The Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) is a comprehensive, open-access digital database focused on Islam and Muslims in West Africa. Directed by Frédérick Madore, this project is supported by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Science, Health and Care.
- 8,800+ documents including archival materials, newspaper articles, and multimedia content
- Coverage of Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire
- Multilingual content (French, Hausa, Arabic, Dendi, English)
- 850+ indexed academic references
- 2,400+ indexed events, languages, locations, organizations, people, and topics
The IWAC Chat Explorer is an AI-powered web application that implements an augmented retrieval strategy to explore the Islam West Africa Collection.
Key Features:
- Interactive chat interface for querying the IWAC dataset
- Augmented retrieval system combining document search and AI-generated responses
- Context-aware responses using the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model from Anthropic
- Source attribution for AI-generated responses
For detailed information on setup, usage, and technical details, please see the IWAC Chat Explorer README.
Contains CSV and JSON-LD files with detailed metadata for all items in the IWAC.
- 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 Format: Comma-delimited, double-quoted, '/' as escape character, '|' as multi-value separator
All metadata is also available in JSON-LD format, with filenames corresponding to the CSV files.
Contains Omeka S resource templates in JSON format. These templates define the structure and properties for different types of resources in the IWAC.
The metadata uses a mix of schemas including Dublin Core, Bibliographic Ontology, Friend of a Friend, and Geonames.
Spreadsheets used to create digital exhibits with Timeline JS.
This repository includes several visualisations created using Python and Plotly, showcasing trends and insights from the IWAC data. View them in the Visualisations folder or on the project website.
This project is dual-licensed to ensure both the code and data remain freely available for educational and non-commercial use:
- All source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0).
- All data and content are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
This means you are free to use, modify, and distribute both the code and data for non-commercial purposes, as long as you provide appropriate attribution to the original creators and share any modifications under the same terms.
For more details, see the LICENSE-GPL and LICENSE-CC-BY-NC files in this repository.