Islam West Africa Collection

Directed by Frédérick Madore, the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) is a collaborative and open-access digital database supported by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Science, Health and Care. Building on the success of the award-winning Islam Burkina Faso Collection launched in 2021, the current repository features over 7,500 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications of various kinds, audio and video recordings, and photographs on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Côte d'Ivoire. The majority of documents are in French, with others available in Hausa, Arabic, Dendi, and English. The database also indexes over 850 references to relevant academic references such as books, articles, chapters, theses, reports and blog posts. Each document is tagged with detailed metadata and subjected to optical character recognition (OCR), making it easily accessible via keyword searches or more advanced multi-criteria searches. The IWAC also includes a comprehensive index of over 2,400 events, languages, locations, organizations, people, and topics.

English website: https://islam.zmo.de/s/westafrica/

Site en français: https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/

Folder "Metadata"

Contains all the metadata of the items in the IWAC

Contains:

• Audio-visual documents metadata ("audio-visual_documents.csv")
• Bibliographical references metadata ("references.csv")
• Documents metadata ("documents.csv")
• Events metadata ("index_events.csv")
• Images metadata ("images.csv")
• Issues of Islamic newspapers/magazines/bulletins metadata ("issues.csv")
• Locations metadata ("index_locations.csv")
• Newspaper articles metadata ("newspaper_articles.csv")
• Organizations metadata ("index_organizations.csv")
• Persons metadata ("index_persons.csv")
• Topics metadata ("index_topics.csv")

CSV files format:

• Delimiter: ,
• Enclosure: "
• Escape: /
• Multi-value separator: |

Metadata:

• Metadata names or headers are Rdf names
• The metadata is a mix of "Dublin Core", "Bibliographic Ontology", "Friend of a Friend", and "Geonames"
• Format of uri: Uri and label separated by a space

JSON

Metadata is also available in JSON-LD format.

Folder "Jupyter notebooks"

This folder contains the Jupyter notebooks that were used to create the visualisations that showcase the possibilities of digital humanities with the IWAC dataset. To access and run the Jupyter notebooks in this repository, simply click on the Binder button shown above. This will launch a virtual environment within your browser, allowing you to open and run the notebooks seamlessly, without the need for any installation. There are 4 notebooks in the folder:

1. Sentiment_analysis.ipynb
2. Spatial_analysis.ipynb
3. Temporal_analysis.ipynb
4. Topic_modelling.ipynb

Folder "TimelineJS"

It contains a copy of the spreadsheets that were used to create the digital exhibits using Timeline JS.