Lost in translation (Part 1)

The recent colloquium on Traducture & Translation: Creating intercultural dialogue in International Development held at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor, London, United Kingdom from 27 – 29 May 2011,  resembled an African gathering where elders share their wisdom and insights with curious young people around a fire place.  Here Charles Dhewa shares his impressions of the colloquium.

Before travelling to the colloquium, I consulted my electronic dictionary to figure out the meaning of the word ‘colloquium’ and it said: an academic meeting or seminar usually led by a different lecturer and on a different topic at each meeting.

Embracing a conversational tone, Professor Mbulelo Mzamane from South Africa set a fitting rhythm for the colloquium. According to Prof.  Mzamane, the invention of language mediated dialogues and contributed to knowledge construction in the world.   While there seems to be an obsession with codifying knowledge, oral forms are more concrete in Africa with orality representing diverse forms of dynamism and consciousness.  The introduction of writing in Africa was a setback to orality, enabling subversive knowledge to find its way into African classrooms and communities.

In Africa, we are ignoring epistemology to our detriment. Many African forests and areas around mountains like the Drakensburg in South Africa have over 2000 plant species that are beyond the description of Latin Nomenclature.  Universities do not even have this kind of knowledge.  Ironically, we have foreign scientists coming to Africa with the belief that they can teach African farmers inter-cropping and Conservation Agriculture, among other concepts.  All this is happening at the detriment of local knowledge which remains outside formal education systems. Traducture can assist in correcting this anomaly.

He added that the 19^th century was the golden age of African literature and this was linked to political maturation:

I am a classical product of the Bantu education system in South Africa which was designed to take away our power of self definition so that we would become perpetual hewers of water. After 1994, following a realization of what had been taken away from us, we officialized every South African language.  Because we had been all colonially compromised, we had to constitutionally elevate African languages.  It is interesting to note that different African languages are closer to each other than assumed.  A number of words are found in many different African languages, e.g, Umfazi, which means a woman in many African languages.

Language and development are very close to each other, according to Prof Mzamane. There is a definite correlation between language and democratization.  Empowerment outside a language dispensation is impossible. This is why the African language movement is an African Renaissance.  However, a missing ingredient is inter-African translation.  Few works are translated from one African language to another.

Professor Ghirmai Negash, the Director of African Studies Program at Ohio University, weighed in by saying we cannot talk of culture outside a language.  He added that the existence of various types of English such as British English, American English, Kenyan English, Ethiopian English, South African English, Indian English and so on, shows that English has become part of many people’s lives and cultures.  However, there is need to empower African languages through producing tangible products like poems, among other artefacts. We cannot leave everything to European languages which are associated with colonialism and Christianity. Prof Ghirmai lamented the tendency for African languages to cannibalize each other which results in the disappearance of knowledge around languages that are cannibalized.

A translator and literary critic, Dr. Tomi Adeaga said, based on her experiences, many African intellectuals are not literate in native languages and this means they are not able to translate into those languages.  A lot of knowledge can be generated though translating works by such titanic literary icons like Chinua Achebe whose work speaks to many languages.

IKM Emergent at the EADI General Conference

The 2011 General Conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) will be held jointly with the UK Development Studies Association (DSA) at York University, UK, from 19th to 22nd September under the title Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty: New values, voices and alliances for increased resilience.  Working with other networks and organisations, IKM Emergent is involved in a number of the knowledge-related elements in the conference programme.

Linked data experiment

Linked data – the machine readable web, as the inventor of the Web Tim Berners Lee explains here is the next layer of the web. He developed a five star rating to describe information which is fully compliant with the semantic web and allows it to become part of the growing web of linked data. In the recent discussion paper IKMemergent explained why this was relevant for the international development community.

As a result of participation in the IKMemergent Workshop in Oxford, UK, in November 2010, IFPRI has taken the Global Hunger Index (GHI) as an example and published it as a linked data RDF files and documented the experience. We worked with Practical participation to develop the initial files and seek guidance on the options and approaches for publishing linked data. This is the first stage of the project to make the data available and then monitor its use and look at ways to promote and integrate it with more datasets.

Groups have already used the original data of the GHI to produce new mappings of the data, see the examples from Tableau and Chartsbin. By publishing the linked data we hope others will integrate the information with other visualizations and disseminate the results of the report.

Linked data has already been used by the international community to bring together different datasets, for example comparing Aid from the UK and USA.

The process of initially setting up a process to publish linked data sets is involved, but obviously with a recurring dataset such as the Global hunger Index it is easy to update.

