Digitizing Past and Present: Our Geddes Digital Humanities Team
By Mark Lewis and Daivi Rodima-Taylor
The Geddes Language Center of Boston University is one of the integral partners of our NEH-funded Research Project on Ajami Literature and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa. The Geddes Language Center is a full-service language learning facility dedicated to providing an extensive humanities resource for the College of Arts and Sciences and the Boston University community. Founded in 1960, the mission of the Geddes Language Center is to support the teaching and learning of languages, literatures, cultures, and film as faculty introduce new learning modalities and resources, both in the classroom and online.
The collaboration with the Geddes Digital Humanities Team under the leadership of Mark Lewis provides a unique multi-media component to our archival and research project. Geddes web designer Alison Parker and director of programming Shawn Provencal provide the website design and coding elements to accommodate the digital repository and display of Ajami manuscripts, their transcriptions and French and English translations, in four West African languages – Wolof, Mandinka, Hausa and Fula. Video resources specialist Frank Antonelli processes and edits video and audio files that form an important part of the NEH Ajami project, and advises project scholars on the use of multi-media equipment.
Geddes has a long-standing collaboration with the BU African Studies Center. This includes the African Language Materials Archive (ALMA) that is a multi-partner project focusing on the promotion and documentation of literature and literacy in the languages of Africa. This archive holds a collection of cassette recordings from the 1980s, made during field research in a number of different Sahelian and desert countries. Many of the transcriptions accompanying these recordings were translated into Western languages, mostly French or English. This collection, known as At the Desert’s Edge, involved hundreds of interviews of every-day people in traditional societies. Researchers engaged them in discussions of the ecological conditions of their existence and the state of the environment in their countries.
The countries that are part of the ALMA project are Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and the Sudan. The project represents one of the largest digitization initiatives the Geddes Language Center has undertaken in more than a decade, and will likely continue for the foreseeable future. All coordination and technical work is done by Frank Antonelli, Video Resources Specialist. The primary material of this collection was digitized during the years of 2016-2019.