Personal Communication

Words of welcome

Title: Words of welcome
list of authors: Ulrike Freitag
Abstract: fr Mots de bienvenue d'Ulrike Freitag lors du lancement officiel de la Collection Islam Afrique de l'Ouest; en Words of welcome by Ulrike Freitag at the official launch of the Islam West Africa Collection
Date: November 9, 2023
Is Part Of: Lancement de la Collection Islam Afrique de l'Ouest
Language: Anglais
Type: Communication scientifique
Identifier: iwac-reference-0000845
content: A very warm welcome from my side as well. Perhaps I should tell you just very briefly what ZMO is. It's an independent research institute, meaning independent from universities, but we are part of the Leibniz Association. And we are working on Islamicate or Muslim majority societies, basically in Asia and Africa, with certain extensions to Europe as well. And, obviously, West Africa is an important part of that space. We mainly conduct historical and anthropological research, but we also occasionally have linguists, we have social scientists, and others participating in our work. And we also have a quite nice, although still quite small, special collection of former research materials, including old newspapers, but also things people brought from various archives, field notes, tapes of preaching, and other materials. And we actually are in the process of developing a repository which makes available such materials.

And so, in a sense, when we met Frédérick, who joined a project at ZMO and was telling us about his website, we took that as great inspiration and actually some of the materials from ZMO have been incorporated now into this project which Frédérick has prepared. The idea behind this kind of work is really how to make available resources which were used or which are being used in research to researchers around the world, to people in the countries where resources come from, as well as elsewhere, both for research but sometimes also to inform themselves about what is going on in certain places. And I think in terms of Islam and West Africa, that is also a very topical issue. So the Islam West Africa Collection is really something which is important both for researchers but also for people such as journalists, people who are shaping policies, and others.

Now, how did we come across this website? At the end of last year, and in the context of discussions with the State of Berlin, which is one of our main money providers or financiers, we discussed various projects, and they eventually said, well that they had some funds for digitization. And we thought that we might use this on the one hand to strengthen our own resources, but then also to show what digital humanities can actually do. And here, Frédérick's project, which at that time was a somewhat smaller website hosted in an American university, seemed to provide a lovely base to expand and also to show what is possible with digital tools, something which of course takes quite a lot of effort and time, but also of money, in order to prepare, to scan, to provide the metadata of particular materials, etc. And we are really grateful to the State of Berlin for having given us this opportunity to show what digital humanities can actually do in the field of Asian and African studies, in particular in studies of Muslim societies. I think with this I'll hand over to Frédérick because he can tell you so much more about the website.