Creating linguistic resources for use in DH: notes from one proudly South African adventure
Channel: SADiLaR
Date: 17/09/2021

Speaker: Marissa Griesel

South Africa has a rich and diverse linguistic landscape but not many applicable resources to drive research and development in the digital humanities sphere exist yet. Such resources are expensive to produce and require linguistic as well as computational expertise. Add to this the intricate structures of the South African languages and the cultures represented by those languages and ours is an interesting puzzle to work on. Two projects that aim at filling some of the gaps are the African Wordnet and the Multilingual Linguistic Terminology projects hosted in UNISA’s Department of African Languages and funded by SADiLaR. This talk will give an overview of these resources as well as the development timeline up to now, before highlighting some examples of unique challenges faced when working in a multilingual, resource scares environment.