article journal • Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines
2025References
A curated bibliography of works at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Artificial Intelligence, and African Studies. This index is actively curated and will continue to expand over the coming weeks.
Showing 4 references
"We know what we are doing": the politics and trends in artificial intelligence policies in Africa
Thompson Gyedu Kwarkye
In the last decade, several actors have encouraged African countries to establish standards, policies and strategies that maximise the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and reduce risks. African countries appear to be adopting this regulatory path, yet their motivations and political contexts for actively engaging in AI policies vary, as do the values, principles and ethical issues woven into these policies. With qualitative evidence from Rwanda and Ghana, the paper explores the complex interplay of politics, power and local ecosystems in policy development on the continent. It unpacks the strategies of mobilising knowledge through stakeholder engagements, agenda setting and valid public and political engagements that lead to the final AI policy. A comparative analysis of the policies in the two countries finds that while reproducing identical initiatives, there are differences in AI vision, practicality and data sovereignty based on political, economic and historical contexts.
article journal • The Journal of African History
2025Decolonizing Archival Narratives: Exploring Digital Bias in the Catalogs of Portuguese-Colonized African Territories
Agata Błoch, Guillem Martos Oms, Clodomir Santana
This study discusses the intersection between Black/African Digital Humanities, and computational methods, including natural language processing (NLP) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). We have structured the narrative around four critical themes: biases in colonial archives; postcolonial digitization; linguistic and representational inequalities in Lusophone digital content; and technical limitations of AI models when applied to the archival records from Portuguese-colonized African territories (1640–1822). Through three case studies relating to the Africana Collection at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, the Dembos Collection, and Sebestyén’s Caculo Cangola Collection, we demonstrate the infrastructural biases inherent in contemporary computational tools. This begins with the systematic underrepresentation of African archives in global digitization efforts and ends with biased AI models that have not been trained on African historical corpora.
article journal • Revue d'Histoire Contemporaine de l'Afrique
2021La Collection Islam Burkina Faso : promesses et défis des humanités numériques
Frédérick Madore
Cet article propose une réflexion sur les possibilités inédites qu’offre le numérique pour développer de nouvelles méthodes de recherche et de diffusion de données sur l’histoire de l’islam en Afrique de l’Ouest, ainsi que quelques considérations méthodologiques, technologiques et éthiques soulevées par de telles initiatives. Au centre de ces considérations se trouve la Collection Islam Burkina Faso. Ce projet de base de données numérique en libre accès, que j’ai lancé en 2021 et qui est hébergée par les bibliothèques George A. Smathers de l’Université de Floride (UF), contient actuellement plus de 2 500 documents d’archives, articles de la presse généraliste, publications islamiques sous diverses formes et photographies, en plus de 200 références bibliographiques liées à l’islam et aux musulmans du Burkina Faso (https://islam.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/s/bf-fr). Le texte propose également un bref état des lieux des humanités numériques dans le champ des études africanistes et plus spécifiquement sur l’islam.
article journal • History in Africa
2020Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa
Fabienne Chamelot, Vincent Hiribarren, Marie Rodet
With the rise of information technology, an increasing proportion of public African archives are being digitized and made accessible on the internet. The same is being done to a certain extent with private archives too. As much as the new technologies are raising enthusiasm, they have prompted discussion among researchers and archivists, on subjects ranging from matters of intellectual property to sovereignty and governance. Digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. This article therefore seeks to reflect on the digital turn of African archives as a subject for study in its own right, located at the crossroads of political and economic interests.