SADiLaR Workshop Showcases Digital Humanities Tools For African Language Research And Teaching

The workshop formed part of ongoing efforts to showcase digital humanities methodologies and highlight the digital resources available through SADiLaR. Approximately twenty participants including postgraduate students, researchers, and academic staff attended the training, all eager to explore how digital tools can enrich African language research and teaching.

The programme blended lectures, live demonstrations, and practical hands-on sessions, allowing participants to work directly with digital tools such as Voyant Tools and the SADiLaR NCHLT Web Services for linguistic annotation.

The first day introduced participants to the growing field of digital humanities and demonstrated how digital text analysis tools can uncover patterns and insights within literary and linguistic data. Facilitated by Mmasibidi Setaka-Bapela, SADiLaR’s digital humanities researcher for Sesotho, the session guided participants through practical exercises using Voyant Tools to analyse textual data and interpret the visualisations produced by the platform. The session sparked engaging discussions on how these methods could be integrated into participants’ own research, particularly in the analysis of Sesotho and isiZulu literary texts.

On the second day, SADiLaR project manager, Marissa Griesel, shifted the focus to linguistic annotation. Participants were introduced to the principles of annotation and explored the use of automatic linguistic annotation through the SADiLaR NCHLT web services. The practical component allowed participants to apply these techniques to a Sesotho literary text, where they experimented with annotating and evaluating linguistic features within the text. The session concluded with a stimulating discussion on innovative ways to combine tools such as Voyant with automatic annotations to explore larger corpora and reveal linguistic or thematic patterns that might otherwise remain hidden.

Participant feedback highlighted the workshop’s value in bridging traditional literary scholarship with modern digital methodologies. Many attendees expressed appreciation for seeing how digital tools can complement established research approaches while offering new perspectives on textual analysis. Participants also explored how the newly acquired skills could be incorporated into classroom teaching, opening opportunities for students to engage with digital humanities methods.

Importantly, the workshop also sparked ideas for future postgraduate research. Several participants indicated that the training inspired potential research topics in areas such as digital text analysis, linguistic annotation, and the broader application of digital humanities methodologies to African language texts.

Overall, the workshop successfully provided participants with a practical introduction to digital humanities.