Workshop output
For Whom and For What Purpose? A Position Paper on Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies
Frédérick Madore, Vincent Hiribarren, Agata Błoch, Albrecht Hofheinz, Ashleigh Harris, Augustin Ndione, Britta Frede, Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Duncan Money, Emmanuel Ngue Um, Érika Melek Delgado, Fallou Ngom, Fu’ad Lawal, Irene Mwendwa, James Yékú, Janeth David Nzenga, Johannes Sibeko, Karen Byera Ijumba, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Leah Junck, Menno van Zaanen, Nuraddin Aman, Oumou Sidibé, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, and Thompson Gyedu KwarkyeFrédérick Madore and Vincent Hiribarren, who convened the workshop, are listed first, followed by the remaining authors in alphabetical order. The order reflects the collaborative writing process and implies no hierarchy of contribution. Affiliations and short biographies of all workshop participants are available on the workshop website: https://fmadore.github.io/dh-ai-african-studies-2026/participants. We thank the two reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this text.
- Status
- Published / Open access
- Published
- 9 September 2026
- Issue
- 16
- Pages
- 1–24
- Series
- ZMO Programmatic Texts
- ISSN
- 2191-3242
- Publisher
- Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
- Access
- Open access · CC BY-SA 4.0
Cite this paper
Madore, Frédérick, Vincent Hiribarren, Agata Błoch, Albrecht Hofheinz, Ashleigh Harris, Augustin Ndione, Britta Frede, Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Duncan Money, Emmanuel Ngue Um, Érika Melek Delgado, Fallou Ngom, Fu’ad Lawal, Irene Mwendwa, James Yékú, Janeth David Nzenga, Johannes Sibeko, Karen Byera Ijumba, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Leah Junck, Menno van Zaanen, Nuraddin Aman, Oumou Sidibé, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, and Thompson Gyedu Kwarkye. 2026. "For Whom and For What Purpose? A Position Paper on Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies." ZMO Programmatic Texts, no. 16. 24 p. https://doi.org/10.58144/20260827-000.
Abstract
African Studies scholars have been involved in Digital Humanities (DH) projects since the 2000s. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), have expanded the possibilities for textual analysis and archival research, but implementation raises difficult questions: who controls access, whose data trains these systems without consent, whose languages remain underserved, and who bears the labour and environmental costs. This position paper is the collective work of a Volkswagen Foundation-funded scoping workshop in Hanover, Germany, in February 2026, with twenty-six scholars from sixteen countries. Across four working groups – language technologies; archives and visual heritage; infrastructure, governance, and access; and epistemologies, decoloniality, and ethics – one question recurred: for whom and for what purpose is this work undertaken? Ownership and sovereignty, access, sustainability, and standardisation emerged as transversal problems, which we set in dialogue with critiques of data colonialism and extractivism. We propose situated practices: licensing that conditions openness on return to source communities; digitisation agreements as living documents; ontologies built collaboratively; design grounded in access, governance, and sovereignty; and ethics treated as a process rather than a deliverable. Many of the problems we examine are common across DH and AI: consent, standardisation that erases variation, algorithmic bias, hidden labour, and the funding of innovation over maintenance. African contexts make them sharper and more visible, and Africa-based practice has produced concrete responses. We therefore argue that African epistemologies and decolonial critique belong at the centre of both fields, and that African scholars, practitioners, and institutions belong where these technologies are designed and governed.
- Keywords
- African epistemologies, African languages, data colonialism, decolonial digital humanities (DH), digital archives, digital preservation, digital sovereignty, large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), standardisation