Fifty‑three Digital Humanities scholars from seven countries and twenty‑six cities wrapped up the first stage of the “Train the Trainers” Hackathon on Friday, 5th July 2025, marking a successful inaugural run of a weeklong deep dive into text analysis with Voyant and Spyral tools.
Organized by the Voyant Consortium at the University of Alberta in collaboration with the African DH Virtual Lab, the event drew participants from over thirty‑five institutions across various countries in Africa and showcased the growing enthusiasm for computational approaches to literary and archival research across the continent.
From Basics to Visualizations
Over five days (June 30–July 5), attendees moved through a carefully structured curriculum:
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- Day 1 – Introduction to Text Analysis: Participants learned foundational concepts such as tokenization, concordance, and term frequency.
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- Days 2 & 3 – Exploring Text‑Mining Tools: Scholars experimented with topic modeling, scatter‑plot and principal‑component views, and correspondence analysis to identify thematic patterns in their texts.
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- Day 4 – Salient Words: The focus shifted to word‑level statistics—frequency counts, TF‑IDF scoring, stop‑word filtering, and custom white‑lists—to surface meaningful terms and phrases.
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- Day 5 – Visualization: Attendees explored Voyant’s Trends tool and other chart types, discussing best practices for interpreting and presenting their findings.
A Pan‑African Cohort
Though the majority of registrants described themselves as “beginners” with Voyant, and many had no prior experience with Spyral notebooks, the range of academic backgrounds—linguistics (15 participants), philosophy, computer science, history, library science and beyond—fostered lively cross‑disciplinary collaboration. Lecturers, PhD candidates and students collectively made up the cohort, reflecting both seasoned researchers and emerging scholars eager to integrate digital methods into their work.
With great enthusiasm, the 53 participants are carrying out some self-paced course modules and project made available to them through the E-Learning portal while preparing the African text based corpus ahead of the August session. They have all joined the Voyant Consortium Forum and mailing‑list, while some of them expressed interest in the translating Voyant Tools Skin to African Languages.
Looking Ahead: Spyral Workshop in August
Building on this momentum, Professor Geoffrey Rockwell—Canada CIFAR AI Chair and co‑developer of Voyant Tools, and Augustine Farinola, will lead an intensive Spyral Training Workshop from August 11–15, 2025. This next phase will guide scholars through data ingestion, preprocessing in Jupyter‑style notebooks, custom Python analyses and fully reproducible research pipelines.
Organizers emphasize that no prior programming background is required, making the workshop accessible to all skill levels. Registration details and pre‑workshop materials will be posted at voyant-tools.info and the African Digital Humanities Lab website (www.africandigitalhumanities.ca).
As digital methods continue to reshape the study of African texts, this Train‑the‑Trainers series aims to equip a new generation of scholars with the tools and community support needed to tell richer, data‑driven stories.