Formation | 2016 |
---|---|
Headquarters | Buildings F16 C & F16 D North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa |
Executive Director | Prof Langa Khumalo |
Website | https://sadilar.org/en/ |
SADiLaR (the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources), is a Department of Science and Innovation-sponsored initiative to create and manage digital resources and software supporting research and development in digital language resources in South Africa. [1] [2]
Founded in 2016, and hosted at the North-West University, [3] SADiLaR aims to provide a resource centre that simulates, enables, manages and distributes digital research related to all of South Africa's official languages. [4] It functions both as host and as a hub for a number of nodes, including other universities, research centres and public archives.
The nodes [5] that are linked to SADiLaR include;
SADiLaR launched [9] the DH-OER Champions [10] project to stimulate activism and research around the use and/or creation of OER for the digital humanities (DH) at universities in South Africa. [11] The inaugural DH-OER cohort offered stakeholders the opportunity observe how the various open champions (academics, researchers, and students) from other disciplines, institutions, and regions in South Africa (and beyond) can make use of OER in their disciplines. The results of these DH OER projects are listed on the Educator Track page on the SADiLaR site.
SADiLaR are engaged in the systematic creation of relevant digital text, speech and multimodal resources [12]
SADiLaR is involved in a collaboration between Wikipedia and the Pan South African Language Board. Together they launched the SWiP collaboration [13] at the University of South Africa in September 2023. SWiP advocates for equality among all indigenous languages and encouraging languages communities in South Africa to become more visible on Wikipedia and post information in their own language. [14]
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
SumbandilaSat, was a South African micro Earth observation satellite, launched on 17 September 2009 on a Soyuz-2 launch vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The first part of the name, Sumbandila, is from the Venda language and means "lead the way".
The Pan South African Language Board is an organisation in South Africa established to promote multilingualism, to develop the 12 official languages, and to protect language rights in South Africa. The Board was established in terms of Act 59 of 1995 by the Parliament of South Africa.
WikiEducator is an international online community project for the collaborative development of learning materials, which educators are free to reuse, adapt and share without restriction. WikiEducator was launched in 2006 and is supported by the non-profit Open Education Resource Foundation (OER). A variety of learning resources are available on WikiEducator: direct instructional resources such as lesson plans and full courses, as well as learning-support resources, such as individual school portals and funding proposals.
An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is a South African scientific research and development (R&D) organisation. It was established by an act of parliament in 1945 and is situated on its campus in Pretoria. It is Africa's largest research and development organisation and accounts for about 10% of the entire African R&D budget. It has a staff of approximately 3,000 technical and scientific researchers.
The University of Pretoria is a multi-campus public research university in Pretoria, the administrative and de facto capital of South Africa. The university was established in 1908 as the Pretoria campus of the Johannesburg-based Transvaal University College and is the fourth South African institution in continuous operation to be awarded university status. The university has grown from the original 32 students in a single late Victorian house to approximately 53,000 in 2019. The university was built on seven suburban campuses on 1,190 hectares.
The North-West University (NWU) is a public research university located on three campuses in Potchefstroom, Mahikeng and Vanderbijlpark in South Africa. The university came into existence through the merger in 2004 of the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, a large, historical university dating back to 1869, which also had a branch in Vanderbijlpark, and the University of North-West. With its merged status, the North-West University became one of the largest universities in South Africa with the third largest student population in the country. NWU ranks among top universities locally, in Africa and globally.
Sol Plaatje University is a public university located in Kimberley, South Africa. Established in 2014, it is the first and only university located in the Northern Cape province.
Link-ZA is a tactical data link system used by the South African National Defence Force. It is the data communication component of the "Combat Net Interoperability Standard" (CNIS). Development began in the early 1990s when South Africa acquired a wide variety of high technology defence equipment such as Saab JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets, BAE Hawk lead-in fighter trainers, Valour-class frigates and other weapons systems. Because South Africa was not able to acquire the NATO standard Link-16 system an indigenous system was developed.
Fulufhelo Vincent Nelwamondo (OMS) is an electrical engineer by training, and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa. He is the youngest recipient of the Harvard-South Africa Fellowship Programme amongst other honours. His research and practical experience has covered a wide spectrum of areas, including software engineering and computational intelligence. His interests include biometrics-based systems, data mining and machine learning tools.
Open access to scholarly communication in South Africa occurs online via journals, repositories, and a variety of other tools and platforms. Compared to other African nations, open access in South Africa has grown quickly in recent years.
Rachel Kerina Chikwamba is a Zimbabwean plant geneticist born in 1967. She is in the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Group Executive: Strategic Alliances and Communication. She is an active member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
SeaKeys is a large collaborative marine biodiversity project funded through the Foundational Biodiversity Information Program in South Africa. The purpose of the project is to collect and distribute genetic, species and ecosystem information relating to marine biodiversity in southern Africa, which may be used to support informed decision-making about the marine environment.
Marié Philliphina Wissing is a South African clinical psychologist, who is a professor at the Africa Unit for Transdisciplinary Health Research (AUTHeR) at the North-West University in South Africa. She became a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2018.
Mathapelo Christa Ramasimong is a South African field hockey player for the South African national team.
Fortunate Phaka is a South African environmental scientist, author, environmental television producer and science communicator. He is best known for research focused on herptiles, studying the relationship between biodiversity and people's cultural diversity, and writing South Africa's first comprehensive wildlife guide for frogs to be jointly published in an Indigenous language (IsiZulu) and English. His academic affiliations for postdoctoral research are with South Africa's North-West University and the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, as well as Belgium's Hasselt University. Phaka is also on the board of directors for Youth 4 African Wildlife, a youth-focused wildlife conservation non-profit organisation operating in Southern Africa. Phaka also has a superhero scientist, called The Scribe, based on him and his work.
The Centre for High-Performance Computing] (CHPC) was launched in 2007 and is a part of the National Integrated Cyber Infrastructure System (NICIS) in South Africa. The CPHC is supported by the South African Department of Science and Innovation, TENET and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. South Africa, in 2016, joined the Petaflop Club when the fastest computer in Africa was unveiled. Dubbed "Lengau", which is a Setswana word for Cheetah,; this petascale system consists of Dell servers, powered by Intel processors