Monthly Archives: May 2012
African Activist Archive Project
An online archive of the U.S. solidarity movement with Africa from the 1950s to 1990s at: http://africanactivist.msu.edu/. More than 5,000 objects from 35 states and the District of Columbia, including photos, posters, documents, buttons, T-shirts… From an announcement today on H-net: “We also continue to contact former activists in the Africa solidarity movement who would […]
Unglue.it is seeking to raise $7,500 for a Creative Commons Attribution-only licensed edition of Oral Literature in Africa
Raising money to free classic volume on Africa’s oral literature From bOING bOING By Cory Doctorow at 5:57 am Friday, May 18 “A campaign on Unglue.it is seeking to raise $7,500 to pay for a Creative Commons Attribution-only licensed edition of Oral Literature in Africa, an out-of-print classic on the subject that is widely sought […]
I can no longer work for a system that puts profit over access to research
Posted by Winston Hide, Wednesday 16 May 2012 07.34 EDT guardian.co.uk I can no longer work for a system that puts profit over access to research “Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field – Genomics. No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits […]
Africa Past and Present, Episode 63: Noise & Silence, War & Peace in the Politics of DR Congo
In episode 63 of Africa Past and Present — the podcast about African history, culture, and politics: Noise & Silence, War & Peace in the Politics of DR Congo “Prof. Tom Turner (DR Congo country specialist, Amnesty International USA) on the politics of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, focusing on The Congo Wars and […]
Cultural Diversity in a Global Society
In response to an earlier editorial titled The Global Knowledge Society is this nicely written piece by Likwan Cheng in the Letters section of Science (13 April 2012) Vol. 336 no. 6078 pp. 155-157. DOI: 10.1126/science.336.6078.155-c The world needs not one homogenized global knowledge society, as the Editorial suggests, but a global mosaic of multiple, […]
Awesome Tapes from Africa
Awesome Tapes from Africa From David Pescovitz via bOING bOING “Brian Shimkovitz was on a Fulbright scholarship in Ghana when he got hooked on the cassette culture of the region. Street vendors hawked West African recordings in myriad genres, from highlife to African disco, old left-field soul to curious local pop. Shimkovitz started a blog, […]
Gambia Studies Series by Professor David Gamble
The Gambia Studies Series is a rich, detailed set of valuable resources in full text online from one of the world’s foremost experts on The Gambia, its history, culture and linguistic diversity. Includes A General Bibliography of the Gambia, Supplement III 1983-1987 among many other useful resources (interviews, narratives, stories, tales, legends, guides to place names, […]
Building a Digital Map of Scholarly Archival Materials
In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education is an article “Projects Aims to Build Online Hub for Archival Materials” by Jennifer Howard on the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC), which intends to help researchers “search for the names of individuals, corporate entities, or families to find ‘archival context records’ for them.” “To work […]
Fiction vs. Reality: the portrayal of Chinese people in African pop culture
This is Africa. City Life – Wednesday, May 9. “Fiction vs. Reality: the portrayal of Chinese people in African pop culture” by Cosmic Yoruba. “China is currently Africa’s biggest trading partner, Sino-African Bilateral trade reached $160 billion in 2011 and apparently Chinese investment in Africa currently totals $13 billion. One of the consequences of this […]
Character Encoding in MARC records
Character Encoding in MARC records (MARC-8 and Unicode) “While MARC records are encoded in MARC21 (if not XML) there is generally a choice on character encoding between MARC8 and Unicode. So, what is MARC8?” “The newest version of the SobekCM MARC Library includes the most common combinational characters and a mapping between MARC8 to Unicode/UTF8, […]
African Studies library 