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African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA)

African informal literatures, such as spoken-word poetry, pamphlet literatures, street theatre, Facebook novels, TikTok poetry and other online genres are rarely catalogued and therefore exist outside of any structured metadata system. These informal, ephemeral and not-for-profit literary and oratory cultural forms are very popular on the African continent but lack visibility globally.

ALMEDA is therefore developing a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished, and informal African literatures – that is to say, the literatures that do not routinely enter catalogues, or that enter them in unstructured ways. The project repository is implemented using a Wikibase infrastructure and integrates data collected by a team of ALMEDA researchers, as well as data from other data sources. The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No: 101097763.

Note that the project is ongoing and the contents and structure of the ALMEDABase will be under continuous development.

Key starting points:

• Project homepage: https://almedaresearch.org/
• SPARQL endpoint: https://wdqs-frontend.almeda.engelska.uu.se/

Examples:

• An author: Kyalo Mativo
• A literary work: The second delivery (a short story by Kyalo Mativo)
• A version of a literary work: The second delivery (the short story published in Ghala)
• A literary festival and its edition: Poetry Africa, 18th Poetry Africa Festival
• A literary award: Bank Windhoek Doek Literary Award For Fiction
• A serial work: Darlite
• An everyday expression (f.e. text on kanga): work: Ngoma ikiliya ina maana; version: Ngoma ikiliya ina maana
• An excerpt from a work: Item:Q28827''Uanga''