"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation."
As part of QCRI’s Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Elections (AIME) project, I liaised with Kaggle to work with a top notch Data Scientist to carry out a proof of concept study. As I’ve blogged in the past, crowdsourced election monitoring projects are starting to generate “Big Data” which cannot be managed or analyzed manually in real-time.
While we seem to spend an enormous amount of virtual space at AIAC critiquing the ways that Africa and Africans are represented, we do so because we believe that it is possible to subvert expectations, to create images that shatter myths and ideology and that make people think about why they are surprised by particular representations.
Mali is short of heroes at the moment. War in the north has produced very few, only villains aplenty, some of them in uniform. The same holds for Bamako’s deep, existential political crisis. Many people have tried to seize the moment; few have risen to it. So it’s good to be reminded of someone like Ibrahima Ly.
The mainstream media has been in overdrive working lockstep to uphold their ridiculous caricature of Hugo Chávez. The campaign has led to some pretty desperate and shallow displays of journalism.
Shell may be forced to completely shut down its 150,000 barrel per day Nembe Creek oil pipeline in Nigeria due to an “unprecedented” amount of oil theft. The Nembe trunkline is one of the most important production routes for Africa’s top crude oil exporter, feeding the benchmark Bonny Light export terminal.
Zina Saro-Wiwa’s “alt-Nollywood” short film, Phyllis, is one of the weirder fifteen minutes of film I’ve seen in some time. “Using Nollywood to subvert Nollywood,” it is an atmospheric, impressionistic, and haunting film, chronicling Phyllis’s emotional states as she takes the wigs that form such a huge part of her identity on and off.
Ory Okolloh, the Executive Director of Ushahidi , is from Kenya but currently lives in Johannesburg. Her blog is "outlet for her opinions. While it is primarily focused on Kenya, she reserves to write about whatever she wants."
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian social justice activist living in Spain, with a background in technology, gender issues and human rights. She is interested in creating a community of grassroots African bloggers as a way for Africans to exchange ideas, share experiences and tell their own stories in our own words.
Native of Cape Town, Sean Jacobs lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in Manhattan. He obsesses about the relationship between politics and popular culture, but the main rationale for his blog is to comment on what passes for media coverage of the African continent.
Rosebelle Kagumire is an experienced Ugandan Journalist. She won the best Journalist blogger English category at the Panos hosted competition in 2009. Currently she is a student of MA. Media, Conflict and Peace studies at University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica.
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