The post recounts how 26 researchers from 16 countries spent three days working in thematic groups on language technologies, archives, infrastructure, and epistemologies, with no traditional presentations. Instead, the workshop combined plenary sessions, poster presentations, World Café rounds, and collaborative writing. By the end of the second day, the group was already drafting a co-authored position paper together.

We discuss the key themes that emerged across all groups: data colonialism and extractivism, the tension between open access and data sovereignty, minimal computing as a deliberate methodological choice, and the persistent question of who digital humanities work ultimately serves. The post also addresses the practical obstacles of organising such events, including European visa procedures and the anglophone dominance of the field, which limits participation from francophone Africa.

Looking ahead, the position paper will appear in the ZMO Programmatic Texts series. A second workshop, funded by the DFG Point Sud programme, is planned for September 2026 at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa.

We are looking for contributions along three axes:

1. Transforming research methods through AI and digital tools in African Studies
2. Building sustainable research infrastructures from African perspectives
3. Centring African knowledge systems in digital research design

Submission details

Deadline: Proposals of up to 500 words (in English or French) are due by 30 April 2026.

Selected papers may be published in a special issue of the Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (JDHASA).

Full details and submission guidelines are available here.

Drawing on the Beninese case, our chapter examines the limits of religious categorisations in censuses and demographic surveys. Statistics suggest a steady decline of Vodun since independence in favour of Christianity and Islam, but fieldwork tells a different story: multiple affiliations, circulation between traditions, hybridities that survey categories struggle to capture.

The interdisciplinary dialogue with the other contributors was particularly enriching, notably with Aurélien Dasré, a demographer, whose expertise shed light on how religious categories are constructed in censuses and Demographic and Health Surveys — data that historians like myself often draw on without sufficiently questioning their limitations.

Over two days, researchers of the funded projects presented their ideas and exchanged feedback. It was fascinating to get to learn about such varied projects, from soundscapes of populism and the historical genealogy of guilty pleasures to paleolithic hominins and environmental peace.

Thank you to the VolkswagenStiftung for actively funding exploratory research where taking risks is valued, not penalised.

Digital humanities have a longer history in African studies than most people realise, but much of this development has occurred in isolation, with few initiatives bringing together scholars from different disciplines and regions. Meanwhile, AI is accelerating the field faster than critical reflection can keep up, and all too often, these conversations take place without African scholars present. We wanted to change that. Our participants include historians, linguists working with African languages, archivists digitising endangered collections, literary and art scholars, researchers specialising in AI governance, and open science practitioners.

This is not a "traditional" academic conference. No keynotes, no panels. Three workstreams will run through facilitated discussions, covering methods, equitable collaboration, and ethical frameworks. The goal is a co-authored position paper, to be published open-access in the ZMO Programmatic Texts series.

Thanks to the VolkswagenStiftung for funding and hosting us at the Xplanatorium Herrenhausen, to Anke Harwardt-Feye for her help with logistics, and to our student assistants, Eline Marie Langbo Holm and Calum Houston, for handling a huge amount of organisational work.

More to come from Hannover this week!

Thompson describes the book as making "a vital contribution to our understanding of West African faith-based student associations" and notes the breadth of the research:

"Through an impressive body of research – 81 formal interviews and focus groups, participant observation during multiple field visits spanning 2019–2024, and extensive archival work – Madore documents how Christian and Muslim student groups have not merely survived but thrived under authoritarian regimes, through periods of democratisation, and amid shifting applications of laïcité (secularism) on campuses."

The review highlights several strengths of the book, including "its comparative framework examining both countries and multiple faith traditions, its attention to transnational influences, and its documentation of overlooked histories." Thompson notes that the book "convincingly demonstrates that these associations provided alternative pathways for pursuing 'the good life' amid economic precarity and political uncertainty."

The review also offers constructive observations, particularly regarding the theorisation of key concepts like "social curriculum" and the need for more sustained attention to gender dynamics. These are areas that merit further scholarly attention.

In conclusion, Thompson writes:

"By positioning universities as incubators of religious elites and sites where competing visions of the good life are articulated and pursued, Madore makes a compelling case for taking faith-based student activism seriously in understanding contemporary African societies."

