I. Statement of Sustainability
The sustainability of projects is challenging in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Nigeria. Our project endeavors not to be “extractive” (learning from mistakes of the past) while ensuring long-term preservation and widespread accessibility of the born-digital resources we will produce. A balanced weighting of cultural sensitivity and scholarly rigor respects and protects the interests of all stakeholders, including participants, project personnel, the granting agency, and the Nigerian and American public.
Over the three-year period, a minimum of 10 early career researchers and educators will participate in all phases of the project. We will recruit 50 community representatives to commence training. Their training will include audiovisual recording and editing, digital metadata collection in the field, data management and interoperability, digital archiving, and online and offline dissemination, annotation and analysis for text, audio, and visual data, and preparing, submitting, and revising research articles. Each will choose a field site, at least 10 ethnolinguistic groups with distinct ISO culture codes will be represented.
The process they will learn encompasses documenting ICH, annotating materials, and sharing (disseminating) products. Project values will include local accessibility for the host community through shareable files (that may be distributed without internet access) and broad accessibility for international stakeholders and the public through the internet. This will in turn create sustainability of ICH at its source community and awareness globally.
Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia is the only all-male historically Black college in the United States. The College has a long history of interest in Nigeria and supporting faculty and staff from Nigeria. The Africana Digital Ethnography Project (ADEPt) is initiative started by Aaron Carter-Enyi who was a Fulbright Student to Nigeria in 2012. ADEPt received its first grant as a program of Morehouse College in 2017 from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Kay Williamson Educational Foundation (KWEF) is a charity organization founded in 2005 to promote and encourage the documentation of the culture and languages of Nigeria and neighboring countries. KWEF has had a presence in Nigeria since its founding in 2005 The organization is currently based in Jos and affiliated with the University of Jos, a federal institution in Plateau State, Nigeria. KWEF’s team has produced a substantial list of publications, including videos, available on both its webpage and the Chief Research Officer’s publications page.
CONAECDA is a multi-state organization operating in the Nigerian Middle Belt since 2014. The plan is to organize CONAECDA’s records in the first phase of the project and recontact all groups prior to field visits. Groups which are already documented, such as those cooperating with KWEF, will be added to the database, but not scheduled for documentation, to avoid duplication.
In 2021, ADEPt began collaborating with the Kay Williamson Educational Foundation (KWEF). The organizations share similar missions of cultural documentation and work in complementary geographic areas: ADEPt in southern Nigeria and KWEF in the Middle Belt. ADEPt and KWEF personnel have cooperated through knowledge exchange and joint research projects, pooling in-kind resources and field research documentation and annotation methods. This developing research collaboration is the basis for this proposal for a pilot educational training and outreach program.
ADEPt (through Morehouse College) and the Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library (AUCTR) have both received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for creating humanities collections and reference resources. KWEF has not received US federal grants but has received grants in the UK. Morehouse and AUCTR are both in good standing for federal funding in terms of financial records and the completion of deliverables. AUCTR will be responsible for preservation and accessibility the grant products after the term of the grant. This in-kind contribution to the project will ensure the sustainability of grant products and long-term impact of the project.
