The Role of Poetry: Genre, Data Visualization, and a Reframing of African Literature through Transition Magazine, 1960s–70s

ABSTRACT: This article explores the role of poetry within African literary studies through a detailed examination of Transition magazine using digital humanities tools. By analyzing a dataset derived from the first fifty issues of Transition , this research challenges the predominant scholarly focus on prose, revealing poetry as a central and influential genre in the magazine's literary history. Utilizing bar graphs, geospatial maps, radial tree models, and network visualizations, the study highlights poetry's consistent presence and impact. It also addresses the challenges posed by the digital humanities, such as incomplete data, and missing or ambiguous information, and underscores the importance of comprehensive datasets in digital literary analysis, especially emphasizing the ethical imperative of building datasets for the study of African literature. This work reaffirms the significance of poetry in African literature, demonstrating its vital role in shaping literary culture and offering a nuanced perspective on the historical and thematic contributions of Transition to African literary discourse. I also make a case for the use of the digital humanities for the study of African literature.