Decolonial by Design: Building Sekuru's Stories

This case study illustrates how carefully designed digital publications can make significant contributions to decolonial scholarship, with a focus on the humanities. Drawing upon my recent experience creating Sekuru's Stories, a co-authored digital humanities project featuring music from Southern Africa, I suggest several ways to engage this decolonizing potential. Among other issues, I discuss which digital platforms may prove most readily accessible to users with limited internet access, outline options for making content available in indigenous languages, and highlight special interactive features such as comparative map viewers and 3D imaging. I also discuss considerations in building digital projects that will prove accessible, robust, and sustainable over time, as well as specific strategies for cultivating a wide audience. One highlight of digital publication is its ability to support multiple navigation options, including both linear and non-linear ways of moving through content. Similarly, digital projects can integrate both narrative and non-narrative formats, blending aspects of monograph and website. When these considerations are taken into account, well-designed digital projects are uniquely capable of reaching a wide audience of scholars, students, and laypeople. As evidence, I analyze data from Google Analytics showing that the primary readership for our project is located in Southern Africa. I argue that digital humanities projects can prove accessible and engaging for non-specialists without sacrificing scholarly rigor, and I call upon scholars to embrace the decolonial potential of digital work. I conclude by outlining concrete steps to place the digital humanities more firmly at the heart of the humanities writ large.