Thompson, K.D. "Religious Activism on Campuses in Togo and Benin: Christian and Muslim Students Navigating Authoritarianism and Laïcité, 1970–2023 by Frédérick Madore. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025. Pp. xiii + 259. €79.99 (Hbk)." The Journal of Modern African Studies (2026): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X25101195.

I appreciate him taking the time to engage with the text. He offers thoughtful, constructive criticism regarding the "pivot from piety to pragmatism," suggesting that a deeper theological exploration of the "social curriculum" could enrich the analysis.

He points out that the movements' economic survival could be considered a "moral and religious mandate for communal activism," rather than merely a response to state failure.

Here's an excerpt:

"These nuances, however, do not detract from the book's contribution, which is considerable; this is due to its comprehensive analysis of the history and development of faith-based movements in Togo and Benin from 1970 to 2023. The book offers a valuable resource for scholars seeking to understand the complex interplay between faith, activism, and adaptation in Francophone Africa."

Fall, Macodou. "Frédérick Madore, Religious Activism on Campuses in Togo and Benin: Christian and Muslim Students Navigating Authoritarianism and Laïcité, 1970–2023. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023. 308 Pages. ISBN: 978-3-11-142790-4." Research Africa Reviews 9, no. 3 (2025): 15–17.

Today marks the end of my five wonderful years at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). It has been a defining period for my career, shaped by an intellectually stimulating environment and colleagues who have made the centre a truly exceptional place, like a family.

Although I cannot thank everyone individually, I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Abdoulaye Sounaye for bringing me on board for his "Religion, Morality and Boko in West Africa" project, and to Ulrike Freitag and Kai Kresse for their continued support.

In January, I will begin a new chapter at the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple at the University of Bayreuth. I am excited to join the Digital Research Environment team, led by Mirco Schönfeld, as a Data Curator.

In this role, I will bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and African Studies, supporting researchers in managing data according to FAIR and CARE principles, and ensuring that digital literacy and ethical standards are integrated into our workflows. This position will also allow me to continue my own research at the intersection of AI, digital humanities and African Studies.

Our work will centre on two unique, multilingual collections housed at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). The first is the Islam West Africa Collection, an open-access repository containing over 14,500 newspapers, Islamic publications, and audio-visual recordings from six West African countries. The second is the Reinhard Eisener Collection, which documents colonial and early Soviet governance in Central Asia.

These digital collections contain thousands of documents written in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Hausa, French, Russian and Tajik. While they are rich in detail, their sheer quantity and linguistic diversity make traditional comparative analysis almost impossible. To bridge these regions, we are moving beyond "traditional" methods and simple keyword searches.

We will experiment with using AI to overcome the fragmentation of the collections. Processing these documents computationally allows us to move beyond isolated case studies and compare Islamic discourses in West Africa and Central Asia, regardless of the original language. The goal is to transform static scans into a dynamic system that reveals connections between actors and concepts that would otherwise remain hidden.

Crucially, we will prioritise open-source AI models. The resulting tools must be accessible to all, not just those in institutional environments with significant resources. We want these workflows accessible to researchers in West Africa and Central Asia, not just to those of us in Germany.

The project will conclude with a workshop for scholars and archivists from both regions. We intend to leave behind usable digital workflows that serve the communities we study, rather than simply extracting data for publication.

The Islam West Africa Collection spans six countries and comprises over 14,500 documents. Managing this digital database involves grappling with scale.

I recently discussed this challenge with the African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) team at Uppsala University, at the invitation of Ashleigh Harris. In my talk, "Building AI Pipelines for African Digital Collections: Lessons from the Islam West Africa Collection", I mapped out four specific workflows that I have developed to manage this volume of data:

1. OCR correction: Cleansing "noisy" text from newspaper scans to improve readability.
2. Text extraction: Deploying multimodal AI to interpret complex magazine layouts and handwritten notes.
3. Named Entity Recognition (NER): Automating metadata to locate specific people, places, and organisations.
4. Indexing: Building rich, searchable indices that open up entire publications to researchers.

We also raised a critical point: technology must not become a barrier. In order to meaningfully support African libraries, we must prioritise "minimal computing" and "digital sobriety". These approaches ensure that metadata workflows remain cost-effective and open source, rather than locking institutions into expensive, unmaintainable systems.

We also addressed the messy reality of the archive. Dealing with unstructured data, mixed languages, and irregular layouts requires tools that are not just powerful, but pragmatic.

