Ayodele James Akinola | Digital Humanities and the discursive complexities of colonial ‘letterature’
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2020-04-24

Ayodele James Akinola | Chrisland University, Abeokuta, Nigeria

Presentation description:

Colonial letters are a means of communication among colonial masters in major parts of the world, especially Africa between 1870 and 1900 (Iweriebor, 2011). In many instances, these letters served as a medium of exchanging thoughts or information between the ruling colonial masters and the colonised subjects or vice versa. Korieh (2014) considers them as a reliable source for analysing Africa’s encounter with Europe owing to the letters’ historical and cultural values. In recent times, colonial historicity and its antiquities have attracted the interest of scholars in the field of digital humanities. Interestingly, scholars in this field have observed that colonial letters is one of the important antiquities of the colonial times. Yet, their linguistic complexities remain understudied. This study is aimed at collecting archived colonial letters in and/or relating to Nigeria, investigate the various discursive or pragmatic patterns that shape the complexities, and how they assist in the understanding of colonial thoughts, and interrogate the effectiveness of these letters to modern-day pedagogy and their potentials for the description of African socio-cultural cum linguistic values in the study locations. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are being applied for content analysis of the corpus. For the quantitative analysis, the digital humanities (DH) tools such as RStudio, and AntConc are being utilised. Interviews are also being conducted at the data collection sites with designated and relevant authorities to collect and establish valid background information on each of the letters.  For the analysis, the texts will be coded to achieve the study outcomes based on different parameters of the software packages in line with the content analysis method following Mey’s pragmatic acts theory which serves as the adopted theoretical foundation. 

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