| HND-284967-22 | Digital Humanities: NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions | University of Arkansas, Fayetteville | Digital Storytelling on African Urbanisms: A Model to Empower Education Initiatives Across the Global South | 2/1/2022 - 3/31/2023 | $49,999.00 | Carla | | Klehm | Angelia | | Payne | University of Arkansas, Fayetteville | Fayetteville | AR | 72701-1201 | USA | 2021 | African Studies | NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions | Digital Humanities | 49999 | 0 | 49999 | 0 | The assessment and expansion of the metsemegolgolo digital archive for use in teaching digital storytelling to K-12 and college students in Southern Africa and across the Global South. The UK partner, the University of Cambridge, is requesting £59,948 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
This project explores how to best empower secondary school and university educators based in the Global South to explore cultural heritage through a digital archive called metsemegologolo, ‘ancient towns’ in Setswana. Metsemegolgolo, co-directed by Cambridge and based at three South African institutions, is an open source prototype database containing archaeological data, heritage objects, historical maps, oral histories and poetry about precolonial African urbanisms. This project develops a complementary UK-US collaboration among the metsemegologolo developers, digital heritage experts, and southern African educators with the purpose of exploring digital storytelling in low-resourced educational environments across the Global South. Increasing digital representations of marginalised histories is part of the ongoing process of decolonizing the digital humanities and further deepens connections to, and preservation of, cultural heritage sites. |