We discussed my work on the Islam in West Africa Collection, as well as the potential and pitfalls of AI in African and Islamic studies, ranging from "vibe coding" and data extraction to the "seductive danger" of AI-driven OCR and HTR.

The episode is now available! Listen on:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Podigee
• Pocket Casts
• Deezer

The session will open with Salia Dramé presenting his short documentary on the links between religion, precarity, and university life in Abidjan. I will then outline the book's main findings, followed by a discussion moderated by Issouf Binaté (Université Alassane Ouattara), with Muriel Gomez-Perez (Université Laval) and Cédric Jourde (University of Ottawa).

The event will take place on Zoom. I hope to see you there!

📅 Date: November 6, 2025
⏰ Time: 12:00–1:30 p.m. EST (UTC−5)
💻 Format: Online (Zoom)
🔗 Registration: https://forms.gle/agWqJLs18daoiyaM9

We seek contributions grounded in African Studies that reimagine DH from African perspectives. We especially welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners based in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Suggested themes

1. 1. Transforming Research Methods through AI and Digital Tools in African Studies
2. 2. Building Sustainable Research Infrastructures from African Perspectives
3. 3. Centring African Knowledge Systems in Digital Research Design

Submission details

Deadline: A 250-word abstract by 15 December 2025.

See below for the full call for chapters.

Call for papers

Alors que le « tournant numérique » dans les études africaines prend de l'ampleur, ce panel explore le potentiel de transformation et les défis critiques des humanités numériques (DH) et de l'intelligence artificielle (IA) dans ce domaine. Nous examinons leur impact sur la production, la diffusion et l'interprétation des connaissances sur l'Afrique, en abordant tout particulièrement l'anglocentrisme persistant et la « fracture numérique ».

Nous invitons les auteurs à présenter des applications innovantes des méthodes numériques dans les études africaines. Les sujets peuvent inclure :

1. Innovations méthodologiques

• Approches numériques pour explorer les appartenances africaines, afropolitaines et afropéennes à travers l'analyse textuelle et visuelle;
• Analyse par l'IA de contenus africains numérisés (par exemple, traitement du langage naturel, reconnaissance des entités nommées);
• Enseignement de l'histoire africaine à l'aide d'outils numériques.

2. Perspectives critiques

• Aborder l'« impérialisme numérique » (Breckenridge 2014) et le « complexe du sauveur numérique » (Shringarpure 2020) en relation avec la positionalité et la construction des connaissances;
• Considérations éthiques dans l'application des méthodes de DH à des contextes culturellement sensibles.

3. Production et diffusion des connaissances

• Plates-formes numériques pour la production de connaissances alternatives et publiques axée sur les perspectives africaines;
• Stratégies pour surmonter la numérisation sélective et les hiérarchies coloniales dans l'archivage numérique;
• Projets numériques collaboratifs transnationaux et transcontinentaux qui remettent en question les paradigmes établis dans le Nord.

Ce panel organisé par Frédérick Madore et Vincent Hiribarren fait suite à la réflexion entamée à l'ECAS2025. Il vise à présenter des recherches transdisciplinaires de pointe dans le monde francophone qui utilisent des méthodes numériques pour explorer les complexités des réalités, des identités et des systèmes de connaissance africains. En encourageant le dialogue sur le potentiel et les pièges des approches numériques, nous souhaitons contribuer à un paysage numérique plus inclusif, plus diversifié et plus critique dans les études africaines.

Soumission

Veuillez envoyer le titre et le résumé de votre communication (en français ou en anglais, 2500 signes maximum) avant le 15 novembre 2025 à :

• Frédérick Madore, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, frederick.madore@zmo.de
• Vincent Hiribarren, King's College London, Londres, vincent.hiribarren@kcl.ac.uk

This recognition comes at a fitting moment, as the website has recently undergone a major visual update and new content exploring digital humanities and AI has been added.

These cautions framed our panel, "Global and Transregional Histories: Digitally Connected?" at the Eighth European Congress on World and Global History in Växjö, Sweden. I presented "From Archives to Algorithms: Uncovering Transregional Islamic Connections through the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC)". I am grateful to my panellists, Mila Oiva and Gerben Zaagsma, and to the organisers, Antje Dietze and Kathleen Schlütter, for facilitating such a stimulating conversation about the silences and biases inherent in digitised collections, and about the most effective ways to represent connections and their variations.

