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Oralisation of UNESCO's "General History of Africa" (GHA), via an innovative publishing interface: the Diakol



WHAT?


Thru a mobile application, give access to the text of the GHA to a global public, literate or not, in oral form, first in English and French then in any other as contributed by communities : Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Chinese, Yoruba, Swahili, Poulhar, Lingala etc...

Conversing with the machine, the listener consults, visualizes, on request and convenience on his mobile set, any chapters or details of the history of the continent, he might be interested with.

WHY? 


Education is the software of the mainframe that programs the future of societies
Joseph Ki Zerbo


The GHA is a historical, scientific, objective corpus. There are very few such comprehensive documentary sources dealing with the Black Continent.

It is known that by 2100, 1 in 3 humans will be African (INED study). For all, easily appropriating the history of the Continent is a priority. More than just a humanist duty, it is a lasting commitment to living together!

The possibilities offered to easily exploit the content of the GHA (semantic links, summaries and synthesis), the knowledge that would exhume it, all create a noble material. At a time when globalization is accelerating, this material will enable education actors to work to facilitate the insertion of migrant youths and generations, often cut off from the cultural roots necessary for new anchorages hence exposed to the reign of fake news and manipulation.

The computing Human Machine Interface (HMI) is now oral. Welcome to the Continent of Orality, telling its history.

Let us take the edge in a vocation to build an informed collective look on the common past.


HOW?


  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools: translation, vocalization, sumaries and synthesis
  • Massive mobilizations of contributors, under a wikipedia type governance.

Inspired by the practices of the free software world, we propose to communities of contributors (translators, proofreaders, contextualizers), a collaborative architecture (DIAKOL) with the most advanced NLP solutions, in order to oralize the written corpus of the GHA.

1. All contributors subscribe to a collective self-control governance, such as with WikiMedia.

2. Translators and proofreaders amend, enrich, validate automated proposals made by artificial intelligence.

3. Pedagogic contextualizers bring out contents adapted to the varied publics, in order to put the knowledge in relation with the diverse epistemological bases of the ones and others. This will create free ecosystems of edition, software development and multimedia production that would put the GHA, under a thousand eyes, but under scientific control, too.

4. At the end, each end-user, will choose for himself, the editorial line that suits him best, according to the models of the free software world inspired by the distributions of Linux....


WHO ?

Co-author:
The Non Profit Organisation A’PART - Afropéenne & Partenariale.



As a breakthrough seeker, to service the development of the continent, A'Part has glimpsed the decisive advantage of oralizing in the diffusion of a work such as the GHA. That gave the inflection towards the idea of product...
Co-author:
The collective Black(s) to the Future (Association CY).


By willingly embracing a contemporary posture of historical and sociological unraveling of the gaze on Africa (A. Mbembe / F. Vergès, etc.), B(S)TTF is committed to an inclusive and  "trans" (-genders, -cultures, -identities, -temporalities...) humanity. Hence, as a transmedia platform, its natural demand for a modern communication channel, to tell the history of the continent out of which arose the idea of the Diakol! 
Co-holder:

The Cooperative Artefacts.



A major cultural actor in the region “Centre” in France, with a long history of pedagogical innovation and digital promotion, Artefacts has naturally joined the project to invite its human talents and institutional links … the promise of means required for the emergence of the project ...
And others are joining soon....


WHERE ARE WE ?


INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
  • Unesco holds  intellectual rights of the GHA work.  As an author, it can’t deny us the right to use its work for educational goals like ours. We would then be most humbled to have the honor of modestly contributing to the mission of this so noble institution. 

  • Based on these facts, we are confident to obtain an agreement of UNESCO on specific terms to be specified. Such support would unvaluably leverage of project to reach the most, the sooner...

TECHNICAL STEPS
  • We have made the proof of concept

  • We are now prototyping the application, having chosen to develop it on the Microsoft Azure AI Platform.

  • A MVP (Minimum Vital Product) is planned for the last quarter of 2018.