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Exploring African Digital Humanities Using the Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa
No full textDigital Humanities scholarship is often framed through paradigms developed in the Global North, leaving African-specific practices and epistemologies underexplored. In this article, I use topic modelling and lexical analysis to investigate what constitutes African DH by analysing 41 Southern African DH articles. The findings indicate that the majority of publications in JDHASA engage deeply with language-related topics. The field combines advanced computational methods with a strong grounding in local languages, cultural heritage, and socio-historical realities. It also reflects responsiveness to evolving digital social realities, addressing themes such as online harm, misinformation, and affective communities. This article contributes to the theorisation of African DH by identifying thematic tendencies and methodological patterns specific to the Southern African context. It highlights the dual focus on computational innovation and cultural rootedness, offering an empirically grounded foundation for further critical engagement with what African DH is and what it can become
Creative AI: Prompting Portraits and Matching Datasets
No full textThis paper aims to provide a brief exploration of two versions of Creative AI, namely the prompting of portraits by using AI text-to-image generators and the use of GAN, AICAN and Facer to create AI generated portraits. These two versions are in turn compared to corresponding debates in the field of art history, namely the image-text debate as positioned by the image scholar, WJT Mitchell, followed by the concept of schemata as proposed by the art historian EH Gombrich. First, Mitchell’s understanding of the nature of the image versus text is utilized to compare portraits prompted through text-to-image generators. Secondly, Gombrich’s schemata is compared with recent AI portraits generated by means of image datasets. The differences between the art historical and the Creative AI processes are explored to draw initial conclusions about the future of portraiture and creativity
Siswati Part of Speech Tagger: A Quantitative Evaluation
No full textThis article evaluates the performance of the Siswati Text Annotation Tool part of speech (STAT POS) tagger using Recall, Precision and F1 score metrics. A quantitative research design was adopted for analysis, and data was collected through purposive sampling. Python 3 was utilised to calculate the Recall and Precision of the STAT POS tagger outputs. The results show that the Recall for nouns was 0.761, Precision 0.417, with an F1 score of 0.54; for verbs, the Recall was 0.756, Precision 0.798 and F1 score 0.54; for adverbs, the Recall was 0.571, Precision 0.8, and F1 score 0.67; for possessives, the Recall was 0.963, Precision 0.813 and F1 score 0.88. For relatives (REL), the Recall was 0.706, Precision 0.523, and the F1 score 0.60; for class-indicating demonstratives, the Recall was 0.333, Precision 0.25, and the F1 score 0.29; and for copulatives (COP), the Recall was 0.75, Precision 0.75, and the F1 score 0.75. For conjunctions, the Recall was 0.85, the Precision was 0.68, and the F1 score was 0.76; for pronouns, the Recall was 0.563, the Precision was 1.0, and the F1 score was 0.72; for adjectives, the Recall was 0.75, the Precision was 0.75, and the F1 score was 0.75. However, question words, interjections and ideophones received 0.0., highlighting the need for refinement of the STAT POS tagger.
