The African Digital News Corpus (adnC) is a long-running effort to build a systematic, multilingual collection of online news published across the African continent. Although more and more Africans get their news from digital sources, this content remains difficult to study at scale: much of it is ephemeral, search engines rarely surface African outlets, and commercial full-text databases privilege content from the Global North. The corpus addresses this gap with a custom-built crawler and scraper that collect headlines, full text, and metadata twice daily from hundreds of news websites.

The project pairs this infrastructure with a custom R package that lets researchers query the underlying database and retrieve pre-processed, text-mineable data without raising copyright concerns. It supports comparative research on questions such as sourcing practices, regional imbalances in coverage, and postcolonial legacies in reporting, and is intended to be especially useful to scholars at African universities who often lack access to expensive commercial databases.