Symposium - Humanistica 2025 in Dakar

From 22 to 25 April, IFRA-Nigeria’s director, Barbara Morovich, will be in Dakar, Senegal for the Humanistica symposium on “Explorer les usages et pratiques “nouvelles” en Humanités”. This edition of the yearly symposium of the francophone association for digital humanities will question the “new” to address the tools, questions and constraints that are concretely moving the lines of research in the humanities.

At the symposium, IFRA-Nigeria was acknowledged for its funding of travel grants for two West African scholars, who were able to present their work. Dr Emmanuel Ngue Um Associate Professor of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaoundé 1, held a presentation on "Technologies vocales et inclusion linguistique : repenser la préservation des langues africaines peu dotées à travers une approche participative", and moderated the rountable "Jeune recherche en Humanités avec une perspective numérique". The second recipient, Ganyat Abass, doctoral candidate and lecturer at the University of Lagos, introduced her work on "La préservation de la langue yorùbá à travers la publicité en ligne : cas des publicités de MTN ciblés à l'audience franco- yorùbá phone."  

On 25 April, Dr Morovich participated in the “Data and Heritages” conference, with a paper presentation titled “Les défis de la numérisation d'archives au Nigeria : des positions d'acteurs et des processus réflexifs à l'œuvre. ” This paper aims to shed light on heritage and digital arenas in Nigeria, through the analysis of several projects between IFRA-Nigeria and institutional and non-institutional partners. It shows that digitization, especially in the case of co-productions, involves complex relationships, sometimes disagreements, sometimes compromises, and that an analysis of these processes sheds light on divergent approaches to digitization. So it's not the technical aspects that are addressed here, but the “actors' positions”, through a reflexive analysis of these processes. You can learn more about our digitization work on our Nigerian Heritage Digitisation Program page.