Hamzat to open UNILAG digital humanities centre, smart classroom on Tuesday
- Lagos Deputy Governor Obafemi Hamzat will inaugurate two new facilities at the University of Lagos on Tuesday.
- The centre and smart classroom will host postgraduate programmes in Digital Humanities, described as the first of their kind in the region.
- The centre's director says the buildings mark a new chapter for African scholarship in the digital age.
The University of Lagos will on Tuesday unveil a remodelled Digital Humanities Centre and a Smart Postgraduate Classroom, with Lagos State Deputy Governor Obafemi Hamzat doing the honours.
The two facilities, built by the university's Centre for Digital Humanities, will host its new postgraduate programmes in Digital Humanities, which the university says are the first of their kind in the region.
The centre, founded in 2019, works where African languages, archives and cultures meet new technology. Its research covers digital archiving, text and data analysis, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.
What the centre is for
The remodelled centre is meant to give researchers a shared space to work with digital archives, computational methods and data. The smart classroom is a technology-equipped learning space for students on the new postgraduate programmes.
Babatunde Ope-Davies, the centre's founding director and Nigeria's first professor of Digital Humanities, said the inauguration opens "a doorway, not just a building."
He said the facilities are where Africa's inherited knowledge is preserved, interpreted and carried into the digital age, and described them as the work of many hands, including partners in Nigeria and abroad.
Ope-Davies said the centre was honoured that Hamzat would cut the ribbon, and thanked the Lagos State Government for backing the project.
For the state, the deputy governor's presence ties its push for a technology-driven, knowledge-based economy to the university's efforts to train scholars who can work across the humanities and digital tools.
The centre says its wider aim is to make sure African scholarship is not left behind as research and knowledge production go digital.
What happens next
Tuesday's ceremony is expected to draw Vice-Chancellor Folasade Ogunsola and other principal officers of the university, deans, scholars, students, development and industry partners, members of the diplomatic community and the press.
After the opening, the centre's Postgraduate Diploma, Master's and Doctoral programmes in Digital Humanities will run from the new facilities.