Navigating national interests: Exploring the dynamics of Pakistan-South Africa bilateral relations
Full text linkSouth Africa occupies a strategic geographic position at the southern tip of the African continent, serving as a potential trade and investment gateway for countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. It is a key partner for Pakistan’s Look Africa Policy. Pakistan and South Africa, bound by shared values and a focus on common interests since establishing diplomatic ties in 1994, have cultivated a long-standing partnership. However, a significant gap remains in the academic exploration of this relationship. This study delves into the politico-diplomatic, economic, and defence aspects of Pakistan-South Africa relations, employing the concept of national interest as outlined by Morgenthau and Neuchterlein. Employing a qualitative analysis, this study argues that high-level visits, the establishment of institutional mechanisms, and the formalisation of cooperation through Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) have significantly shaped the direction, facilitation, and governance of Pakistan-South Africa relations. This research highlights three key findings: despite frequent leadership-level exchanges and interactions between parliamentarians and policymakers, the relationship lacks the necessary vigour; while trade between Pakistan and South Africa has grown steadily, Pakistan experiences a trade deficit with its partner; and defence collaboration remains a significant aspect of their relationship. This article posits that the existingPakistan-South Africa bilateral relationship holds the potential to blossom into a more formalised and enduring strategic partnership, contingent upon the implementation ofwell-defined and practical initiatives
The Big Druid’s photographs of trees: Art and knowledge
No full textThis article argues that the world-renowned multi-media artist, Willem Boshoff’s, digital image gallery of photographs of trees, flowers and plants on the digital domain of the internet and in his digital archive, forms part of a history of efforts by modern artists to dismantle and stage the reductive divisions between the arts and the natural sciences. By emphasising their agency to richly interweave layers of cultural meaning and ideological questioning, while producing cascades of other images, the objective is to situate the botanical photographs in Boshoff’s digital “image gallery” in an expanded history of imaging, and to explore the layered perspectives that this positioning may entail and divulge. The interpretation includes comparative visual material from atlases and other image galleries, landscape art and land art, photographic and cinematic images, diagrams and scientific “illustrations”, Druid Walks and performances, and so forth. The interpretation ventures to fathom the aesthetic, artistic and cultural significance of this body of photographs, as well as their power to ignite debates on the relationship between art, science, knowledge, wisdom, politics and culture
Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Kathryn Janeway: The subversive politics of action heroines in 1980s and 1990s film and television
No full textIn the late 1970s and early 1980s, female characters that are different from the sexualised and passive women of the 1960s started appearing in science fiction film and television. Three prominent women on screen that reflect the increasing awareness of women’s sexualisation and lack of representation as main protagonists in film, and that appeared at the height of feminism’s second wave, are Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise (1979-1997), Sarah Connor from the Terminator film series (1984-1991;2019) and Kathryn Janeway from the Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) television series. These female characters were, in contrast to their predecessors, the main protagonists and heroes at the centre of their respective narratives, they were desexualised, and they were not subservient to their male contemporaries. Most importantly, and as I show in this paper, they are complex, hybrid characters that do not perpetuate the masculine/feminine dichotomy as their predecessors did. I further argue that it is thesecharacters’ hybridity that makes them heroines instead of simply being male heroes in female bodies, which they are often accused of. I term the heroine archetype presented by these characters the “original action heroine”, and I argue that these women are likely candidates to be regarded as the first heroine archetype on screen
The colonial legacy of disability: Analysing historical perspectives and disability legislation in Zambia - 1890s - 1960s
Full text linkThis paper offers a historical overview of the perception and treatment of persons with disabilities in Zambia, focusing on the pre-independence era. It begins with an examination of cultural understandings of disability prior to British colonisation and then explores how colonial rule influenced these perspectives. A significant finding is the enduring impact of colonial mental health legislation on mental healthcare and support for individuals with cognitive disabilities. By tracing disability narratives through this pivotal period, the paper provides insights into how socio-cultural attitudes have shaped the real-world experiences of persons with disabilities over time
Rethinking gender and conduits of control: A feminist review
No full textThe South African Constitution has been hailed as one of the most progressive in the world and has received high acclaim internationally (Mkhwanazi 2016:6). However, the war on women, their bodies and their right to self-determination persists, irrespective of the Constitution. Literature reveals experiences of brutal rapes and killings of black lesbian women, as well as mistreatment and hate speech in the name of morality against sex workers, women seeking abortions and HIV-positive women (Strode et al. 2012:64). Based on a desktop review of images and audio-visuals of women’s narratives in South Africa, this paper finds that many of the country’s contemporary social institutions, such as the state, family, church and culture, amongst others, normalise forms of gendered violence, such as the policing, control and exploitation of women’s lives and bodies through cultural practices like ukuthwala and ukuhlolwa kwobuntombi. Research findings also include narratives of women, who – in spite of prevailing social and institutionalised violence – have leveraged personal agency to declare autonomy and make personal choices regarding their bodies and lives
Editorial: Pretoria in/im print: Textual and print cultures and text-as-image in the Capital City
Full text linkThe articles featured in this themed section of Image & Text resulted from a oneday workshop with this title, held at the University of Pretoria on 8 May 2014. The event was a collaboration between two initiatives: The then recently launched Andrew W Mellon Foundation-funded Capital Cities Institutional Research Theme of the University of Pretoria, and a markedly loosely-constituted (yet remarkably prolific) decade-old conception which those who freely associate with it, like to call the South African Book History Group