Visit of Bastien Miraucout, managing editor of the French National Research Council (CNRS) at LAM-Bordeaux

Bastien Miraucourt, managing editor for the French National Research Council (CNRS) at LAM-Bordeaux was hosted for two weeks by IFRA-Nigeria at the beginning of July. We worked with him on our different Digital Humanities projects. He helped us find the best ways to disseminate to a wider audience the research produced by our colleagues.

His visit was the opportunity to strengthen our Digital Humanities programme by making more resources available online. 

Bastien Miraucourt initiated the digitisation of 16 books that will then be published online on IFRA-Nigeria's Open Edition portal. Most of them are books published as outcome of IFRA’s Research projects in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Research will therefore be accessible to a wider audience. 

This direction towards more online editing by IFRA is part of our Digital Humanities programme, and came as well with a training for IFRA’s team members. The managing editor for CNRS trained them in the use of text editing softwares in order to facilitate online publication of further IFRA’s publications. 

Another platform to promote research made by IFRA’s affiliated researchers is the collection of IFRA-Nigeria e-papers, renamed “Abi? IFRA-Nigeria e-papers”. The collection will be fully published on the French open archives database HAL and accessible through our resource center online catalog. (More to come very soon!) 

This mission was also the opportunity for IFRA’s team to think about new ways of promoting Nigerian scholars' publications among French and European academic networks. An agreement is currently discussed between IFRA-Nigeria and a publishing company in order to publish research work produced in Nigeria and West-Africa. The possibility of launching a PhD thesis prize with the Institute of African Studies of Ibadan is also being discussed. 

Tags: digital humanities