HSSH researchers Jouni Tuominen and Matti Pohjonen recently visited South Africa as part of the ongoing research collaboration between the University of Helsinki’s Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) and the University of Witwatersrand (Wits). The collaboration focuses on combining African scholarship with methodological innovation. The trip was funded by GAINS seed funding (Generative AI and Africa: New Methodological Directions for Social Sciences and Humanities Research) awarded to HSSH university researcher Matti Pohjonen through the University of Helsinki Africa Programme.
A key feature of the collaboration is the integration of HSSH’s digital humanities expertise with Wits’ strengths in decolonial, and African-centered scholarship and computer science. Professor Gagliarodne from Wits was recently appointed the inaugural SARChI SA–UK Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities, a five-year collaboration between Wits University and the University of Edinburgh that aims to place African scholarship at the centre of global debates on digital futures. Over the next five years, the Chair will develop new computational and AI-related methods, pedagogical training and public resources to support more inclusive and just uses of digital technologies in the African context.
As part of this collaboration, Wits and HSSH hosted an intensive three-day workshop that brought together researchers, technical specialists, and students to reflect on how African scholarly knowledge is produced, archived, accessed, and analysed, and how computational and AI-based methods might reshape our understanding of these processes. To explore these changes, the project analysed citation patterns across all electronic Master’s and PhD theses from the University of Wits to examine how global patterns on knowledge production has shifted over the years and whether debates on decolonising knowledge have led to practical changes in how academics in African institutions are cited.
The workshop combined conceptual discussion, technical experimentation, and hands-on group work. Participants shared preliminary findings, tested tools and methodologies for analysing large-scale EDT textual data, and explored both the infrastructural and epistemic challenges of making African research more visible and reusable. These included questions of metadata quality, digitisation gaps, linguistic diversity, uneven platform infrastructures, and the global politics of knowledge circulation.