Following Digital Footprints: Researching South African Digital Poetry

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship increasingly recognises the need to document the growing corpus of African literature being produced and distributed via social media and other online platforms. In African literature and the future, Ogundipe (2015) declared that: In the search for a viable path for the future of African literature, a well-crafted vision of the future and  effective strategies to engender transformation are imperative. This raises the practical application of the  digital space, the internet and related innovative technology as new paradigms of knowledge to African  literary engagement. But the absence of a critical standard remains a bane of this development. To address this critical imperative and further explore the prevalence of such works, I collected a dataset to  find examples of literary trends and key recent examples of significant works, informed by Moretti's  scholarship on distant reading. The dataset focuses on poetry written by younger South African authors from  the Born Free Generation, in line with my broader research. The main purpose of this paper is to present my  findings and the theoretical and methodological framework that informed them. The paper concludes by  briefly proposing some possible means of expanding this research and proposing a large-scale online  archival project.