Since 2023
Islam West Africa Collection
An open-access archive of nearly 21,000 newspapers, Islamic publications, recordings and documents on Islam and Muslims in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Nigeria and Togo.
View projectInfrastructure · 17 entries · Since 2018
Digital Humanities
Not an end in itself, but 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. These projects turn that accumulation into open research infrastructure — digital archives, AI-assisted pipelines, interactive visualisations, and conversational interfaces — so that African historical sources are not only preserved but made usable.
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Africa Multiple Interactive Research Atlas (AMIRA)
The research-data platform of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence: one place to search, map and connect thousands of research items, projects, people, publications, podcasts and videos from partner centres in Africa, Brazil and Germany.
Omeka S PHP Python TypeScript Svelte 5 MongoDB Typesense Docker ECharts D3.js MapLibre GL Linked Open Data Wikidata Semantic search Model Context Protocol Data visualisation
Catalogue
15 of 17 entries
Genocide at the Security Council
A reproducible pipeline and interactive dashboard tracing how the word genocide was used across 167,642 UN Security Council speeches, 1946–2024, with every figure traceable to the script that made it.
Python pandas Corpus Linguistics NLP Text Analysis Reproducible Research SvelteKit Svelte 5 TypeScript ECharts MapLibre GL Data Visualisation LLM Open-weight models vLLM Embeddings GitHub Actions
IWAC MCP Server
An open-source connector that lets AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT search, read and analyse the Islam West Africa Collection, with every answer linked back to its sources.
TypeScript Model Context Protocol LLM Prompt Engineering Agent skills DuckDB Hugging Face Embeddings Semantic search Docker
Live Translation and Subtitles
A Windows app that puts live captions and translations over meetings, video calls and slides, offline with Whisper or through Gemini, OpenAI and Mistral. Built for a bilingual workshop at STIAS, now in the Microsoft Store.
Rust Tauri SvelteKit Svelte 5 TypeScript WebSocket Real-time Audio Speech Recognition Whisper Machine Translation LLM Accessibility Internationalisation
RAIS Publications
Embeddable visualisations of the publications of the University of Bayreuth’s Research Center for AI in Science and Society (RAIS): a semantic map, keyword and co-author networks, and a dashboard, rebuilt every week from the university repository.
Python Embeddings UMAP Network graphs ECharts MapLibre GL Data Visualisation Bibliometrics GitHub Actions
Global Heshmat
An interactive map and archive following the public artworks of the Egyptian sculptor Hassan Heshmat across ten countries, and the people who shaped his career. Developed for the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO).
Svelte 5 SvelteKit TypeScript MapLibre GL WebGL Interactive mapping Prosopography Data visualisation
IWAC AI Pipelines
Open-source Python pipelines that use AI models to transcribe, index, summarise and analyse the Islam West Africa Collection, with every result traceable to the model that produced it.
Python LLM Open-weight models Prompt Engineering OCR HTR NER NLP Audio transcription Sentiment analysis Omeka S API Docker
Charting New Territory: Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies
The website of a VolkswagenStiftung scoping workshop held in Hanover in February 2026: its programme and 26 participants, a bibliography of over 200 works, a concept map of the literature, six filmed interviews and the position paper it produced.
Svelte 5 SvelteKit TypeScript Tailwind CSS D3.js Leaflet Python Obsidian Zotero Metadata Standards Data Visualisation Network graphs