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South African National Centre for Digital Language Resources

This presentation introduces the imminent establishment of a new language resource infrastructure focusing on languages spoken in Southern Africa, with an eventual aim to become a hub for digital language resources within Sub-Saharan Africa. The Constitution of South Africa makes provision for 11 official languages all with equal status. The current language Resource Management Agency will be merged with the new Centre, which will have a wider focus than that of data acquisition, management and distribution. The Centre will entertain two main programs: Digitisation and Digital Humanities. The digitisation program will focus on the systematic digitisation of relevant text, speech and multi-modal data across the official languages. Relevancy will be determined by a Scientific Advisory Board. This will take place on a continuous basis through specified projects allocated to national members of the Centre, as well as through open-calls aimed at the academic as well as local communities. The digital resources will be managed and distributed through a dedicated web-based portal. The development of the Digital Humanities program will entail extensive academic support for projects implementing digital language based data. The Centre will function as an enabling research infrastructure primarily supported by national government and hosted by the North-West University.