Recent years have seen something of a renaissance in African literature, with African novelists becoming global best-sellers and achieving the world’s highest literary accolades. But published novels are restrictively expensive in Africa itself and the novel form is ill-suited to African everyday life, where people are more likely to spend their leisure time engaging with informal, ephemeral and not-for-profit literary and oratory cultural forms, such as spoken-word poetry, street theatre, and a variety of online genres. These informal African literatures are rarely catalogued and therefore exist outside of any structured metadata system. The consequence is that formally published English and French African novels are hyper-visible globally, while the rich literary and oratory cultures of the continent itself are caught in a perpetual state of structural ephemerality. The African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project addresses this problem in three ways. First, by providing the first history of literary metadata on the African continent, the project will provide a diachronic understanding of how colonial cataloguing systems came to construct the idea of the ‘literary work’ as book-based and thus dismissive of Africa’s oral cultures. Secondly, ALMEDA is developing a metadata scheme specifically designed for these informal literary materials. This scheme is multilingual, which allows African-language genres to inhabit their own categories, rather than having to be forced into European literary classifications. Thirdly, the project is developing a linked open metadata repository, which will be searchable via an interface that allows non-specialist exploration and of our metadata and exploration of the materials we are cataloguing. All three stages of the project involve a team of researchers, working on distinctive literary and oral or performed materials from across Africa, as well as the expertise of an information specialist with specific expertise on African archives and libraries, and a team of digital engineers who work closely with the PI. By creating and linking metadata on African ephemeral and informal expressive culture, this repository will constitute a major intervention by making these materials searchable and their records enduring.
