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Africana Encyclopedia Launches

Microsoft joins forces with African-American scholars for the first encyclopedia of its kind.

By Tom Spring, PCWorld   

The new Encarta Africana includes 2 million words of text in more than 3000 articles and more than 2500 multimedia entries, including video clips, audio recordings, and maps. The interactive title is a joint effort led by Harvard scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah, who collaborated with Microsoft.

Encarta Africana runs on Windows 95, 98, and NT computers and has a suggested retail price of $69.95, with $20 mail-in rebates available.

The encyclopedia has virtual tours of Harlem and a slave station in Senegal, as well as performances by Billie Holliday and Whoopi Goldberg. It also features short lectures by notable Africans and African-Americans such as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, scholar Cornel West, and poet Maya Angelou.

In 1909, the leading black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois proposed a "Black Britannica," a comprehensive work to be called Encyclopedia Africana. But his death in 1963 cut short his effort.

In 1970 Gates and Appiah first discussed the idea of completing Du Bois's work. Soon after, the two Harvard professors began gathering articles and asking the assistance of other scholars to pull together every aspect of knowledge about Africa and the African diaspora.

Work on the multimedia version began two years ago with the assistance of the Microsoft Encarta team.

A book version of the encyclopedia is expected to be published later this year by the Perseus Book Company.