As part of the Borders, Circulations, Interculturalities and Human-Milieu Interactions seminar, a special lecture by Véronique Ginouvès will take place on Wednesday 30 April 2025, from 6pm to 8pm, in room F 108 on the Troubiran campus of the University of Guyana.
A shared memory that transcends borders
Entitled "From dispersed collections to a shared memory: restoring Niger's sound heritage across borders, a replicable experiment", this talk is part of the ERC Langarchiv project, led by historian Camille Lefevbre, which aims to write the social history of the Sahel and central Sahara through the analysis of documents in African languages.
This work involves a vast project to identify, digitise, document and map sound recordings made in Niger in the 20th century. These archives, in Hausa, Kanouri, Zarma-Songhay, Tamasheq and other languages, were produced in a variety of contexts by journalists, researchers and institutions, both in Niger and internationally.
Enhancing and restoring our audio heritage
In collaboration with the MMSH's Phonothèque, Véronique Ginouvès will present the tools and methods developed to inventory and promote these sound archives in accordance with the FAIR principles (Easy to Find, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). The initiative has resulted in an unprecedented mapping of this heritage, revealing its richness and dispersal, but also the challenges of its restitution and cross-border accessibility.
This approach, centred on the case of Niger, offers a replicable model for other contexts, particularly in French Guiana, where little-exploited sound corpora could be the subject of similar conservation and promotion work on an international scale.
About the speaker
A specialist in research archives, Véronique Ginouvès is committed to the ethical and legal issues surrounding the dissemination of digital data. In particular, she co-directs the ethiquedroit.hypotheses.org research notebook.
She recently published an article with sociologist Ibrahim Moussa (University of Zinder) in the Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée :
"De la cassette au fichier numérique : enjeux de l'archivage, du partage et de la restitution des archives orales enregistrées au Niger" (n°156, 2024).
This seminar is organised by Agnès Clerc-Renaud, Damien Davy, Rosuel Lima-Pereira and Marianne Palisse, researchers at LEEISA and MINEA.
Admission free, subject to availability.
