Dr. Aksana Ismailbekova & Dr. Frédérick Madore: Islam’s „Peripheries“: Digital Humanities, Algorithmic Analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia

The fifth seminar of the seminar series „Digital History in/of Central Asia and the South Caucasus“ will be held on June 29, 14:00 CEST | 16:00 Yerevan & Tbilisi | 17:00 Tashkent & Almaty | 18:00 Bishkek online in Zoom.

Topic: Islam’s „Peripheries“: Digital Humanities, Algorithmic Analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia.

Invited experts: Dr. Aksana Ismailbekova, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin & Dr. Frédérick Madore, University of Bayreuth.

In Islamic studies, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia are often treated as marginal, yet these regions may share underexplored parallels around modernity, governance, secularism, and Islamic intellectual production that this project seeks to examine. This presentation introduces a new VolkswagenStiftung-funded project that will use AI to unlock two unique multilingual collections at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO): the Islam West Africa Collection (14,500+ items, six countries, 1960s–present) and the Reinhard Eisener Collection (1,546 documents on the Emirate of Bukhara, early Soviet governance, and the Tajik civil war). Together, these ~16,000 documents in over ten languages remain largely inaccessible due to their volume, linguistic diversity, and partial cataloguing. We outline three planned approaches: (1) multimodal large language models for text extraction, transcription, metadata attribution, and named entity extraction across low-resource languages and scripts; (2) a cross-regional chatbot enabling semantic queries across both collections; and (3) open-source, replicable AI-powered workflows with human-in-the-loop validation. The pipeline is designed to be modular and replicable for other multilingual, under-resourced archival collections.

Language: English.

Registration and Zoom-link: https://fau.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/ZtGHGTlGTpGhEh13LUK2BA 

This series is jointly organized by Max Weber Stiftung Georgia Branch Office and the Chair of Modern and Eastern European History at FAU.