UNILAG: Hamzat to inaugurate Digital Humanities twin facilities Tuesday

The University of Lagos (UNILAG) will make history on Tuesday when the deputy governor of Lagos State, Dr Obafemi Kadri Hamzat, formally inaugurates the twin facilities of the Centre for Digital Humanities, CEDHUL.
The facilities are the newly remodelled Digital Humanities Centre and its state-of-the-art Smart Postgraduate Classroom.
The announcement was made in a statement by the founding director of CEDHUL, Professor Babatunde Olusola Ope-Davies.
The event scheduled for 11a.m. will hold at the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Lagos, Akoka.
Ope-Davies described the inauguration as a defining moment for CEDHUL, sub-Saharan Africa’s first dedicated Digital Humanities centre.
Founded in 2019, the centre has grown from a bold idea into a continental reference point, where African languages, archives, cultures and stories meet data, computation and artificial intelligence.
The twin facilities will now house the centre’s Senate-approved Postgraduate Diploma, Master’s and Doctoral programmes in Digital Humanities, the first of their kind in the region.
Ope-Davies said Dr Hamzat’s presence, and his personal act of inaugurating the facilities, signalled a powerful alignment between the Lagos State government’s vision of a smart, knowledge-driven megacity and the university’s mission to produce scholars who could read both the manuscript and the machine.
An engineer, technocrat and long-standing advocate of innovation in public life, the deputy governor brings to the occasion a conviction that Lagos must not only consume technology but shape it.
The Founding Director of CEDHUL and first Professor of Digital Humanities in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa, Professor Babatunde Olusola Ope-Davies, described the occasion as “the opening of a doorway, not just a building.”
“The facilities are where that meeting happens: where we are redefining the future of the humanities; where Africa’s inherited knowledge is preserved, interpreted and carried forward with the tools of the digital age. We are deeply honoured that His Excellency will commission them,” he added.
The ceremony will bring together the vice-chancellor and principal officers of the university, members of the diplomatic and development community, industry partners, scholars, students and the media.