On 18 July 2024, I had the privilege of presenting a talk titled “Islam, Algorithms, and AI” at the ZMO Summer Party. I explored the transformative impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning on digital humanities research, with a particular focus on the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC).
Here’s an overview of what I covered:
- AI-enhanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for improved text searchability
- Advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP): Named entity recognition, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis
- “IWAC Chat Explorer”: An AI-powered chatbot
The IWAC Chat Explorer:
- Searches the database for relevant documents when a question is asked
- Provide document context to an AI model
- Generate an answer based on that context and the question
- Deliver the answer with citations