# From Archives to Algorithms: Uncovering Transregional Islamic Connections through the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC)

- **Type:** Conference
- **Date:** 11 September 2025
- **Tags:** Digital Humanities, Global History, Archives, Algorithms, Transregional History, ENIUGH, Conference, IWAC, Islam, West Africa
- **Web page:** https://www.frederickmadore.com/activities/archives-algorithms-iwac-2025

*Paper presented at the Eighth European Congress on World and Global History*

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.