Our story
From a shared frustration to a continental community.
The African DH Lab began when a handful of scholars kept hitting the same wall: digital-humanities tools that assumed English-language, well-resourced corpora — and peer reviewers who didn't understand why an oral-tradition text couldn't just be treated like a novel.
So we built the thing we needed. A platform where you can learn Voyant and Spyral, submit a chapter and get editorial feedback that respects your material, register for a mentored hackathon, and find collaborators across the continent.
Today the Lab spans institutions across Africa and beyond, anchored by an open-access edited volume with the University of Alberta.