Unisan wins 2022 AIEF doctoral scholarship

The College of Human Sciences congratulates Oscar Sigauke, a student of the Department of Information Sciences, who has been awarded a coveted international scholarship by the ARMA International Educational Foundation (AIEF) in May.

Oscar Sigauke

The AIEF is the leading non-profit organisation enhancing the practical and scholarly knowledge of information management. It financially supports and publishes research addressing critical issues in information management, and provides scholarships that enhance the knowledge, skills and abilities of aspiring and current practitioners in the information management field.

“Oscar is a new doctoral student at Unisa and still on the proposal stage,” says Professor Mpho Ngoepe, Director of the School of Arts under which the Department of Information Sciences falls. “The strength of his application lies in his topic on ‘computational archival science’ that we conceptualised together when he showed interest to register with Unisa for his doctoral studies. So, his study will be interdisciplinary as the principles of computation will be used to solve archival problems relating to retrieval of records using optical character recognition technology. This is so because of nature of archival documents which sometimes are not easy to retrieve.”

Sigauke’s PhD topic is “The application of computational archival science to the arrangement and description of archives at the National Archives of Zimbabwe”

“I feel greatly excited by the scholarship, and I would like to sincerely thank the ARMA Education Foundation for awarding me the scholarship,” says Sigauke. “This scholarship will allow me to focus on my PhD studies.” Sigauke hopes to conduct more research focused on the application of computational archival science in records and archives management, which will ultimately lead to publication in peer-reviewed journals.

The Zimbabwean-born student holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree, an Honours Degree in History and a Master of Science Degree in Records and Archives Management, all obtained at the National University of Science and Technology in Zimbabwe.

Congratulations, Oscar!

#TheWinningSchoolofArtsTeam

* By Tebogo Mahlaela, Communication and Marketing Specialist, College of Human Sciences