Key takeaways:

• From technologies to practices: Technological change has long shaped historical enquiry and the production of knowledge. Pay attention to when, where and how practices change, and to the technologies and individuals that influence them.
• Digitisation reveals and flattens: decisions about selection, metadata and the unit of analysis determine what appears connected and what is obscured.
• Silences are structured, not random: they arise from censorship; licensing and access regimes; OCR and language coverage; and national priorities.
• Findability reflects supply-side bias: it mirrors what has been digitised and in which languages, not what is necessarily important.
• Co-mentions are leads, not proof: qualify edges by type, strength and provenance, and make uncertainty explicit.
• Connections are layered: social, infrastructural and semantic circuits rarely align.
• Mix scales: use distant reading to map coverage and temporal patterns, and close reading to expose gaps and turn absence into evidence.

The presentation showcased three practical applications of large language models. These included enhancing the accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) and entity recognition for African materials, conducting experimental sentiment analysis across over 10,000 newspaper articles examining the representation of Islam, and developing a conversational AI chatbot that transcends traditional keyword-based search methodologies.

Drawing on my experience of working on the IWAC, I presented practical solutions for managing digital abundance, emphasising the importance of maintaining a critical awareness of the inherent limitations of AI technologies. The talk emphasised the transformative potential of AI technologies when applied to historical materials, as well as the necessary cautions.

Around thirty colleagues from Africa, Europe and North America will come together for three days of structured dialogue and practical planning. The focus will be on collaboration and strategy rather than formal talks.

We will focus on three practical questions:

• How should DH and AI evolve within African Studies?
• What academic conditions and infrastructures are needed?
• How do we move from intentions around equity and decolonisation to concrete changes in practice?

Instead of giving presentations, participants will work together to write a position paper containing actionable recommendations for research funders, universities, technology developers, and policymakers. The aim is to promote the ethical and equitable advancement of DH and AI in African Studies.

If you work at this intersection, what examples, tools or considerations should we be aware of? We welcome your suggestions!

Reimagining Archives and Metadata

Three pioneering projects are revolutionising how African cultural materials are catalogued and interpreted. The African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project, led by Ashleigh Harris at Uppsala University, directly confronts colonial cataloguing systems that have marginalised African oral cultures. ALMEDA develops metadata ontologies tailored to African language genres, creating a multilingual, open, linked data repository where users can search and input data in multiple African languages. This approach liberates African literary forms from European classification systems, allowing them to exist within their own conceptual frameworks.

The Islamic Cultural Archive (Britta Frede and Rüdiger Seesemann, University of Bayreuth) complements this work by establishing a trilingual collaborative research platform for Islamic studies in Africa, spanning English, French, and Arabic. Through cross-lingual ontologies developed with African academic partners, the project establishes new standards for transcontinental research grounded in collaborative knowledge creation.

Taking a distinctive approach, the Mapping Senufo project (Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Emory University) investigates arts from Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali through a born-digital publication that resists the digital realm's tendency towards rapid consumption. Drawing inspiration from indigenous knowledge transmission through riddles, the project promotes contemplative engagement with museum data, encouraging critical scrutiny of information that often misrepresents ambiguities as certainties.

Building Infrastructure and Communities

Two groundbreaking projects are constructing sustainable DH ecosystems that transform research infrastructure across Africa. The ESCALATOR project, presented by Menno van Zaanen and Jessica Mabaso from the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), addresses the fragmentation of DH training through comprehensive support structures. These include a progressive curriculum cultivating local DH champions, a Slack platform fostering community engagement, regional DH-IGNITE networking events, and a stakeholder mapping tool facilitating inter-institutional collaboration. This structured approach eschews sporadic workshops in favour of establishing self-sustaining communities of practice across South African universities.

Jessica Holland (British School at Athens) and David Maina (British Institute of Eastern Africa) have developed a Linked Open Data project that revolutionises archival accessibility. Their work connects multidisciplinary collections across Africa for the first time, revealing relationships between institutions such as the British Institute of Eastern Africa and the British Institute of Libya and Northern Africa Studies. This methodology empowers African researchers to reinterpret colonial and postcolonial materials through indigenous frameworks. Digital storytelling and map-based visualisations illuminate pre-colonial African trade networks and cross-cultural exchanges often obscured by colonial archives.

