20. TOWARDS THE PEDAGOGY OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES IN NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES: THE ROLE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (DHAN)
Richard Ajah, Ph.D – Department of Foreign Languages
University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State.
Email: richardajah@uniuyo.edu.ng
Abstract
Many American, European and Asian universities have embraced the Digital Humanities, popularly referred to as DH, as evolving trends in Arts and Humanities in the 21st century world. It has enabled the hybridism of qualitative and quantitative methodologies for humanities researches where computer-based tools are deployed for the analysis of humanistic data. However, the DH scholarship, which is an interface among science, technology and the humanities studies, has little scholarly awareness in sub-Saharan African universities, and Nigerian universities in particular. This paper, which adopts historical approach and critical distant reading as research methodologies, provides an overview of the digital humanities scholarship, its applicability in all fields of humanities, its adaptability to curation, archiving, analysis, visualisation, and its various computer-mediated tools. I went further to buttress some impediments to DH scholarship in Nigeria and to propose how Digital Humanities Association of Nigeria (DHAN), which has been recently launched with its temporary headquarters at the University of Lagos, could be used to provide public and scholarly enlightenment on digital humanities discourses, promote the pedagogy of Digital Humanities in Nigerian universities and offer some technical support for Digital Humanities Summer School. I have used Computer-Assisted Literary Analysis (CALA) to demonstrate how computer software could be used in the postcolonial analysis of African literary texts. By my critical literary analysis, Kourouma’s anthroponyms and toponyms are revealed to be postcolonially charged; the frequency of historical names demonstrated the level of culpability of all political figures implicated in the Ivorian crisis by the author in his war narrative.
Keywords: Digital Humanities, DHAN, CALA, AntConc, AhmadouKourouma