Digital Humanities

Islam Burkina Faso Collection

Launched in 2021, the Islam Burkina Faso Collection is an open access digital database, which contains over 2,900 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications of various forms, and photographs on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso. The site also indexes more than 270 bibliographical references of books, book chapters, journal articles, dissertations and theses on the topic. In addition to the metadata attribution, optical character recognition (OCR) has also been applied to each document. An index listing nearly 1000 events, locations, organizations, people, and topics is also available.

This project is one of the first digital humanities initiatives to be published under a new University of Florida Libraries program, LibraryPress@UF. This program, an imprint of the Libraries and the University of Florida Press, seeks to develop public scholarship across formats that extend and complement the work of traditional academic publishing.

In the next phase of the project, the Islam Burkina Faso Collection will be part of a larger collaborative digital database on Islam in West Africa, which will include material that I have already digitized as part of my research on Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Togo.

To learn more about this project, see Frédérick Madore, “La Collection Islam Burkina Faso : promesses et défis des humanités numériques”, Revue d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Afrique (2021).

Award

I won a 2023 Emerging Open Scholarship Award, sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) and its partners, for my work on the Islam Burkina Faso Collection.

Islam West Africa Collection (2023-)

With the support of Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and a grant from the state of Berlin, I’m currently working on extending the Islam Burkina Faso Collection to West Africa, by including material on Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Niger.