Digitising African Oral Narratives In A Global Arena
Renate Meyer, Centre for Popular Memory, South Africa
http://www.popularmemory.org

Session: User-Created Content

While technological advances provide new preservation and dissemination practices for African archives, they rely largely on internationally developed standards for digitisation and prioritisation of material. What that means is African concerns relating to Intellectual Property, community property and access to technology, as well as connection to global forums, are largely ignored: technology is controlled by trans-national organizations off the African continent. Issues such as ‘global homogeny’ focus the world on the West- its practices, icons and language. Multi-lingualism for Web-based media and digitisation/ transcription procedures for languages other than English remain under-developed and under-prioritised. In short, there are concerns that are specific to the African continent which are not being addressed on a global level. Through the Centre for Popular Memory’s (CPM’s) audio visual archive and the collection of narratives of urban terror and power relations in the diasporas, these concerns are explored with relation to digitisation procedures, storage mediums/customised digital repositories, and virtual archives in a global context.