African Digital Humanities

I came to digital humanities when I was in Ibadan in the 2010s, not knowing what I was engaged in then (digitizing and archiving maps, old newspapers, and film posters) was part of a then-emerging field. Since then, I have been fascinated with how we study African cultural heritage and productions when so much of it now happens in algorithmic environments and on digital screens. When I started this work, there was no clear field called African Digital Humanities, although there were digital humanists working on the digital cultural record in European and American contexts. At the same time, while there were African studies scholars using traditional methods, few were experimenting with digital technology.

Digital Nollywood is my most sustained project, an ongoing digital archive of Nollywood film posters. I started it because these posters were either considered trash or were simply disappearing, being ephemeral objects, plastered on walls in Lagos, Ibadan, and Kano. They get covered over, torn down, weathered away, and marked as objects defacing the urban space. But they are also rich cultural texts, print transcripts that tell us how Nollywood markets itself locally, imagines its audiences, and, crucially, negotiates between local and global aesthetics. The archive I have sought to build preserves these posters, making them available for scholarship and teaching Nigerian visual culture, film, etc.

Together with colleagues at KU, particularly Brian Roseumblum, I have also co-organized an annual African Digital Humanities Symposium at the University of Kansas since 2020, bringing together scholars working at this intersection and collaborating with colleagues in West Africa on several events and initiatives. We’ve also hosted workshops on digitizing Onitsha Market Literature, mapping detention centers, exploring the possibilities and limits of using social media as historical sources and on African NLP. These symposia are about building community and creating a network of scholars who can support each other’s methodologically adventurous work.

I have done this work along with writing Cultural Netizenship (2022) and The Algorithmic Age of Personality (2025), two monographs examining digital media cultures in African literary and cultural contexts. Beyond community-building, I’m also working to create space for these conversations in major journals, currently editing a special issue on AI and Africa for ASR and previously co-edited a special issue on African Digital Humanities. This work matters beyond African studies. If digital humanities developed its methods primarily for European manuscripts and American literary corpora, those methods need serious rethinking for the African cultural record, including oral traditions, multilingual contexts, ephemera, and platforms like TikTok, where African users are reshaping digital practice itself.

Ọ̀rọ̀ láti ẹnu àwọn àgbà òṣèré Yorùbá is an oral history project documenting audio and video interviews with senior veterans of the Yorùbá film industry. These conversations preserve knowledge about early Yorùbá cinema, production practices, and cultural contexts that rarely appear in written archives. The project addresses a core methodological challenge in African DH: how do we preserve and study knowledge traditions that privilege orality over text?

So, for anyone interested, I have compiled a bibliography of some foundational works in African DH below.

I. Methodological DH

Scholarship that deploys or theorizes digital tools, methods, archives, and infrastructure

  1. 1. Adelusi-Adeluyi, Ademide. “Mapping Old Lagos: Digital Histories and Maps about the Past.” The Historian 82, no. 1 (2020): 51–65.
  2. 2. Błoch, Agata, Guillem Martos Oms, and Clodomir Santana. “Decolonizing Archival Narratives: Exploring Digital Bias in the Catalogs of Portuguese-Colonized African Territories.” The Journal of African History 66 (2025): e19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853725100601
  3. 3. Yékú, James. “Social Media Images as Digital Sources for West African Urban History.” In Thomas Spear, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford Academic, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.977
  4. 4. Iduma, Emmanuel. “Digitality and the African Photographic Archive: Towards a Practice of Futurity.” Arts 15, no. 3 (2026): 48. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts15030048
  5. 5. Ngom, Fallou, and Eleni Castro. “Beyond African Orality: Digital Preservation of Mandinka ʿAjamī Archives of Casamance.” History Compass 17, no. 8 (2019): e12584.
  6. 6. Chamelot, Fabienne, Vincent Hiribarren, and Marie Rodet. “Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa.” History in Africa 47 (2020): 101–118.
  7. 7. Hart, Jennifer. “Introduction: Digital History in African Studies.” History in Africa 47 (2020): 269–274.
  8. 8. Alegi, Peter. “Podcasting the Past: Africa Past and Present and (South) African History in the Digital Age.” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 2 (2012): 206–220.
  9. 9. Hallberg Adu, Kajsa. “The Promise of Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Decolonizing a Diverse Classroom in Ghana.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36, Supplement 1 (2021): i37–i42.
  10. 10. Farinola, Augustine Akintunde. “Digital Humanities Scholarship in Africa: Prospects and Challenges.” Paper presented at Virtual DH2020 Conference, ADHO, July 2020. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:31977/
  11. 11. Limb, Peter. “The Digitization of Africa.” Africa Today, 2005: 3–19.
  12. 12. Barringer, Terry, and Marion Wallace, eds. African Studies in a Digital Age: The Disconnects? Brill, 2014.
  13. 13. Junck, Leah, and James Yékú, guest eds. “African Digital Humanities.” Reviews in Digital Humanities 5, no. 4 (April 2024). https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v5-n4

