DHASA 2024
Back from the 4th biennial conference of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA) Conference in Gqeberha. Post is about the keynotes, panel discussions & a workshop on omegat.org
My first in person conference since 2020. Yes, it was so good to be back with people (not screens). Appropriately, the DHASA conference theme was “Digital Humanities for Inclusion" (https://dh2023.digitalhumanities.org.za/). The conference set out to foster growth and collaboration in the DH field.
Keynote Presentations
The conference offers researchers, who are interested in showcasing their work in the broad field of Digital Humanities, a forum to connect with their colleagues, fellow researchers and peers. I am new to this community and enjoyed keynote addresses by
Rory du Plessis - “A unit of data or a human subject? The inclusion of marginalised voices and humanising stories from digital archives”.
Alette Schoon - “Foregrounding the human in the time of AI: What do we mean by inclusive digital humanities?”
Karabo Maiyane - “The responsible use of AI in digital humanities practices.”
Open Seeds Panel discussion
I was a member of a panel (along with Henri-Count Evans, Alette Schoon and Mmasibidi Setaka) Were talked about our experience with Open Seeds (https://openlifesci.org//openseeds/ols-8/). Where I am being mentored.
This is a 16-week mentoring & training program, based on the Mozilla Open Leader program (https://mozilla.github.io/open-leadership-training-series/). It is intended for those who are interested in running your own open leadership program. The combination of mentorship and cohort meetings has kickstarted my Open Umbrella (https://weblearning.co.za/umbrella/) work. This is a project that I have wanted to expand on for years. Open Seeds has helped me to put things in action. By
sharing essential knowledge required to create, lead, and sustain an Open Education project.
connecting with different communities, backgrounds, and identities accross the globe, where many have freely shared their experiences and expertise.
empowering me to become a better Open Education ambassador in my community.
Today, at a Workshop at a UJ, where we are discussion first year orientation, I introduced the Open Umbrella to a group of collaborators.
Workshops - Autshumato ITE
DHASA is also about empowering participants in open technology. I really enjoyed Thursday’s workshop where we were introduced to OmegaT (https://omegat.org/), a free and open source multi platform Computer Assisted Translation tool with fuzzy matching, translation memory, keyword search, glossaries, and translation leveraging.
In the workshop we were introduced to computational methods to assist translation activities. By the end of the session, we were able to use the as a tool to do translations on their own laptops.
Last Words
Back home at my desk after an intense and stimulating week. Both exhausted and very pleased. Thanks to all from Escalator (https://escalator.sadilar.org/) who made this week possible. Looking forward to seeing the growth of DHASA across SA universities in 2024. Congratulations to NMU for getting the DH ball rolling.
Till next time. I’ll continue working on putting IT into place, and make clicks count.
Derek.
P.S. Thank you for your attention.
Pleasure Johannes. This was a fabulous conference. Would be very keen to hear more about what DH are doing. Are you going to the SWiP events in your part of the world?
Thank you, Derek! This was a wonderful read.