The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) at the North-West University (NWU) had a significant presence during South Africa’s winter conference season.
Its digital humanities researchers and operational teams presented their research and organised digital humanities workshops at various conferences and events held across South Africa.
The SADiLaR team presented a pre-conference workshop at the African Language Association of Southern Africa’s (ALASA) 25th international conference that took place from 8 to 12 July. This involved engaging workshop sessions on the latest trends and techniques in digital humanities and computational social sciences.
Researchers Dr Muzi Matfunjwa and Dr Respect Mlambo also co-presented a collaborative paper titled “The lexicographic treatment of kingship terminologies in bilingual dictionaries”.
Prof Langa Khumalo, executive director, Dr Friedel Wolf, technical manager, Juan Steyn, operations director, and Mmasibidi Setaka, digital humanities researcher in seSotho, represented SADiLaR at the 28th International Conference of the African Association for Lexicography (AFRILEX) from 1 to 4 July.
They facilitated a digital humanities pre-conference workshop themed “Towards a sustainable national term bank for the official languages of South Africa: Collaboration vs fragmentation”, and Dr Wolff and Juan presented a talk on the role of SADiLaR.
During the AFRILEX conference, Prof Khumalo, who is also the AFRILEX president, shared his presentation on “Making sense of Kuningi using a corpus linguistic analysis”.
In 2023, the Pan South African Languages Board (PanSALB) named the word “kuningi” – an IsiZulu word meaning “it’s a lot” – as the inaugural South African word of the year for social media.
Prof Khumalo’s study analyses the meaning of “kuningi” using a corpus linguistic approach, two corpora drawn from the most popular IsiZulu newspapers, Isolezwe (ACISO) and Ilanga (ACILA), to comparatively analyse the standard use and meaning of the word.
Mmasibidi shared her presentation on corpus-based dictionaries for low-resource languages as an idea for her PhD proposal, and she gained valuable feedback from experts who attended the conference.
The team was also well-represented at the Language and Education Global Conference in Kenya where digital humanities researcher in isiZulu, Rooweither Mabuya, appeared as a panellist discussing the topic “Education, Literacy, and AI”.
In turn, Andiswa Bukula, digital humanities researcher specialising in isiXhosa, co-presented a talk titled “African Digital Humanities and the Ethics of AI” at the July Global Southern Forum from 1 to 5 July.
“The three-hour panel discussion went well with great audience interaction. After the event, the panel has been invited to submit a book chapter, which is a great way to share all that was discussed,” says Andiswa.
Then, during the annual conference of the Southern African Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Society from 25 to 27 June, Dr Matfunjwa and Dr Mlambo presented their collaborated paper, “Introduction to Text Analysis Tools”.
SADiLaR was also pleased to have collaborated with the South African Association for Language Teaching again this year. Here the team supported the pre-conference workshop for language professionals and lecturers which focused on assessment literacy and the matter of enhancing translation practices of assessment tools.
This workshop was facilitated by Prof Tobie van Dyk, lead of the higher education programme seconded at SADiLaR and director at ICELDA.
SADiLaR researchers and operational teams presented their research and organised digital humanities workshops at various conferences and events held across South Africa.