II. Digital Cultural Studies of Africa and Postcolonial DH

Scholarship theorizing African digital culture, platform practice, algorithmic politics, and the postcolonial digital record

  1. 14. Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2018.
  2. 15. Risam, Roopika, and Kelly Baker Josephs, eds. The Digital Black Atlantic. Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
  3. 16. Risam, Roopika. “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 78–86. Routledge, 2018.
  4. 17. Yékú, James. Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria. Indiana University Press, 2022.
  5. 18. Yékú, James. The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture. Michigan State University Press, 2025.
  6. 19. Yékú, James, and Leah Junck, eds. African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures. Routledge, 2026.
  7. 20. Yékú, James. “Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2022.
  8. 21. Yékú, James, and Ayobami Ojebode. “From Google Doodles to Facebook: Nostalgia and Visual Reconstructions of the Past in Nigeria.” African Studies Review, 2021.
  9. 22. Adenekan, Shola. African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya. Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
  10. 23. Sacks, Susanna L. Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry. University of Massachusetts Press, 2024.
  11. 24. Bosch Santana, Stephanie. Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures. Northwestern University Press, 2025.
  12. 25. Bosch Santana, Stephanie. “From Nation to Network: Blog and Facebook Fiction from Southern Africa.” Research in African Literatures 49, no. 1 (2018): 187–208.
  13. 26. Bosch Santana, Stephanie. “Navigating Digital Worlds: African Literary Forms in the Digital Age.” In A Companion to African Literatures, 2021: 439–453.
  14. 27. Birhane, Abeba. “Algorithmic Colonization of Africa.” SCRIPTed: A Journal of Law, Technology & Society 17, no. 2 (2020): 389–409. https://doi.org/10.2966/scrip.170220.389
  15. 28. Aiyegbusi, Babalola Titilola. “Decolonizing Digital Humanities: Africa in Perspective.” In Bodies of Information, ed. Losh and Wernimont. University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 434–446.
  16. 29. Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2016: 42–49.
  17. 30. Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2019: 27–35.
  18. 31. Nesbitt-Ahmed, Zahrah. “Reclaiming African Literature in the Digital Age: An Exploration of Online Literary Platforms.” Critical African Studies 9, no. 3 (2017): 377–390.
  19. 32. Opeibi, Tunde. “Digitizing the Humanities in an Emerging Space.” In The Digital Black Atlantic, ed. Risam and Josephs, 2021: 162–167.
  20. 33. Harrell, D. Fox, Sercan Şengün, and Danielle Olson. “Africa and the Avatar Dream: Mapping the Impacts of Videogame Representations of Africa.” In The Digital Black Atlantic, ed. Risam and Josephs, 2021: 183–206.
  21. 34. Srinivasan, Sharath, Stephanie Diepeveen, and George Karekwaivanane. “Rethinking Publics in Africa in a Digital Age.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 13, no. 1 (2019): 2–17.
  22. 35. Losh, Elizabeth, and Jacqueline Wernimont, eds. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
  23. 36. Adenekan, Shola, Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Stephanie Bosch Santana, and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang, guest eds. “Digital Africas.” Postcolonial Text 15, nos. 3–4 (2020).