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Digitization for cultural heritage projects have mostly focused on collections in formal archives, museums and libraries. While this is an important part of cultural heritage work, this workshop explores the challenges of digitizing 20th century informal paper archives of Southern African literature and theatre that have not been maintained in formal archives. There is an enormous amount of cheaply printed and handwritten literary ephemera not maintained in libraries. Much of this material, which formed a major cultural substrate for the majority of Southern Africans during apartheid, was never formally published, thereby making the protection and digitization of these manuscripts even more urgent for cultural heritage work in Southern Africa.
A further problem in this field is the work of corporate digitization projects which place digitized Southern African materials behind paywalls. Often, these materials are gained via access to formal university and governmental paper archives, which raise questions that have to be addressed at the level of policy. It also means that even those ephemeral forms that are kept in formal archives are not accessible to local readers.
The workshop will begin with the presentation of two case studies. The first case looks at the very real material threat to Zimbabwean theatre paper archives, which have fallen into such disrepair that important materials have certainly already been lost. The second case study looks at high quality digitization of Black South African Magazines and the problems of the corporatization of these materials.
This workshop operates as a ‘think tank’ to articulate and discuss the challenges of cataloguing and digitizing informal cultural archives in Southern Africa.
The first hour will consist of two half-hour presentations of the case studies by the Swedish and South African PIs. The second hour will be a structured discussion of how best to articulate, address and resolve the challenges of digitization of cultural heritage work in Southern Africa. Topics for discussion will include: Copyright and lack of infrastructure to find living authors or their families Unattributed materials – method toolbox for finding unattributed materials, or finding out who was writing behind pseudonyms Basic quality digitization: is it enough? Is it better than nothing? Cataloguing ephemera Working with family trusts and other stakeholders Repositories for digitized materials Working with National Archives and National repositories
Keywords: Cultural heritage, digitization, African Literature, African Theatre.
