Panel 3 Tue 22 · 09:00 EN
Friederike Lüpke, Jules Mansaly
University of Helsinki · University of the Gambia
The movement to include African languages in AI systems has concentrated on the continent’s largest languages, while the vast majority of Africa’s 2,000+ languages remain extremely low-resourced. For speakers of small, locally confined languages in ‘francophone’ multilingual West Africa, this creates a triple marginalisation: they are excluded first by the global dominance of English in AI, with user experiences in French being already degraded, and further by the emergent…
Panel 1 Mon 21 · 11:00 EN
Khaoula Stiti
Unaffiliated scholar
When researchers in African Studies reach for AI tools to document, classify, or analyse heritage, they inherit a problem that predates AI itself. This paper argues that the failures now emerging in AI-assisted heritage research are not new, they are the continuation of a pattern already visible in earlier digital heritage platforms, and that understanding this pattern is the first step toward designing against it. The argument draws on a concrete case: the P@trimonia 2.0…
Panel 4 Tue 22 · 11:00 EN
Lauren Coetzee
University of Luxembourg
African history before colonialism is not absent from the archive — it is dispersed across thousands of pages of travel writing, missionary records, and merchant accounts. Yet, African-authored sources and oral histories still remain significantly harder to locate, access, and digitise for this period — a disparity that itself reflects the archival legacies of colonial knowledge production. Across this uneven landscape, the interpretive labour required to transform narrative…
Panel 4 Tue 22 · 11:00 EN
Oreen Yousuf
Uppsala University
_Ajami_ refers to African languages written in the Arabic script. The use of Ajami began in the 10th century and spread to various sociopolitical states across Africa. Both existing handwritten and optical character recognition systems, as well as text-based NLP models perform poorly on recognition of Ajami manuscripts and analyzing digital Ajami text. This is mainly due to a lack of research and inclusion of Ajami manuscripts in NLP and Digital Humanities as a whole. I will…
Panel 6 Wed 23 · 14:00 EN
Rachel Maina
University of Wisconsin–Madison
AI-driven language learning platforms are expanding rapidly, yet their underlying pedagogical and technological architectures remain poorly aligned with the linguistic, infrastructural, and epistemological realities of African language contexts. Despite increased adoption, African languages remain underrepresented in both training data and pedagogical design. Existing computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tools such as Duolingo, Memrise, and earlier platforms like…
Panel 4 Tue 22 · 11:00 EN
Luca Bruls, Bruno Allahissem, Matthew Sung, Jelena Prokic, Mirjam de Bruijn
Leiden University
Drawing on ethnographic case studies of WhatsApp groups in Chad and Mali, this paper addresses the visual narratives Fulani communicate online. The manual collection and computational analysis of images using the CLIP model allows for an interregional and cross-group thematic comparison. The results highlight similarities and differences in visual communication in Fulani-dominant WhatsApp groups. The complex configuration of various social actors of Fulani across the groups…
Panel 7 Thu 24 · 11:00 EN
John Oluwafemi Daniel
University of Ibadan
Digital Humanities (DH) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have globally ushered in new possibilities for data visualisation, archival preservation, and public engagement with cultural heritage. Yet, in the Nigerian context, these epistemological advancement are crippled by inequities in accessibility, infrastructural deficits, and a lack of genuine co-production between DH practitioners and the communities of study. Initiatives such as the Centre for Digital Humanities,…
Panel 1 Mon 21 · 11:00 EN
Iginio Gagliardone, Christine Mataranyika, Max Milella, Karabo Mohapeloa, Joshua Ward
University of the Witwatersrand
Calls to decolonise knowledge have transformed the discursive landscape of African higher education over the past decade. Movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall demanded structural change to institutional cultures and curricula, and advocated for a deeper epistemological challenge, insisting that the production and adoption of knowledge in African universities be refigured around African intellectual traditions, researchers, and institutions. Yet the gap between…
Panel 5 Wed 23 · 09:00 EN
Sanjin Muftić
University of Cape Town Libraries
