A Minimal Approach to Building Computational Language Resources for Southern African History
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2023-03-09

William J Turkel, Ruramisai Charumbira, and Jaylen Edwards | University of Western Ontario, Canada

Digital historians who work in languages such as English can draw on a wealth of pre-existing tools for linguistic analysis. Scholars who work in so-called under-resourced languages have few, if any such luxuries. In Southern Africa, the lack of computational linguistic resources for indigenous languages is due, in part, to colonial practices that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o called Europhonism, "the replacement of native names, languages, and identities with European ones" and the subsequent "dismemberment of African memory" (Something Torn and New, 2009). Here we describe the beginnings of a project to create a morphosyntactic analyzer for the chiShona language. The project is minimal in every sense. Our sources are modest, consisting of a few dictionaries and other materials printed in the 20th century. Our goal is modest: an open source tool that can provide interlinear glosses for speakers of English and other indigenous Southern African languages like isiNdebele. Our team consists of two historians (one a native speaker and historian of the region, the other a programmer with no knowledge of African history) and an energetic and enthusiastic undergraduate computer science student. In addition to conveying our fundamental optimism, we hope to both draw other collaborators and potential users into our own project, and to suggest one small-scale approach to supporting anti-colonial practice in the digital humanities.

For more information about the symposium visit: https://msuglobaldh.org