A few of the projects we've enjoyed most, in no particular order. We don't always keep this list up to date; for a complete list of our recent papers, talks and demos, see the Research page.

• Book African Poetry, Black Transnationalism, and the Making of Literary Worlds Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu. Forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. About the book

  For many readers, African literature means the novel, yet poetry was a major genre through which African writers imagined new literary worlds. This book shows that what we now know as African poetry did not emerge from isolated national traditions but was made through transnational networks of media, institutions and social bonds. Developing a method called network poetics, it follows poetry from the mid-twentieth century to the present: through little magazines such as Black Orpheus, Okike and Lotus, radio broadcasts, galleries and artistic groups like Mbari and Paa ya Paa, writers' conferences, literary friendships and the contemporary prize economy. Reading poets from Kofi Awoonor, Efua Sutherland and Wole Soyinka to Kamau Brathwaite, Jayne Cortez, Romeo Oriogun and Safia Elhillo, it moves African poetry from the margins of world literature to a central site where global modernity was theorized, contested and given form by Africans. The book calls for a relational literary history, one that studies not isolated texts but the networks that bring them into being and carry them across space and time.

• Article The Role of Poetry: Genre, Data Visualization, and a Reframing of African Literature through Transition Magazine, 1960s–70s Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu. Research in African Literatures 55, no. 4 (2025): 1–20. Indiana University Press. doi:10.2979/ral.00080

  This article explores the role of poetry within African literary studies through a detailed examination of Transition magazine using digital humanities tools. By analyzing a dataset derived from the first fifty issues of Transition, this research challenges the predominant scholarly focus on prose, revealing poetry as a central and influential genre in the magazine's literary history. Utilizing bar graphs, geospatial maps, radial tree models, and network visualizations, the study highlights poetry's consistent presence and impact. It also addresses the challenges posed by the digital humanities, such as incomplete data, and missing or ambiguous information, and underscores the importance of comprehensive datasets in digital literary analysis, especially emphasizing the ethical imperative of building datasets for the study of African literature. This work reaffirms the significance of poetry in African literature, demonstrating its vital role in shaping literary culture and offering a nuanced perspective on the historical and thematic contributions of Transition to African literary discourse. I also make a case for the use of the digital humanities for the study of African literature.

• Talk African Poetry and AI Henry Miller, Mina Repice, and Jeanne Rosine Abomo Edou (PhD candidate). Humanities Digital Workshop, Washington University in St. Louis.

  This talk reports on work in progress from the lab's project Can AI Write an African Poem? African Literary Style and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence, which asks whether large language models can replicate the stylistic features of Anglophone African poetry, and whether computational stylometry can tell authentic poems from AI-generated ones. Over the summer, the team built a corpus of nearly 2,900 poems by poets drawn from major anthologies of modern African poetry, alongside an exploratory corpus of AI-generated poems. Early, still-untested findings from topic modeling and from measures of linguistic hybridity, punctuation, enjambment and pronoun use suggest that AI poems drift toward familiar themes such as earth and nature, and struggle to reproduce experimental form, whitespace and the mixing of English with African languages. The work also exposes gaps in the archive itself, including the underrepresentation of Central African poets, women poets and poetry translated from Portuguese and Spanish. The research is ongoing, with further stylometric comparison and machine-learning classification still to come.

• Workshop Exploring Data Visualization and Digital Mapping Digital Humanities Workshop organized by the University of Kansas with the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria.

  Organized by the University of Kansas with the Federal University of Technology, Akure, in Nigeria, this workshop introduced scholars and students to data visualization and digital mapping as methods for humanities research. The lab was glad to take part, bringing approaches from its own work in digital mapping and data visualization. Events like this reflect the lab's commitment to sharing digital methods across institutions.