The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) and the UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources (OER) at the North-West University (NWU) are having the first intake of their Digital Humanities OER Champions Initiative.
According to Prof Jako Olivier, NWU UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and OER, the programme is offered through SADiLaR’s ESCALATOR Digital Champions Initiative. He says it seeks to stimulate activism and research around the use and/or creation of OER for the digital humanities at universities in South Africa.
“We are pleased to announce that 26 projects have been accepted into this programme to support and fund the creation and adaptation of OER in the digital humanities. As the name implies, OER include any teaching, learning and research materials that are available in the public domain and permit no-cost access, use and adaptation and redistribution,” says Jako.
He explains that these resources are an integral tool in the building of digital humanities skills and expertise in South Africa, as this important field needs to develop in response to the specific needs of academics in the humanities in South Africa.
“Digital humanities is a relatively new research field in South Africa,” adds Prof Menno van Zaanen, Digital Humanities professor at SADiLaR. “It is the practice of using computational tools in the broad area of the humanities. Digital technologies allow humanities and social sciences researchers to analyse larger amounts of data (such as text). This allows them to answer research questions more objectively or even to answer completely novel research questions.”
The selected 26 projects are distributed across institutions in South Africa. They have objectives ranging from using OER to introduce a multilingual, decolonial and interdisciplinary perspective in journalism education, to supporting indigenous language robotics education in South Africa, and introducing digital humanities and computational thinking into legal research.
In the coming months, SADiLaR will showcase the work of the projects involved in the programme on its various platforms.
In addition to a research grant, the programme has a strong capacity-building focus. Jako says the programme participants will do an online short course on OER, which includes webinars and workshops and creating a space to share best practices.
“The programme will also include support for champions from the humanities to research the process, participate in a colloquium on their research and work towards a publication on their work. An essential outcome of the programme is to build a network of digital humanities researchers and practitioners in South Africa to develop this fledgling field.”
