identified by grammarians to determine the extent to which such models are able to perform for such languages, there is a need to assist grammarians via computational solutions to increase their coverage of known rules. At present, there are no existing algorithms to extract the rules for such processes and therefore enable the creation of building better text generation models. We present a new algorithm for extracting phonological conditioning rules for Nguni languages. All the rules extracted by the algorithm are valid when the input word and associated morphemes are judged to be valid. The algorithm has the potential to improve the productivity of grammarians and enable the creation of modern text generation technologies that support and promote under-resourced languages.
Copyright (c) 2024 Zola Mahlaza, Langa Khumalo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Towards an Inclusive and Accessible Digital Scholarly Editing: A Critical Assessment
This paper is based on an ongoing project on Diversity, Inclusivity, Accessibility in Digital Scholarly Editing (DIA-DSE and in our view it should be seen as a place of critical assessment of existing digital scholarly editions (DSE) and discussion for future developments and improvement. Our idea is the result of a bigger initiative based at the University of Verona (Italy) on the topic Inclusive Humanities: Perspectives of Development in Research and Teaching Foreign Languages and Literatures [1]. In its essence it tries to respond to some of the goals envisaged by globally relevant agendas and strategic plans which put in the foreground the challenges posed by our time and focuses on the idea that a knowledge society like ours needs to develop an open model of science. This novel model pleads for an accessible science and through innovative methodologies seeks to involve wide, inclusive and diverse agents, contents, and targets into the scientific discourse. In this context, our aim is to investigate from the perspective of Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility (which we call by the acronym DIA) a traditional field of study, that is philology and textual criticism, in its very ultimate development: Digital Scholarly Editions (DSE). The field of DSEs raises nowadays the following questions: Do DSE projects consider Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility? If so, how much and how do they do this? To try to provide an answer, in the context of DIA-DSE project we will build a corpus of existing resources and we will try to assess their DIA degree according to different parameters. In the long term, after data collection and analysis, a ranking of diverse, inclusive and accessible resources will be defined. These results will be followed by a survey that will be disseminated among the scholarly community and users, with the objective engage in an open critical discussion, to raise awareness and to gain suggestions for the creation of DIA-DSE guidelines that will be published and promoted at the end of the project.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Cappellotto, Raffaele Cioffi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Recovering Knowledge Commons for the Global South
The colonial encounter instituted the hegemony of documentary practices over oral, performative and manuscript practices. Only knowledge validated through the process of print publication could stand the test of legal scrutiny. On the one hand the Western epistemological quest glossed over ideas that existed through ephemera, on the other hand that knowledge which Western print practices imbibed from non-European traditions were henceforth, locked behind intellectual property regimes and restrictive archival practices. This tremendously skewed access to knowledge between the North and the South. Tools for digital transformation, particularly those that are based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), can be culture specific e.g. training data for Optical Character Recognition (OCR)/ Hand-written Text Recognition (HTR); datasets for natural language processing. In the absence of culture specific tools in underdeveloped societies Anglo-American interpretive categories and assumptions become the default. Further, Anglo-American institutions work to use their advantage in the balance of knowledge distribution to maintain their hegemonic position. In order to protect the South’s access to human heritage and knowledge we need to develop technologies that leverage the potentials of digital communication for increased conversations among languages of the South.
Copyright (c) 2024 Arjun Ghosh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Harnessing Google Translations to Develop a Readability Corpus for Sesotho: An Exploratory Study
This article addresses the scarcity of gold-standard annotated corpora for readability assessment in Sesotho, a low-resource language. As a solution, we propose using translated texts to construct a readability-labelled corpus. Specifically, we investigate the feasibility of using Google Translate to translate texts from Sesotho to English and then manually post-editing the texts. We then evaluate the effectiveness of the Google translations by comparing them to the human-post-edited versions. We utilised the Ghent University readability demo to extract the readability levels of both the Google translations and the human-post-edited translations. The translations are then evaluated using three evaluation metrics, namely, BLEU, NIST, and RIBES scores. The translation evaluation results reveal substantial similarities between the machine translations and the corresponding human-post-edited texts. Moreover, the results of the readability assessment and the comparison of text properties demonstrate a high level of consistency between machine translations and human-post-edited texts. These findings suggest that Google Translations show promise in addressing challenges in developing readability-labelled parallel datasets in low-resource languages like Sesotho, highlighting the potential of leveraging machine translation techniques to develop translated corpora for such languages. The evaluation of Google Translations in the context of educational texts in Sesotho and the demonstration of the feasibility and potential of using machine translations for enhancing readability in Sesotho will aid in the quest for developing Sesotho text readability measures.
Copyright (c) 2024 Johannes Sibeko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Personal Archives for Community Building: Lessons Learned from PG Sindhi Library
The need for archiving Sindhi literary tradition in India comes from the space of serving the Sindhi community and its literature divided by the partition of India. This region-less regional literature has been facing a lot of challenges. For instance, it has not thrived the way literatures from the other two partitioned territories (Punjab and Bengal) have because Sindhis did not get a land or a province they could call their own in India. It has also been divided by script in the sense that multiple scripts are in use and the practice of reading/writing in Sindhi itself is disappearing (Daswani, 1989. The digital archive project PG Sindhi Library is an attempt to make older books published in the early years of independent India accessible to the Sindhi community and those interested in South Asian Studies as well as to encourage readers to contribute their items to the library, or even build their own archives. This paper shares the archivist’s findings or lessons learned from the experience with the larger community of digital humanists working in archiving projects. The objective is also to integrate archival work with that of the researcher and theorise archiving from a practitioner’s point of view, given the need to reflect on the unique archival and digital needs of Global South.
Copyright (c) 2024 Soni Wadhwa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Introduction to the Special Issue: “Digital Humanities for Inclusion”
It is with immense pride and anticipation that we introduce the fifth volume of the Journal of Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (JDHASA), centred on the theme “Digital Humanities for Inclusion.”
Copyright (c) 2024 Johannes Sibeko; Menno van Zaanen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0