During the month of January, the isiXhosa researcher from the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), the Siswati researcher and a programmer were fortune enough to be selected to attended a summer school in Pretoria, which was organised by the University of Pretoria’s Department of Information Science together with the Data-Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA), SADiLaR and Network of Data and Information Curation Communities (NeDICC). The CODATA-RDA Research Data summer school ran from 13 – 24 January 2020.

It was such a privilege to be part of the group of Africans to attend the first summer school presented in South Africa which provided a group of early career researchers with the essential data science skills which include technical skills and responsible research practices, to enable them to work with data in an effective and efficient manner required by the fast paced 21st century.

Author: Mieke Hofmeyr

At SADiLaR, Mr. Respect Mlambo is the Xitsonga researcher. Respect specialises in lexicography, translation and terminology.

Currently he is keeping himself busy with the writing of papers and blogs for SADiLaR in his various fields of research. While the current Covid-19 situation and national lockdown is impacting the whole of South Africa and its workforce Mr. Mlambo plans to keep on writing and doing research projects in his field.

Upon asking Mr. Mlambo about his field of interest, in terms of research, he kept it straight forward and answered – “Lexicography”.

Mr. Respect Mlambo concluded by sharing his thoughts on the contribution that Digital Humanities can make within the African context by saying

“Digital Humanities will improve the functionality of African languages in various modern fields”.

Mrs. Valencia Wagner is SADiLaR’s Setswana language researcher. She finds sociolinguistics, phonetics, phonology and digital humanities particularly interesting within the language of Setswana.

Currently she is working on the writing of articles and organising virtual workshops. Other projects that is currently consuming Mrs. Wagner’s time is focusing- and working on her PhD studies. She is also planning to write more articles within the next few months. Furthermore Valencia will be working on two projects:

• The Setswana and IsiXhosa grammar portal
• The speech data collection project

Upon asking her what she thinks about the contribution that Digital Humanities can make in the African context she had the following to say:

“Africa still has a limited exposure to various digital tools, resources & methodologies, therefore, many African researchers and scholars still rely a lot on traditional methods of conducting research. Digital humanities can transform traditional humanities by creating and integrating digital technologies into African research. Research that would have taken years to complete manually, will be much easier to undertake with the use of digital tools.”

She concluded by saying that these digital platforms could also help us to share information and grow our indigenous communities.

Author: Benito Trollip (SADiLaR Afrikaans Researcher)

Short summary and English title:

Language in the time of a distance creator

In today’s blog the importance and value of language in our current circumstances is discussed. The dual nature of language as a conveyer of information and a medium of encouragement form the basis of the discussion.

Ons leef tans in ʼn wêreld waaraan ons so in die bou daarvan gewoond moet raak. In ʼn tyd waarin mense min keuses het en hierdie keuses onder druk moet uitoefen. Baie mense moet deesdae meer gereeld (en uit noodsaak) aanlyn met mekaar kommunikeer. Videovergaderings en langer e-poskorrespondensies is aan die orde van die dag. Taal en die oordeelkundige (en vir sommige die ‘korrekte’) gebruik daarvan word deesdae al hoe belangriker. Ons moet leer hoe om in ons nuwe wêreld oor ons nuwe wêreld te praat.

Die vraag oor ‘korrekte’ taalgebruik is ʼn maalkolk waaruit ʼn mens nie vinnig ontsnap as jy eers daarin vasgevang is nie. Om dit te illustreer, kan ʼn mens kyk na gesprekke oor die koronavirus en verwante sake. Iets wat my opgeval  het, is die gebruik van en debat rondom verskillende Afrikaanse weergawes van (state of) lockdown. Dit is verstaanbaar, aangesien die taalgebruik wat na hierdie virus verwys so akkuraat as moontlik behoort te wees om vir mense die korrekte inligting oor te dra. In hierdie opsig het die gepastheid van alternatiewe soos inperkingstyd / staat van inperking / grendeltyd al heelwat gesprekke tussen mense ontlok. Uiteindelik kom jou keuse van alternatief neer op enige keuse wat jy in die algemeen sou maak – jou persoonlike voorkeur en gesonde oordeel. Solank mense verstaan wat jy probeer sê, wat meer het jy nodig? Dit is nie ʼn streng taalkundige maatstaf om net op persoonlike voorkeur staat te maak nie, maar dis ʼn dapper nuwe wêreld en dalk word persoonlike voorkeur (sonder die benadeling van ʼn ander) al hoe belangriker.