The Timbuktu Chronicles are a series of 17th century manuscripts written in Timbuktu about historical West Africa.
This digital humanities research project aims to explore two of the longest and most famous of these chronicles: Tarikh al-fattash by Mahmud Kati, and Tarikh al-Sudan by ʻAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʻAbd Allāh Saʻdī.
We aim to make these texts, or certain passages from them, more accessible. Some possible integrations include geo-tagging, named-entity recognition, improved Arabic OCR for the texts, and others.
Learn more about how this was used in scholarship at Tufts University here.
A more detailed description and summary of the project and its conclusions can be found here.