Digital Humanities
Digital humanities has become central to my research practice—not as an end in itself, but as a
response to a concrete problem. After years of fieldwork across West Africa, I had accumulated
thousands of documents that exceeded what traditional methods could process. The projects below
trace my effort to transform this accumulation into open research infrastructure: from building
digital archives and AI-assisted processing pipelines to interactive visualizations and
conversational interfaces. All code is open source, and all data follows open access principles
wherever rights permit, with the conviction that African historical sources should not only be
preserved, but made usable for researchers, students, and the communities from which they
originate.
Featured Projects
Islam West Africa Collection
2023-
A collection of over 14,500 documents on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Côte d'Ivoire.
IWAC Sentiment Analysis
2025
Interactive visualization of sentiment patterns in 12,280+ West African press articles on Islam, with multi-model comparison (ChatGPT, Gemini, Mistral) and third-party arbitration.
All Projects
Omeka S Docker Template
2026
A reusable Docker template for deploying production-ready Omeka S digital archive installations with automatic setup, module management, and SSL support.
IWAC AI Pipelines
2026
Python workflows for processing the Islam West Africa Collection using Large Language Models—automating OCR, NER, transcription, and summarization at scale.
Islam West Africa Dashboard
2025
Interactive visualization platform for exploring the Islam West Africa Collection — a dataset of 14,700+ documents on Islam and Muslims in West Africa.
ZMO AI Pipelines
2025
Google Colab notebooks that make AI accessible for researchers: transcribe audio/video, extract text from documents (OCR/HTR), and generate summaries—no installation required.
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 grounded in the archive's newspaper articles.
Remoboko Visualizations
2018-2024
Interactive visualizations for the Remoboko research group, including a points of interest map for my book and charts documenting the group's publications, activities, and collaborative network.
IWAC Bibliographic Data on Wikidata
2023
Over 850 bibliographical references from the Islam West Africa Collection uploaded to Wikidata, enabling SPARQL queries and automatic visualizations through Scholia.
Digital Exhibits on Islam in Burkina Faso
2021
Two digital exhibits featuring curated materials from the Islam West Africa Collection, each with an interactive timeline, contextual narratives, and selective bibliography.
Islam Burkina Faso Collection
2018-2023
An open-access digital database developed to address a critical gap in research infrastructure for West African Islamic studies, containing over 2,900 documents on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso. Now archived within the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC).