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Madore, Frédérick:
From Digital Hoarding to Open Archives : Using AI Agents to Unlock West African Newspaper Collections.
2026
Veranstaltung: Non-European Approaches in European Academia: Strategies for De-Europeanizing Research
, 16 April 2026
, Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences.
(Veranstaltungsbeitrag: Kongress/Konferenz/Symposium/Tagung
,
Vorlesung
)
Abstract
Arlette Farge's celebrated model of archival research — the slow, tactile encounter with documents in a silent reading room — presupposes well-ordered European institutions. For historians of West Africa, the reality is different: newspaper archives scattered across countries and continents, poorly catalogued, physically deteriorating, and sometimes easier to find in Berlin or Washington than in their countries of origin. Fieldwork often becomes a race to photograph as much as possible, leaving thousands of images unprocessed on hard drives for years. The gap between digitisation (capturing documents) and datafication (transforming them into searchable, structured data) is one of the most significant unacknowledged obstacles in contemporary historical research. This presentation draws on the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database of over 14,500 newspaper articles, to show how AI can address this bottleneck. It discusses multimodal OCR for complex layouts, named entity recognition adapted to West African contexts, and corpus-level triage through sentiment analysis. It then introduces agentic AI pipelines — systems where specialised sub-agents autonomously handle image processing, text extraction, and metadata enrichment under human supervision — as a way to make these methods accessible to researchers without programming expertise. The talk concludes by reflecting on the stakes of using Western-built tools to make non-European knowledge visible.
Weitere Angaben
| Publikationsform: | Veranstaltungsbeitrag (Vorlesung) |
|---|---|
| Begutachteter Beitrag: | Ja |
| Keywords: | Digital Humanities (DH); Large Language Models (LLMs); Al Agents; West Africa; Archives; Islam West Africa Collection; Optical character recognition (OCR) |
| Institutionen der Universität: | Research Networks > African Studies Forschungseinrichtungen > Sonderforschungsbereiche, Forschergruppen > EXC 2052 - Africa Multiple: Afrikastudien neu gestalten |
| Titel an der UBT entstanden: | Ja |
| Themengebiete aus DDC: | 000 Informatik,Informationswissenschaft, allgemeine Werke > 004 Informatik 900 Geschichte und Geografie > 900 Geschichte |
| Eingestellt am: | 29 Jun 2026 07:10 |
| Letzte Änderung: | 29 Jun 2026 07:10 |
| URI: | https://eref.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/98905 |