# Presenting "Islam's Peripheries" in the "Digital History in/of Central Asia and the South Caucasus" Seminar

- **Type:** Lecture
- **Date:** 29 June 2026
- **Tags:** Volkswagen Foundation, Digital Humanities, AI, Large Language Models, IWAC, Islam, West Africa, Central Asia, Archives, Erlangen
- **Web page:** https://www.frederickmadore.com/activities/islams-peripheries-erlangen-seminar-2026

*Aksana Ismailbekova and I introduced our VolkswagenStiftung-funded project on AI and Islamic archives in West Africa and Central Asia in the "Digital History in/of Central Asia and the South Caucasus" seminar series at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.*

Today I had the pleasure of presenting our project "[Islam's 'Peripheries': Digital Humanities, Algorithmic Analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia](https://www.frederickmadore.com/research/islams-peripheries-dh-ai-west-africa-central-asia.md)" with [Aksana Ismailbekova](https://www.zmo.de/en/people/dr-aksana-ismailbekova) in the ["Digital History in/of Central Asia and the South Caucasus"](https://www.osteuropa.phil.fau.de/digital-history-seminars/) seminar series at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

The talk introduced our upcoming [VolkswagenStiftung](https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/en)-funded project, which uses AI to unlock two unique multilingual collections held at [Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)](https://www.zmo.de/en): the [*Islam West Africa Collection*](https://islam.zmo.de/s/westafrica/) (14,500+ items from six West African countries, 1960s to the present) and the [*Reinhard Eisener Collection*](https://www.zmo.de/en/library/special-collection-1/translate-to-english-reinhard-eisener-bestand) (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.

My [slides are available online](https://slides.frederickmadore.com/talks/2026-06-29-erlangen-islam-peripheries/).

## Links

- [Seminar Series Website](https://www.osteuropa.phil.fau.de/digital-history-seminars/)
- [Presentation Slides](https://slides.frederickmadore.com/talks/2026-06-29-erlangen-islam-peripheries/)