THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DIGITALIZATION OF IFA IN THE COMMITTEE OF KNOWLEDGE

Ifa corpus is a rich and ancient collection of Yoruba oral literature, rituals, and cultural knowledge. However, research has shown that Ifa corpus has in many ways faced the challenges of limited accessibility and preservation in the digital age. Conversely, the digitalisation initiative seeks to redress Ifa corpus’ preservation and accessibility because of its degradation and loss due to aging manuscripts and limited physical access to it. It also seeks to know how interdisciplinary collaboration could be necessitated among experts in Yoruba studies, digital humanities, linguistics, and archival practices within the comity of knowledge. And how sacred culturally sensitive materials like Ifa corpus could be sensitive and digitalised for consideration which would in turn ensure the respective handling of the knowledge. Further to this, the study adopts historical and investigative methods. Historical method was adopted in such a way to find out about the age-long activities of Ifa, while the investigative was adopted in order to look into the activities of digitalisation and how it could be used to preserve Ifa and materials in the comity of knowledge. Similarly, the study was scrutinized in the following rubrics: What is Ifa Corpus? What is digitalisation? Challenges in Ifa digitalisation, and the significance of Ifa digitalization. The study discovered among other things that with a successful digitalization of Ifa, the cultural heritage would be preserved and make it even more widely accessible for scholars, practitioners, adherents, and general public around the globe.