ESCALATOR is one of Talarify’s capacity and community building programmes that kicked off in 2020. The programme is co-developed and funded by SADiLaR. On 28 April 2022 we launched the South African Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences (DH & CSS) Stakeholder Map project as part of ESCALATOR. This article was first published in April 2022 on the ESCALATOR website.
The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) is excited to announce the launch of the stakeholder map, which aims to collect and share data on Digital Humanities (DH), Computational Social Sciences (CSS) and related activities and initiatives in South Africa.
The launch of the stakeholder map project coincides with the International Day of DH, and includes data on projects, people, publications, datasets, training courses, learning materials, tools, archives, and unclassified records. Information on these record types can now be submitted to the stakeholder map using our online form.
The stakeholder map data can be visualised via two online interactive platforms, available through the ESCALATOR website.

The software and scripts used in developing the data workflow and visualisations are available under open licenses and/or as freeware. Over the next four weeks we will publish a series of blogs detailing the data pipeline development as part of our commitment to open science. The pipeline can be re-used for similar projects in other countries and regions.
For more information on the development of the pipeline using R and Github Actions for automated updating of the visualisations, please read the following series of posts:
- Introducing the DHCSS Stakeholder Map workflow
- Setting up the authorisations needed to read from Google Sheets
- File encryption, and automation with GitHub Actions
- GitHub Action for deploying a Shiny app (coming soon)
Please visit our visualisations page or the detailed description to interact with the data or learn more. For inquiries, please reach out to Dr Anne Treasure or share your thoughts via our Slack workspace in the #dhcss-stakeholder-map channel.
To learn more about the ESCALATOR programme, please visit our website.