UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Using Content Analysis to Explore AmaXhosa Language Identities in Social Media Texts
No full textIn the age of increasing digital participation, the role of social media in shaping and revealing identity has become an important area of scholarly inquiry. This article explores the viability of content analysis as a method for inferring identity markers of amaXhosa in multilingual online discourse, focusing on isiXhosa- and English-dominant YouTube comments. Draw ing on the theoretical framework of performativity, the study examines how amaXhosa construct and express cultural and linguistic identities through language use in digital spaces shaped by English dominance. A curated selection of 80 YouTube videos related to isiXhosa culture, interviews, and pranks was analysed. Comments were mined using the YouTube API, and the South African Language Identification Tool (SA-LID) was applied for language cate gorisation. By grounding its approach in local language use and identity, the study contributes to African sociolinguistics and the broader field of African Digital Humanities, demonstrating how social media data can inform context identity research in multilingual societies
Multilingual vibes: Visualising linguistic resources and emoji in Southern African online discourse
No full textThis article presents Vibes, a prototype interface for visualising multilingual online discourse in Southern Africa. We developed the prototype during a three-day hackathon with a multidisciplinary team. The interface combines computational tools, manual coding and visualisation methods to work with data that standard NLP tools cannot process due to their monolingual design. We tested Vibes on two YouTube datasets: English/isiXhosa comments from the @cmtvsa channel and comments on videos discussing a hair product advertisement controversy. Through this work, we encountered practical challenges, including language identification failures, code-switching within single posts, non-standard orthographies, and multimodal communication through emojis. The challenges led us to propose an interface for collaborative coding that accounts for translanguaging practices. The hackathon development process highlighted the need for context-sensitive tools to study linguistic diversity in the Global South
Multilingual Data from the Agricultural Domain: Presenting the NWU-Pula/Imvula Corpora
No full textThis paper presents new multilingual corpora from the agricultural domain for seven South African Languages, namely Afrikaans, English, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, and Setswana, based on the Pula/Imvula magazine. After pre-processing, the data has been automatically sentencized, tokenized, lemmatized and annotated with part-of-speech information using the services available at https://v-ctx-lnx7.nwu.ac.za/. The final resources comprising between 774k and 1,38M tokens per language are included on the Corpus Cooperative at North-West University (COCO@NWU) corpus platform at https://coco.nwu.ac.za/ as searchable corpora. In addition, the data can be made avail- able as text files for research purposes upon request. To highlight the value of this agricultural domain-specific data collection in relation to more general data, we also include some corpus-based statistics and comparisons with previous research
Stop words in Khoekhoe
No full textStop word lists are useful resources that allow for the filtering of words in texts that typically do not carry (much) content. Filtering stop words can improve the efficiency and accuracy of data processing. Stop words are typically short and occur very frequently in texts. Stop word lists are language dependent and many low-resource languages currently do not have (accurate) stop word lists. In this article, we look at how we can create, based on word frequency, a stop word list for Khoekhoe, which is a low-resource language spoken in Southern Africa. Given that stop words do not carry much content, they can be expected to occur consistently across different texts. We compare lists of most frequent words between texts in different genres and which words feature in these lists consistently. We look at the overlap of frequent words in English texts and compare these to a known English stop word list as well, and compare the results with the overlap of frequent words in Khoekhoe texts. The results show that there is a high overlap between genres for English, but the overlap between the Khoekhoe genres is lower. This may be due to a different typological profile of Khoekhoe. This means that creating a stop word list for Khoekhoe is more complicated and most likely requires other techniques to produce a useful stop word list
The layered horizon of the South African landscape
No full textAs South African graphic design strives to establish an indigenous character, designers would do well to draw inspiration from the work of artist John Clarke . A recent retrospective exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum confirmed Clarke\u27s status as a major South African artist, whose work moves beyond superficial African imagery, to portraying a synthesis of cultures unique to the South African milieu
Rattle and hum - student designs for a Mexican diner
No full textDairin van Niekerk of Derin Ashley Design was recently guest lecturer to the fourth year design students at the University of Pretoria. In this interview she and Mike McWilliams of Sans Serif review five of the more successful projects with Lesley Pretorius and the student designers
Crossing lines
No full textThe political threshold that both South Africa and Hungary crossed during 1990 paved the way for South African participation in the 15th International Design Seminar, the Zsennye Workshop, convened by the Hungarian Association of Artists and Designers at Zsennye, county Vos in Hungary. The symbolic significance of South African participation in a conference convened by an Eastern European country was obvious to all. The crossing of lines between North and South, East and West became the implicit message of the workshop
Considering socio-cultural histories in gold mining tourism: A view of Khutsong township, Gauteng
No full textSocio-cultural township tourism plays an important role in representing the legacy and heritage of regions, as it helps preserve and promote the unique identity of an area and encourages interaction between tourists and local cultures. The article recognises the significance of researching potential tourism opportunities arising from socio-cultural ventures in the mining township of Khutsong. The township was selected because of the research void regarding its socio-cultural histories. In this discussion, the authors find that heritage and mining legacies have the potential to create future tourism opportunities. Established on the outskirts of Carletonville in the Gauteng province, Khutsong and its people are closely linked with gold mining histories, with labour and socio-economic impacts having created diverse cultures in the township. Views raised by the local community of Khutsong complemented suggestions that engaged with tourism-specific scholarly literature, namely the quest to create and develop tourism opportunities in economically stressed regions dependent on the mining economy. Yet, the major research gap is how to meet this need. An in-depth capture of the socio-cultural histories is discussed in this article as a starting point for future tourism and further research in this field.
The agency, references and contexts in the oeuvre of the ceramist Henriette Ngako (1943-2021): Original Research
No full textA significant part of the South African ceramic art history is not the outcome of original scholarly research and writing but, for lack of primary sources, derived from published material in craft publications, the press, and books of public interest. The latter texts typically reflect personal observations rather than citing and contextualising explanatory statements by the ceramists. In this absence of the ceramists’ own voices, observations by others tend to assume the status of being definitive of the ceramist’s output. This article illustrates the hackneyed earlier observations on the life and oeuvre of the ceramist Henriette Ngako (1943-2021) who was of the Batswana cultural group. Ngako created compositions of stacked, fanciful human and animal forms. Calling on new research findings, some of the claimed influences at play in Ngako’s oeuvre are questioned whilst others are contextualised. The article asserts that Ngako exercised agency in breaking with the Batswana cultural tradition of pottery to create novel forms that were unlike any works in the oeuvres of her peers and for which she captured the attention of collectors and gallerists
Spectres of decay: Anarchival approaches to decoding the palimpsest: Original Research
No full textIn my practice-based research for the project, Decay without mourning: Future-thinking heritage practices, I employ decentering strategies to uncover aesthetic-conceptual potential within the marginalised material ruins of an archive. This involves scrutinising visual and sonic traces of decay to depict the “anarchival impetus” – that which threatens the archive may paradoxically liberate the captures of the past from the colonial confines of their conservation. In this article, I discuss my artistic exploration of decay across three personal collections of an enthusiast, an archivist, and a photographer. The Hidden Years Music Archive (HYMA) documents an alternative view of the South African music scene from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s, reflecting the countercultural impulse against apartheid. The Decay Anarchive consists of discarded elements of processing artefacts within HYMA while being incorporated into the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University. Finally, a collection of outdated photographic paper provided the basis for producing a range of lumen print experiments in collaboration with Jurie Senekal titled Spectres of decay I (2023). This series of chance compositions in a time-based medium captures the spectral qualities of archival detritus as fabricated palimpsests that illuminate the trajectory of decay