AI as Research Tool: Promises and Limitations

Two contrasting presentations illuminate AI's transformative potential and inherent constraints in African historical research. Albrecht Hofheinz (University of Oslo) demonstrates how AI accelerates access to endangered historical sources in Sudan. Using Google's Document AI, he has processed Arabic manuscripts from the Sudan Collection at Bergen—materials gaining urgency as civil war threatens. Though handwritten text recognition remains imperfect, this workflow, enhanced by large language models, enables rapid content analysis and summarisation. Researchers can thus concentrate on detailed textual analysis whilst amplifying local voices that might otherwise remain unheard.

Vincent Hiribarren and Frédérick Madore's comparative study directly tests AI's analytical capabilities against human expertise. Examining British Colonial Office files on the Cameroon War alongside the vast Islam West Africa Collection (24 million words), their findings reveal a crucial paradox: whilst AI excels at identifying patterns across large corpora, it perpetuates the colonial perspectives embedded in source materials.

Both projects converge on a collaborative model where AI handles routine, corpus-wide tasks—from OCR repair to entity tagging—whilst historians remain essential for crafting prompts, auditing outputs, and ensuring interpretations challenge rather than reproduce colonial perspectives. This synthesis demonstrates that AI's value lies not in replacing human analysis but in enabling large-scale archival engagement—engagement that demands vigilance against technology's tendency to amplify historical documentation's existing biases.

Key Challenges and Critical Insights

The Q&A sessions highlighted four principal challenges confronting DH in African studies. First, fundamental gaps in digital literacy and infrastructure perpetuate dependency on Global North expertise, constraining local capacity development. Second, genuine decolonisation transcends multilingual interfaces; it requires interrogating whether knowledge structures organised through colonial languages inevitably reproduce imperial frameworks. Third, as AI tools grow more sophisticated, the "black box" problem threatens to create new forms of mystified authority. Researchers must therefore document their prompts, models, and parameters rigorously. Finally, AI's formidable processing power risks overwhelming human critical judgement, making analytical perspective essential even as we harness computational capabilities.

Conclusions

The presentations converged on core principles for ethical digital practice. Successful projects balance investment in human networks with technical systems to ensure sustainable communities. Researchers require new competencies spanning prompt engineering, ethical AI deployment, and critical algorithm interpretation. The panel exposed a fundamental tension: whilst DH and AI offer unprecedented opportunities to recover marginalised voices and empower African communities to shape their narratives, they simultaneously risk reproducing colonial extraction and classification on a digital scale. The digital transformation of African studies thus represents not merely a technical challenge but an inherently political project.

Success demands radical metric shifts. Rather than celebrating technological sophistication, we must measure our tools' effectiveness in fostering more just and inclusive understandings of African histories and cultures. Progress requires collaborative development, sustained critical engagement with technology, and unwavering commitment to building equitable knowledge infrastructures—infrastructures that serve African communities rather than extract from them.

I presented the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) and demonstrated my AI-augmented data curation workflows, discussing the broader role of machine-assisted scholarship in historical research. In return, ENC colleagues introduced me to the e-NDP (Notre-Dame de Paris et son cloître) project and its digital edition platform. They showcased how medieval chapter registers are made accessible through searchable transcriptions, faceted browsing and an interface designed for researchers and the general public alike.

We spent a long time comparing our respective approaches to AI chatbots: the ENC's prototype, which is based on their 'position de thèse' corpus and uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture; and IWAC's conversational agent, which is in development. Our discussions explored the potential and limitations of generative AI in historical research.

Special thanks to Vincent Jolivet, Elsa Marguin-Hamon (Director of Research and International Relations), and the ENC staff for a productive visit. I look forward to future collaboration.

The series opens on Monday 12 May with "Questions d'islam en Afrique de l'Ouest : enjeux et défis de la recherche avec les archives physiques et numériques", a methodological reflection on working with fragmented post-colonial records and born-digital sources.

The following week, on Tuesday 20 May, I will present 'L'histoire des communautés musulmans ouest-africaines : approches numériques', demonstrating how the Islam West Africa Collection supports distant reading and network visualisations of 65 years of media coverage.

On Wednesday 21 May, the lecture "Rencontre entre chrétiens et musulmans : au-delà du binaire coexistence pacifique/conflits religieux" revisits religious pluralism in Togo, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso.

