Organisers

Frédérick Madore

Organizer

University of Bayreuth

Frédérick Madore is a historian of Islam in Francophone West Africa and a Data Curator at the Cluster of Excellence "Africa Multiple," University of Bayreuth. His current work explores how AI and digital methods can transform the study of under-resourced African digital collections. He is developing the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database of over 14,500 documents built on Omeka S. Using LLM-powered pipelines, he experiments with AI-assisted text extraction, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis to process large documentary collections—while critically examining the risks of algorithmic opacity and Western-centric bias. He was previously a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin).

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Vincent Hiribarren

Organizer

King's College London

Vincent Hiribarren is a historian of West Africa and has worked on several digitisation programmes on the African continent. He has recently created an undergraduate module on Digital History and is interested in the relationship between African Studies, Digital Humanities and AI.

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Emmanuel Ngue Um

Organizer

University of Yaoundé 1

Emmanuel Ngue Um is an Associate Professor of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Yaoundé 1. His current research focuses on developing speech technologies and machine translation services to support the teaching and revitalisation of Africa's indigenous languages. He is also involved in developing an ecomuseum to preserve and promote a section of the colonial railway in Cameroon.

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Menno van Zaanen

Organizer

South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)

Menno van Zaanen is a professor in Digital Humanities at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources. He is particularly interested in incorporating the use of computational techniques in the field of Humanities. His research background is in computer science and computational linguistics.

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