African Literary Metadata

Introduction

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.

Challenges in African Literature

However, published novels are restrictively expensive in Africa itself, and the novel form is ill-suited to African everyday life. 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
• 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.

ALMEDA Project Overview

The ALMEDA project addresses this problem in three ways:

1. Historical Context: By providing the first history of literary metadata on the African continent, the project will offer a diachronic understanding of how colonial cataloguing systems constructed the idea of the ‘literary work’ as book-based, thus dismissive of Africa’s oral cultures.

2. Metadata Scheme Development: ALMEDA aims to develop and publish a metadata scheme specifically designed for these informal literary materials. This scheme will be multilingual, enabling a unique descriptive model that allows African-language genres to inhabit their own categories, rather than being forced into European literary ontologies.

3. Linked Open Metadata Repository: 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.