The cycle concludes on Wednesday 28 May with "Militantisme religieux sur les campus universitaires. Le cas du Bénin et du Togo", which traces how Christian and Muslim student associations have reshaped university life since 1970.

I'm looking forward to presenting my work on using artificial intelligence with the Islam West Africa Collection later this week.

Even more so, I'm excited to be here to learn directly from scholars based on the continent about their innovative uses of digital humanities and AI in research, particularly concerning archives, cultural heritage, and African languages.

Abstract

The interplay between religion and student activism at the universities of Abomey-Calavi (Benin) and Lomé (Togo) has often been overlooked, although faith-based organisations and student unions have coexisted since the 1970s. Based on interviews with different generations of activists, this book uncovers the neglected history of Christian and Muslim student associations on these campuses, originally strongholds of leftist and secular ideologies. It analyses the emergence of these groups under a Marxist-Leninist regime in Benin and a one-party dictatorship in Togo, and explores the implications of growing religiosity for these public universities as secular institutions.

The history of these associations reveals the campus as a microcosm reflecting wider national socio-political life, while also highlighting the importance of translocal factors in shaping the internal dynamics of these groups. Amidst the massification of university enrolments and rising graduate unemployment, faith-based associations have come to provide more than religious guidance. Increasingly, they offer a "social curriculum", providing a space for socialisation and a set of skills, norms and moral values that complement the secular academic curriculum.

Held at the Crêt-Bérard Monastery in Puidoux, Switzerland, the workshop provided a great setting for engaging discussions on the governance and structures of religious associations in West Africa. Grateful for the insightful contributions of the participants and the stimulating atmosphere throughout the workshop.

Many thanks to André Chappatte and the entire team of the research project "The Contemporary Expansion of Corporate Islam in Rural West Africa" (CECIRWA) for organising such a wonderful event.

The panel will be chaired by K.D. Thompson (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and will include Marius Kothor (Harvard University), Ebenezer Obadare (Council on Foreign Relations), Benjamin Lawrance (University of Arizona), and Leonardo A. Villalón (University of Florida).

Our research examined the dynamics of religious categorisation in contemporary Benin, where official statistics suggest a decline in Vodun practices, while field observations reveal its continued vitality through widespread dual religious affiliation.

We analysed how recent state-led promotion of Vodun through initiatives such as "Vodun Days" highlights the tensions between statistical marginalisation and cultural valorisation.

The paper shows how Benin's religious landscape challenges conventional categorisations, with many people navigating fluidly between different religious traditions, despite official statistics enforcing single religious affiliations.

This work contributes to broader discussions on religious measurement and categorisation in Africa, while highlighting the limitations of current quantitative approaches in capturing complex religious realities.

Further details on the call for papers and the submission process will be announced soon. In the meantime, please contact us if you are interested in submitting a proposal for this panel.

Abstract

As the "digital turn" in African studies gains momentum, this panel explores the transformative potential and critical challenges of digital humanities (DH) and artificial intelligence (AI) in the field. We examine their impact on the production, dissemination, and interpretation of knowledge about Africa, addressing the persistent Anglocentricity and "digital divide".

We invite papers that present innovative applications of computational methods in African studies and/or critical reflections on decolonising DH practices. Topics may include:

1. Methodological innovations: Digital approaches to exploring African, Afropolitan, and Afropean belongings through textual and visual analysis; AI-driven analysis of digitised African content (e.g., natural language processing, named entity recognition); Teaching African history with digital tools
2. Critical perspectives: Decolonising DH methodologies and epistemologies; Addressing "digital imperialism" (Breckenridge 2014) and the "digital saviour complex" (Shringarpure 2020) in relation to positionality and knowledge construction; Ethical considerations in applying DH methods to culturally sensitive contexts
3. Knowledge production and dissemination: Digital platforms for alternative knowledge production and public scholarship centred on African perspectives; Strategies for overcoming selective digitisation and colonial hierarchies in digital archiving; Transnational and cross-continental collaborative digital projects that challenge established Global North paradigms

The panel aims to showcase cutting-edge transdisciplinary research that uses digital methods to explore the complexities of African realities, identities, and knowledge systems. By fostering dialogue on the potential and pitfalls of digital approaches, we aim to contribute to a more inclusive, diverse, and critically aware digital landscape in African studies.