Lecture 29 June 2026
Presenting "Islam's Peripheries" in the "Digital History in/of Central Asia and the South Caucasus" Seminar
Today I had the pleasure of presenting our project "Islam's 'Peripheries': Digital Humanities, Algorithmic Analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia" with Aksana Ismailbekova in the "Digital History in/of Central Asia and the South Caucasus" seminar series at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
The talk introduced our new VolkswagenStiftung-funded project, which uses AI to unlock two unique multilingual collections held at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO): the Islam West Africa Collection (14,500+ items from six West African countries, 1960s to the present) and the Reinhard Eisener Collection (1,546 documents on the Emirate of Bukhara, early Soviet governance, and the Tajik civil war).
In Islamic studies, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia are often treated as marginal. Bringing these two "peripheries" into the same frame, we asked what AI-driven workflows make possible across roughly 16,000 documents in more than ten languages and scripts: multimodal large language models for text extraction and named entity recognition, a cross-regional chatbot for semantic queries, and open, replicable pipelines with human-in-the-loop validation.