Situating science in Africa: The dynamics of computing research in Nairobi and Kampala
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the turn of the century, both Kampala and Nairobi have experienced a dramatic growth of computer science research, challenging accepted views of science in Africa. We deploy qualitative methods to follow active computer science researchers, graduate students, policy makers, administrators and entrepreneurs, in order to understand how computer science is enacted in these two cities. Our analysis focuses on four interrelated areas of labor, institutions, identities and scale. We illustrate the dynamics and frictions of computer science research across these areas, revealing the interlacing of moral economies of science and the political economy of higher education, the management of precarious professional lives and desire to get research done, and the pluralistic imaginations and multiple scales of computer science. Urban centers in East Africa are increasingly active in supporting granular and connective research communities that are socially transformative in ways that challenge conventional views of Africa as technologically dry. In this way, the computer science communities of Nairobi and Kampala are instructive for thinking about new geographies of science and technology studies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it