Heritage collections from the Global South face a compounding discovery problem. Sparse or inconsistent metadata limits findability, and the AI tools that could help address this gap are trained predominantly on Global North data, meaning the collections are the least well served by the tools available to describe them. This paper asks a practical question: how can AI-assisted metadata enrichment make Southern African heritage collections more findable, and what happens when…
Panel 6 Wed 23 · 14:00 EN
Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Lydia Kila Taban
Masakhane
Africa is home to approximately 1.5 billion people, with nearly one billion speakers across roughly 50 major languages, and over 2,000 additional languages that remain significantly under-resourced in digital ecosystems. This linguistic diversity presents both a challenge and an opportunity for the development and deployment of inclusive artificial intelligence systems. The Masakhane African Languages Hub addresses this gap through a dual strategy. First, it focuses on…
Panel 7 Thu 24 · 11:00 EN
Leonard Kibet Kirui
Moi University
For a decade, discourse on African research—from UNESCO's Open Science Recommendation to transformation strategies—has championed infrastructure, implementation gap remains: commitments rarely translate into capacity. Humanities and social sciences face three obstacles: (1) limited connectivity makes cloud-dependent workflows unreliable; (2) funding cycles prioritize pilots over maintenance; (3) scarce training data for African languages marginalizes non-English production.…
Panel 2 Mon 21 · 16:00 FR
Falimatou Pemgbou
University of Ebolowa
Ce travail est une exploration de la manière dont les émotions du personnage de Ramatoulaye, dans Une si longue lettre de Mariama Bâ, se construisent à travers les absences, les sous-entendus et les ellipses du récit. Au moment où l’intelligence artificielle promet de lire les textes littéraires à notre place, et surtout de détecter leurs émotions en quelques secondes, que devient la douleur contenue de Ramatoulaye lorsqu’un algorithme la réduit à un simple code « tristesse…
Panel 7 Thu 24 · 11:00 FR
Mohamadou Konaté
Joseph Ki-Zerbo University
Lorsqu’un chercheur burkinabè en cybersécurité cherche des données sur les incidents cyber touchant les infrastructures critiques de son pays, il ne trouve pratiquement rien. Les bases de données de référence internationales comme KDD Cup 99, CICIDS 2017 et UNSW-NB15 se basent principalement sur des environnements réseau nord-américains ou occidentaux. Les modèles d’IA produits à partir de ces données sont souvent présentés comme universels, mais appliqués au contexte…
Panel 1 Mon 21 · 11:00 FR
Aminata Kane, Augustin Ndione
Cheikh Anta Diop University
Cet atelier propose une réflexion critique sur la place des systèmes de connaissances africains dans les environnements numériques contemporains à partir du cas des manuscrits ajami, textes rédigés en langues africaines transcrites à l’aide de l’alphabet arabe. Longtemps marginalisés dans les récits dominants de l’histoire de l’écriture et des savoirs en Afrique, ces corpus constituent pourtant des archives vivantes témoignant de traditions intellectuelles, linguistiques et…
Panel 5 Wed 23 · 09:00 FR
Frédérick Madore
University of Bayreuth
Depuis trois ans, les collections numériques ouvertes des galeries, bibliothèques, archives et musées (les « GLAM ») subissent une double pression. Des robots les moissonnent pour entraîner des modèles d’IA commerciaux tandis que le public délaisse de plus en plus la recherche par mots-clés et par facettes sur les sites et les bases de données au profit des chatbots. Cette communication présente une troisième voie à partir de deux serveurs Model Context Protocol (MCP), norme…
Panel 5 Wed 23 · 09:00 EN
Jiayu Yang, Durgesh Nandini
University of Bayreuth
Research databases in African Studies accumulate rich metadata, including subject keywords, themes, geographic and cultural references, but much of this description remains isolated. The key problem is semantic grounding: without shared identifiers, two databases describing the same cultural practice or geographic region have no way to recognise the overlap. Our work draws on 3,975 metadata records from five African Studies institutions across three continents. We present…
Panel 2 Mon 21 · 16:00 EN
Augustine A. Farinola
University of Alberta
This paper emerges from a childhood shaped by African folktales, told through song, gesture, and moral questioning in familial and communal settings. Drawing on this performative tradition, I examine how African folktales have moved from orally transmitted narratives to written texts, classroom materials, and now digital and algorithmic objects of study. I present “Moral Ecology of African Folktales” (digitalafricanstorytelling.com), a Digital Humanities project that builds…