Although the datasets prove challenging to convert, information on many of the organisations outputs is already available in Linked data form. The hundred or so wikipedia pages featuring links and descriptions of IFPRI output are already part of the web of linked data through Dbpedia. A sample of metadata describing IFPRI presentations, collections and twitter accounts can be seen through Sindice.

Get the data

At present the GHI 2010 data is made available in two different forms and is available in raw RDF/XML and N3 files. http://data.ifpri.org/rdf/ghi/

Chris

|Chris Addison|Head of Web Communication IFPRI

Development knowledge ecology: another visit to the KM kitchen?

We’ve been talking recently with colleagues about the development knowledge ecology – with an implicit understanding that we all know what it means – but we’ve never really tried to define it so I’m going to have a go here.  Or in any event to outline some key influences, key ingredients. In fact, given that we are in the process of developing it as one of IKM’s core arguments, it’s probably time to get cooking….

Define: traducture

While writing an earlier post on this blog, I realised that we didn’t have a short piece on traducture which is one of the cornerstones of the IKM programme, and that when I googled the term, there was not a  clear definition available. For this reason, I am adapting part of a 2009 Newsletter and adding some additional resources.

KMIC 2: Entering the challenge

After the webinar I was inspired to enter the KMIC challenge by adding the story of the IKM Emergent evaluation by Chris Mowles and Anita Gurumurthy to the growing collection of stories. It was the last day for entries – so it was a bit of a rush – but you can read the story Taking a complexity perspective to evaluation here.

KMIC 1: Webinar on monitoring and evaluation of KM

Last week, I attended my first webinar – a seminar on the web – which was organised by the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge (KMIC) and the Society for International Development (SID) in Washington DC. Louise Daniels, working for the Challenge, posted some information here about the KMIC a few weeks ago.

I’ve never been to a webinar before – or any virtual conference which may seem a bit surprising – so it was a new experience for me. Actually, I was rather sceptical about the form although I had high hopes of the content. But, in reality and for lots of reasons, it was a wonderful experience.

ICTD2010 Part 2: IKM installations

In 2008, some of you may remember that IKM had – among other things – a display at the EADI General Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. This featured a huge flag hanging in the atrium (see photograph) but also the first IKM installation which was designed by Ralph Borland, a South African artist. This installation had a number of different components:  four information boards, featuring different perspectives on information and knowledge management related to development; one laptop per child; and an artwork called Crank the web which illustrates the importance of bandwidth for connecting to the web.

You can see Ralph Borland describing the Geneva installation on this Youtube video:

The next tri-annual EADI conference will be taking place in York in September 2011 and plans are afoot for the design of a new installation to be used at EADI and at other conference. This new installation was on display for the first time at the ICTD2010 conference which took place in December in London.

The new installation is slightly different to the original one in that it comprises computer screens playing IKM-related digital stories (see photograph).  Here is a slide show featuring photographs of the new installation at ICTD2010.

And why is IKM Emergent concerned to have installations at large conferences? If you consider that IKM is a campaign for slow knowledge and a space for innovation and reflection, both installations are designed to encourage new ways of thinking about information and knowledge. The installations are important in terms of both content and form. As content, they highlight diverse issues and, as form, – visualisation – they aim to facilitate innovation and new perspectives. They also represent – again as form – a new way of doing things at academic conferences.

ICTD2010 Part 1: Digital stories on IKM

As part of the new IKM installation at the ICTD2010 conference, Michael David has produced three digital stories, based on IKM publications. For me, this was the first time that I had come across digital stories – films with sound and images – that try to explain fairly serious papers in three minutes. Although I have to admit that I’m familiar with the material, the stories really worked for me. Why don’t you listen an see if they work for you?

The first one represents an interview with Hannah Beardon and is based on her IKM Working Paper No 7 Where are the ripples?, written with Kate Newman in 2009:

The next is based on an interview with Julian Jenkins, and is concerned with  the very recent IKM Working Paper No. 10 Things can be better than they:

And, the third and final digital story, is concerned with a paper by Iina Hellsten and myself on Using semantics to reveal knowledge divides in Dutch development cooperation

Share your story! Participate in the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge to help identify the measures that matter for Knowledge Management

Measuring the impact of knowledge management is a hot topic in international development circles and many of us are trying to find ways to effectively measure and demonstrate the results of our investments in knowledge and learning to understand how these investments help us achieve our development objectives faster, more effectively, more efficiently, and/or with greater impact. We all know that there are no simple answers or one-size-fits-all approaches but there is increasing consensus that we need to work together to address these challenges by asking ourselves difficult questions and exploring the context of emerging solutions.