Digital Storytelling on African Urbanisms: A Model to Empower Education Initiatives Across the Global South
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: McDonald Institute Archaeological Res.
Abstract
This project explores how to best empower secondary school and university educators and learners in the Global South to develop digital story telling in low resource environments. This is done through the use of a case study carried out in South Africa and Botswana where learners and educators will explore cultural heritage through a digital archive called metsemegologolo, 'ancient towns' in Setswana (https://www.metsemegologolo.org.za). Metsemegolgolo, co-directed by Cambridge and based at the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Pretoria and the KwaZulu Natal Museum, is an open source prototype database containing archaeological data, heritage objects, historical maps, oral histories and poetry about precolonial African urbanisms. This project develops a complementary UK-US collaboration among the metsemegologolo developers, digital heritage experts, and southern African educators with the purpose of exploring digital storytelling in low-resourced educational environments. Increasing digital representations across the Global South is part of the ongoing process of decolonizing the digital humanities globally by deepening connections to, and preservation of, cultural heritage from a non-Western perspective.
| Description | This is a US-UK collaborative grant established to explore how to best empower secondary school and university educators and learners in the Global South to develop digital story telling in low resource environments via the assessment of a South Africa based archival platform (called metsemegologolo). The project team has so far been able to complete work on the majority of the stated objectives and planned deliverables. This includes the production of a review document on the metsemegologolo database, a survey on digital storytelling initiatives across the Global South, a list of modifications and improvements for the metsemegologolo and similar archival platforms based on the above mentioned reviews, an experimental curation of archival content via an ESRI storymap and a StoryMapJS (open source platform developed by the Northwestern University Knight Lab), the creation of a landing page that allows direct access to information on the project and its results, the organisation and delivery of a webinar for practitioners and educators across the Global South (held on 14/03/2023). The project established that there are a number of (albeit limited) existing digital archives that contain materials on pre-colonial urbanism in Africa and that it is possible to extract information from these archives to create narratives of various aspects that characterise pre-colonial urbanism. Nevertheless there are still several barriers to the development of co-created digital stories of the African past amongst students in secondary education in Southern Africa. Some of these barriers are indeed technological (lack of IT infrastructure in schools, low bandwidth and differential access to mobile devices between the urban and rural areas) but others are linked to the nature of the available archives (not always easily accessible to a non-expert public) and to structural problems of the history curriculum. In fact, for example in South Africa, the curriculum is skewed towards more recent periods in history and teachers, who are expected to follow the curriculum very closely, lack the time and resources for exploring topics that are outside it. The project, which is still on-going (via a no-cost extension) is conducting an in-depth series of interviews with museum based education departments at 4 museums in South Africa and one in Botswana to ascertain whether the museum, rather than the school, would be the most suited location to allow encounters between students and the pre-colonial past via digital media. In fact school classes do visit national and regional museums on a regular basis; these visits have been identified as an opportunity to explore those neglected aspects of the curriculum that delve into the deeper past. |
| Exploitation Route | The outcomes of this funding are being taken forward directly though modifications to the metsemegologolo platform, which were identified as important through this project's assessment exercise and that will be implemented via a sponsored post-doctoral appointment at the University of the Witwatersrand in the second part of 2023. These modifications will be documented and the archival platform design principles and implementation will be published so that other, similar archives, can benefit from the findings of the current project in facilitating access to digital archives in a low resource environments. The co-PIs are currently applying for a larger grant to facilitate the establishment of an international research network that will further explore issues of access to digital archives for teaching and learning in low resourced environments in the Global South, will create guidelines for an ethical and decolonised production and use of archival resources and their manifestations through co-produced digitally based storytelling. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | https://www.metsemegologolo.org.za/wordpress/digital-storytelling/ |
| Description | Project landing page |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | As part of the project deliverables, a landing page was created to outline the aim and objectives of the project, publicise the webinar that was held in March 2023 and host the webinar recording and post-webinar resources. The creation of the landing page within the website of the metsemegologolo project (that the project herein reported is using as a case study) was aimed at giving further visibility to the metsemegologolo itself. We run statistics on the website before and after the launch of the webinar campaign (which was conducted via email to individual and mailing lists, plus publicised within relevant newsletters in digital humanities, African archaeology etc and included a link to the website for the registration to the webinar) and can report that the websites received 38% more unique visits in the month of March, related to the circulation of the event, brining the visits from an average of 50 a month to over 600. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.metsemegologolo.org.za/wordpress/digital-storytelling/ |
| Description | Webinar |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This activity, which was one of the project deliverables, consisted of a webinar hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research on digital storytelling in low-resourced educational environments in the Global South. The webinar, intended to benefit US and UK institutions who are working to address digital-enabled equitable participation, whether at home or abroad, consisted of presentations from experts in the field, followed by extended interactive discussion with the audience.Digital Storytelling in the Global South" brings together experts in archaeology and beyond to discuss: Storytelling with spatial archives, on how various forms of spatial data can be incorporated into and structured within archival databases for digital storytelling; Digital infrastructure in low-resourced environments, on the logistical challenges with connecting audiences with varying technical competencies, computer and internet speeds, and cultural understandings and language barriers to resources associated with digital publication; Digital storytelling and the narrative voice, on how marginalized voices and perspectives can be integrated into digital storytelling process, empowering communities to engage with storytelling in self-directed, generative ways that deepen connections to cultural heritage.w the participation of 120 individuals (over 50% of which attended from an African country). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |