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The Good, The Bad, and The Dataset: Digital Humanities Perspectives for African Arts

Digital technologies continue to reshape the study and circulation of art-historical knowledge, and African arts occupy a particularly charged position within this transformation. On the one hand, digital platforms have expanded access to collections, archives, and visual materials that were once geographically restricted or institutionally inaccessible, opening new possibilities for research, pedagogy, and public engagement. On the other hand, these same systems often reproduce longstanding epistemic biases embedded in museum databases, classification systems, and colonial-era taxonomies. This webinar explores the double-edged nature of digital humanities in the context of African arts.

How do digitization efforts both democratize and discipline knowledge? What happens when historically contingent categories are translated into metadata and search algorithms? How do these classifications shape what is visible, searchable, and knowable in digital space? And further, for whom are these digital spaces designed, and how do the knowledge and data they contain include or exclude different stakeholders? This topic is also, incidentally, one that inherently evokes the specter of artificial intelligence (AI), which increasingly relies on digitized archives as training data. As AI systems ingest and replicate these datasets, there is a risk that the very biases scholars have worked to critique, including hierarchical categorization, reductive labeling, and uneven representation, are not only preserved, but amplified at scale.

With these considerations in mind, this webinar brings together scholars with established experience in digital humanities and African studies. All participants are contributors to a forthcoming position paper developed through a February 2026 workshop co-organized by Frédérick Madore and Vincent Hiribarren. While participants’ primary areas of practice extend beyond the domains of African arts and African art history, their work remains deeply grounded in African studies, and their perspectives offer valuable points of entry for ACASA members. In particular, their insights open up new ways of thinking through the following questions:

How do digital tools and methods common to digital humanities open up new ways of thinking about authorship, circulation, interpretation, and preservation that are more collaborative and decentralized?
Or do these tools risk reproducing existing systems of exclusion, embedding them more deeply into the infrastructures shaping future knowledge production?
What would it mean to build digital infrastructures for African arts that are not only more accessible, but also more accountable?
How might scholars, curators, and technologists intervene in digital infrastructures and other systems to create more equitable and critically engaged forms of knowledge?

Presenters:

Albrecht Hofheinz, University of Oslo

Albrecht Hofheinz is Associate Professor of Arab Studies at the University of Oslo, with decades-long research and humanitarian experience in the Sudan and other African contexts. He has published on Sufism, Islamic reform movements and local history in the Sudan; Arabic manuscript cultures in Africa; and social media and sociocultural dynamics in the contemporary Arab world. Among larger cooperative projects, he co-edited Brill’s “Arabic Literature of Africa” and led the digitisation and cataloguing unit of the “Timbuktu Manuscripts Project” (2000-2009). Combining traditional philological expertise with innovative digital methods, he recently turned to developing AI-powered approaches for analysing Arabic manuscripts from the Sudan, addressing both opportunities and challenges of applying these technologies to endangered African archives.

Fallou Ngom, Boston University

Dr. Ngom is a Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. His research interests include the interactions between African languages and non-African languages, the adaptations of Islam in Africa, and Ajami literatures (records of African languages written in Arabic script).

Irene Mwendwa, Sulwe Labs

Irene is a lawyer creating safer digital futures through research and advocacy in human rights and tech policy. She is an experienced legal professional with extensive experience in innovative collaborations across public, private, and civil society sectors. Irene structures and executes projects that deliver better policies and legal frameworks on public policy issues such as elections and technology. Irene is a builder of liberatory futures, rooted in integrity, imagination, and justice.

James Yékú, University of Kansas

James Yékú, a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, teaches postcolonial digital humanities and African literary studies at the University of Kansas as an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies. He is the author of “Cultural Netizenship: Social Media, Popular Culture, and Performance in Nigeria,” “The Algorithmic Age of Personality: African Literature and Cancel Culture,” as well as two books of poetry, and a nonfiction collection.

Registration

This virtual event is free and open to registered ACASA members. Registration is required to receive webinar credentials. Please note that registration closes one hour before the event.

Please use this link to register via your ACASA Membership Portal.

For any questions or issues, please email Caroline Bastian at bastian@acasaonline.org