From Archives to Algorithms: Uncovering Transregional Islamic Connections through the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC)
Findability ≠ significance. Co-mention ≠ connection.
These cautions framed our panel, "Global and Transregional Histories: Digitally Connected?" at the Eighth European Congress on World and Global History in Växjö, Sweden. I presented "From Archives to Algorithms: Uncovering Transregional Islamic Connections through the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC)". I am grateful to my panellists, Mila Oiva and Gerben Zaagsma, and to the organisers, Antje Dietze and Kathleen Schlütter, for facilitating such a stimulating conversation about the silences and biases inherent in digitised collections, and about the most effective ways to represent connections and their variations.
Key takeaways:
- From technologies to practices: Technological change has long shaped historical enquiry and the production of knowledge. Pay attention to when, where and how practices change, and to the technologies and individuals that influence them.
- Digitisation reveals and flattens: decisions about selection, metadata and the unit of analysis determine what appears connected and what is obscured.
- Silences are structured, not random: they arise from censorship; licensing and access regimes; OCR and language coverage; and national priorities.
- Findability reflects supply-side bias: it mirrors what has been digitised and in which languages, not what is necessarily important.
- Co-mentions are leads, not proof: qualify edges by type, strength and provenance, and make uncertainty explicit.
- Connections are layered: social, infrastructural and semantic circuits rarely align.
- Mix scales: use distant reading to map coverage and temporal patterns, and close reading to expose gaps and turn absence into evidence.