Digital Humanities
This section presents some of my work in digital humanities (DH), applying computational methods to historical research on Islam and Muslim societies in West Africa. DH has taken an increasingly important place in my research in recent years, leading me to develop my skills through both specialised training and continuous self-learning. I use data visualisation techniques to translate research findings into compelling narratives, making historical findings accessible and engaging.
Islam West Africa Collection
2023-
A collection of over 13,000 documents on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Côte d'Ivoire.
IWAC Chatbot
2025-
A chatbot that uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enable semantic exploration of the Islam West Africa Collection. Users can ask complex questions in natural language and receive answers that are grounded in the documents in the collection.
Islam West Africa Collection Overview
2025
Interactive dashboard for exploring the IWAC collection with dynamic visualizations (treemaps, charts, timelines) and filtering capabilities.
IWAC Sentiment Analysis
2025
This interactive visualisation presents a sentiment analysis concerning the representation of Islam and Muslims in articles from the Islam West Africa Collection.
Muslim Umbrella Organisations in IWAC
2025
Co-occurrence matrix and topic modeling analysis of newspaper articles discussing Muslim umbrella organisations within the Islam West Africa Collection.
Skills:
IWAC Newspaper Word Cloud
2025
Interactive word cloud visualising the most frequent words in newspaper articles from the Islam West Africa Collection.
IWAC Keywords Dashboard
2024
This Shiny application allows users to explore the thematic evolution of the IWAC database by displaying frequent and comparable keywords in the form of visualisations, as well as offering dynamic filters and Dublin Core-based results.
Skills:
Remoboko: Religion, Morality and Boko in West Africa
2024
Research group exploring religion, morality, and student life in West African higher education. Includes interactive visualizations.
IWAC Bibliographic Data on Wikidata
2023
Inspired by the WikiCite initiative, which aims "to develop open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge", the metadata of all the bibliographical references of the Islam West Africa Collection has been uploaded to Wikidata to make them to be more openly citable and accessible.
Digital Exhibits on Islam in Burkina Faso
2021
These two digital exhibits on Islam in Burkina Faso, which bring together a selection of materials from the Islam West Africa Collection by theme, are entry points to the collection. In addition to providing contextual information for interpreting the material presented in an interactive timeline, a selective bibliography completes the exhibit.
Skills:
Islam Burkina Faso Collection
2018-2023
An open access digital database containing over 2,900 documents on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, now archived within IWAC.