Digital database on Islam in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire
Carrefour africain (03-11-1962)
Despite the recent surge in popularity for the digital humanities, very few projects to date have sought to seriously mobilize the potential for digital tools to develop research on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. Although African archives in the postcolonial era are usually scattered, disorderly and partial, it is quite possible to build a rich corpus of written sources despite the numerous difficulties. For my doctoral research, I digitized and organized more than 7,000 newspaper articles on Burkinabe and Ivorian Muslim communities, along with material from some 1,000 varied Islamic publications, to create a database containing more than 12,000 items.
Building on this expertise, I am developing an open-access digital database, freely available online, containing archival materials, newspaper articles, Islamic publications, videos and photographs related to Islam in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire. Optical character recognition (OCR) was applied on every scanned document for full text indexing along with an extensive use of tags/keywords. The website will be hosted by the George A. Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida by fall 2019.
Building on this expertise, I am developing an open-access digital database, freely available online, containing archival materials, newspaper articles, Islamic publications, videos and photographs related to Islam in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire. Optical character recognition (OCR) was applied on every scanned document for full text indexing along with an extensive use of tags/keywords. The website will be hosted by the George A. Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida by fall 2019.
Bibliographic database on Islam in West Africa
Using Zotero, a free and open-source reference management software, I created a bibliographic database on Islam in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Togo. It contains more than 400 references. The database can be consulted, browsed and searched on the Zotero web interface: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2359965/bibliographic_database_islam_west_africa/items.
Zotero users can join the group bibliography on the Zotero website by simply clicking on the “Join group” button. When you next synchronise your Zotero database, the entire group bibliography with its subcategories will appear in the groups section of your own Zotero. You can then use the functions of Zotero you are used to such as editing bibliographies in any given citation style, citing references as you write. You can also drag references (or whole collections) into your own database (“My library”) for annotation or adding files of your own.
If you use a RSS-feed reader, you can add the feed for the group bibliography to be notified on new references added to the group bibliography: https://api.zotero.org/groups/2359965/items/top?start=0&limit=25&format=atom&v=1.
Zotero users can join the group bibliography on the Zotero website by simply clicking on the “Join group” button. When you next synchronise your Zotero database, the entire group bibliography with its subcategories will appear in the groups section of your own Zotero. You can then use the functions of Zotero you are used to such as editing bibliographies in any given citation style, citing references as you write. You can also drag references (or whole collections) into your own database (“My library”) for annotation or adding files of your own.
If you use a RSS-feed reader, you can add the feed for the group bibliography to be notified on new references added to the group bibliography: https://api.zotero.org/groups/2359965/items/top?start=0&limit=25&format=atom&v=1.