ESCALATOR

Building isiXhosa intellectual traditions digital archive: challenges & solutions

Join us for the SADilaR DH Colloquium, featuring Amandla Ngwendu and Jacques De Wet, two renowned experts in their fields. This exciting online event will take place on Wed Aug 16 2023 at 10:00 AM South Africa Standard Time. During this colloquium, …

Can Grammarly and ChatGPT accelerate language change?

The proliferation of NLP-powered language technologies, AI-based natural language generation models, and English as a mainstream means of communication among native and non-native speakers make the output of AI-powered tools especially intriguing to …

Postgraduate student involvement as co-developers of sustainable OER

As educators of a structured master's in Education program specialising in ODL, we collaborated with our students to create an OER using our lecture notes and student assignments. Although we previously used OERs and open texts, they were not …

Publishing data papers in the humanities: my experience from the Journal of Open Humanities Data

With the increasing adoption of Open Knowledge principles in research and the growing availability of born-digital and digital collections, as well as data-intensive methods, new questions arise on the best practices for open research in the …

Making Strange: Co-Creating Afrikaans Poetry with a Boutique Language Model

This study proposes a generative language model called AfriKI – an abbreviation for Afrikaanse Kunsmatige Intelligensie, or Afrikaans Artificial Intelligence. The approach is based on an LSTM architecture trained on a small corpus of contemporary …

An NLP method in the corpus analysis of Central Kurdish definiteness marker

In this study, Regular Expression (Regex) is used to improve searching techniques in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Regex is a string of text in which a user is allowed to create patterns which can be useful for text matching, locating, and …

ESCALATOR progress report - July 2021

June was a very exciting month for ESCALATOR! Read this post to learn how you can benefit from, or contribute to the programme and become part of our growing community...

ESCALATOR progress report - June 2021

Wow! It’s been six months since ESCALATOR officially started and it’s time to reflect on what’s been done and where we’re going next.

Where can South Africans learn digital and computational skills for Humanities and Social Sciences?

One of the outputs that ESCALATOR aims to create, is an exhaustive list of stakeholders in South Africa offering training in the field of Digital Humanities or Computational Social Sciences. We invite you to tell us about your initiative!

Launching ESCALATOR

The ESCALATOR programme aims to grow the digital humanities and computational social sciences community in South Africa. It is run by the [South African Centre for Digital Language Resources](https://www.sadilar.org/index.php/en/) (SADiLaR).