Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Humanities Training in South Africa

Abstract

With Digital Humanities (DH) in South Africa (SA) still a relatively “new” and unexplored research area, a more comprehensive approach to creating awareness and training is required. In the past, the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) were typically excluded from discussions around data science-related research infrastructure and Human Capacity Development (HCD) and while initial DH-related activities started around the turn of the millennium in SA, mostly in isolated pockets, the general uptake has been rather slow. This can partially be attributed to the absence of a community of practice (CoP) to support especially researchers from the Humanities and Social Sciences interested in adopting computational methodologies and accessing contextually useful training material. This chapter briefly reflects on DH-related training events run in the region, their impact, and the development of a subsequent program informed by what was learned. In particular, we describe two different, but related initiatives: The Carpentries and ESCALATOR. The Carpentries is an international non-profit organization that teaches computational skills training events that require little prior computational experience. ESCALATOR is a program supported by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) and collaboratively developed with Talarify, which aims to develop CoP’s for the area of Digital Humanities in the country. This program stems from the identified limitations of running ad hoc training events, which were taught at multiple different universities to provide broad coverage throughout the country. This chapter describes a range of challenges and potential solutions related to the training of researchers in South Africa, such as limited resources (related to Internet access, computational power, and electricity supply), communication challenges (consistent and timely reaching of researchers interested in training programs), etc. The lessons learned gave the ESCALATOR program a solid start to address certain challenges from the start.