A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON DIGITAL HUMANITIES IN NIGERIA: PERCEPTIONS AND CURRENT ENGAGEMENTS

As Digital Humanities continue to attract global discussion and re-definition in terms of technological praxis and as a distinctive field of studies in the humanities, it becomes pressing to review Africa's participation and more specifically how digital humanities are being engaged in Nigeria. This study attempts to contribute to a preliminary understanding of digital humanities in Nigeria, current engagements, problems inhibiting the development of digital humanities, and prospects using qualitative methods. This study finds that there is under-engagement of DH in Africa and the current interaction with the potentials of digital technologies in the Humanities gives primacy to text through the expansion of the database of text information and computational linguistics. I conclude by proposing more local and international collaborations and expansion of the scope of engagement of digital humanities in Nigeria beyond building digital bodies of text to embrace visualizations, geospatial technologies, simulated spaces, and network analyses of complex systems