Group discussion Wed 23 · 11:00 EN
Menno van Zaanen
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)
Being a researcher is a bit like being an artist (musician, actor, painter, etc). You want people to recognize and interact with your research (or music, film, painting). This, of course, is directly related to making an impact. What is the point of doing research if nobody learns about your results and outcomes? For other people to learn about your research, it has to be visible. Publishing your research is the first step. This makes the research accessible. Next, you may…
Panel 3 Tue 22 · 09:00 EN
Benito Trollip, Sanjin Muftić
South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) · University of Cape Town Libraries
Barriers to research engagement in South Africa, including awareness of available resources, institutional support, and socio-economic factors, shape how scholars in the Global South produce and share knowledge. Platforms such as the SADiLaR repository and the Ibali digital collections at the University of Cape Town (UCT) have been developed to facilitate the sharing and reuse of indigenous language resources. Yet a critical question remains: to what extent do FAIR-compliant…
Keynote Thu 24 · 09:30 FR
Emmanuel Ngue Um
University of Yaoundé 1
“What does a machine know?” is usually asked as a question about capability: how well a system transcribes, translates or speaks. This presentation asks it as a question about epistemology. A learning machine knows its data, and only its data. It does not observe language; it minimises error over statistical regularities in whatever it has been given, stores those regularities as prior information, and thereafter perceives the world by inference from those priors (Hyvärinen…
Panel 2 Mon 21 · 16:00 EN
Hammed Olalekan Lawal, Alawiye Basheer Adisa, Elizabeth Olanike Adekoya, Adebanjo Oreoluwa Baderin
University of Bayreuth · Lagos State University, Nigeria (LASU) · Lagos State University of Education, Nigeria (LASUED) · BIGSAS, University of Bayreuth
This study investigates the re-mediation of Ìtàn Ìjàpá (Yorùbá tortoise folktales) through AI-generated videos. It explores the relational dynamics among these videos, their creators, digital audiences on TikTok and Facebook, and on-the-ground Yorùbá custodians (comprising three generations). Historically, Ìjàpá has served as a pedagogical and performative tool for negotiating Yorùbá morality and identity (Taiwo, 2019). However, as creators “re-code” these oral traditions…
Panel 3 Tue 22 · 09:00 FR
Evelyne Amana
University of Yaoundé I
L’Afrique est un continent naturellement riche par sa diversité naturelle et culturelle. Elle se caractérise aussi par des regroupements ethniques qui utilisent des langues vernaculaires précises. Le Cameroun, appelé Afrique en miniature par sa diversité linguistique, comprend environ 300 langues vernaculaires dont les plus répandues sont : l’ewondo, le bassa, le fufulde, le ghomala ou le bamoun, etc. Avec l’avènement de la colonisation, les langues étrangères ont été…
Keynote Mon 21 · 14:00 EN
Sarah Oberbichler
University of Luxembourg
What does responsible, sustainable AI-assisted historical research require, and who has access to it? This talk approaches the question as an infrastructural challenge. AI-assisted research depends not only on models and subscriptions, but on digitized collections, language resources, repositories, expertise, and the institutional capacity to sustain them. The current turn toward sovereign AI and publicly funded infrastructures make these dependencies especially visible.…
Group discussion Thu 24 · 14:00 EN
Vincent Hiribarren
King's College London
For the last session before our concluding synthesis, the speaker will first focus on the pedagogical challenges he faced when creating a Digital History module at King's College London. Participants will subsequently be divided into groups and will consider the best ways to teach Digital Humanities in an African context.
Panel 6 Wed 23 · 14:00 FR
Eliette Ngo Tjomb Assembe
University of Yaoundé 1
La traduction automatique des langues africaines peu dotées fait face à des défis qui dépassent largement l’ingénierie linguistique. Cet article s’appuie sur le développement d’un système de traduction automatique à base de règles (RBMT) construit dans une architecture FLEx/FlexTrans/Apertium et testé sur un corpus parallèle de 124 paires de phrases alignées, pour la paire français-ewondo, une langue bantoue du Cameroun. L’étude des transferts structurels met en évidence un…