Sanjin Muftic


2023

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IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive: Digitizing isiXhosa texts from 1870-1914
Jonathan Schoots | Amandla Ngwendu | Jacques De Wet | Sanjin Muftic
Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023)

This article offers an overview of the IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive, which hosts digitized texts and images of early isiXhosa newspapers and books from 1870-1914. The archive offers new opportunities for a range of research across multiple fields, and responds to debates around the importance of African intellectual traditions and their indigenous language sources in generating African social sciences which is contextually relevant. We outline the content and context of these materials and offer qualitative and quantitative details with the aim of providing an overview for interested scholars and a reference for those using the archive.

2020

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Endangered African Languages Featured in a Digital Collection: The Case of the ǂKhomani San, Hugh Brody Collection
Kerry Jones | Sanjin Muftic
Proceedings of the first workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages

The ǂKhomani San, Hugh Brody Collection features the voices and history of indigenous hunter gatherer descendants in three endangered languages namely, N|uu, Kora and Khoekhoe as well as a regional dialect of Afrikaans. A large component of this collection is audio-visual (legacy media) recordings of interviews conducted with members of the community by Hugh Brody and his colleagues between 1997 and 2012, referring as far back as the 1800s. The Digital Library Services team at the University of Cape Town aim to showcase the collection digitally on the UCT-wide Digital Collections platform, Ibali which runs on Omeka-S. In this paper we highlight the importance of such a collection in the context of South Africa, and the ethical steps that were taken to ensure the respect of the ǂKhomani San as their stories get uploaded onto a repository and become accessible to all. We will also feature some of the completed collection on Ibali and guide the reader through the organisation of the collection on the Omeka-S backend. Finally, we will outline our development process, from digitisation to repository publishing as well as present some of the challenges in data clean-up, the curation of legacy media, multi-lingual support, and site organisation.