Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In the French-speaking African region, many research teams in social sciences and humanities (SHS) have reassessed their studies, due to the conversion to digital. Since the first decade of the 1990s, academic and research institutions in African countries addressed the issue of researchers’ archives, those of written heritage, sound archives, data banks and databases photographs, with more seriousness. The enhancement of content dematerialized, pedagogical and didactic transformations, new learning and knowledge regimes, as well as legal issues induced by new digital practices have been successively considered. These experiences can serve as a basis for study on the dynamics of research and innovation already underway in the field of digital humanities in French-speaking Africa. However, this area seems to be crossed by inequalities in the practice of discoverability scientific content. This paper examines and compares two cases that seem to lead Africa’s way in the vast field of digital humanities: LASDEL in Niger and Benin and CODESRIA in Senegal. These two think tanks are today the two flagships in the French-speaking scientific space, of digital discoverability, as researchers and findings are quite demonstrative of the collaborations, mobility facilitated by the digitisation of African social sciences. This transition is also due to the arrival scholars originating from Anglo-Saxon cultural spaces. The result is one real intellectual commerce that significantly transforms practice and the habits of the social sciences and humanities in French-speaking Africa in the era of digital technology.