Review of Frédérick Madore "Islam Burkina Faso Collection" (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Review of Frédérick Madore "Islam Burkina Faso Collection" Vincent Hiribarren Review of Frédérick Madore "Islam Burkina Faso Collection," 2021. https://islam.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/s/bf [End Page 324] The Islam Burkina Faso Collection1 presents itself as "an open access digital database containing over 2,900 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications of various forms, and photographs on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso since the 1960s. The site also indexes more than 250 bibliographical references of books, book chapters, book reviews, journal articles, dissertations, theses, and reports on the topic." Obviously, this is an impressive achievement, and the project launched in 2021 by Frédérick Madore will become an increasingly useful repository since travel in and to Burkina Faso has become more difficult. Specialists of Islam or print culture from Burkina Faso, West Africa, and beyond will now have access to this extremely valuable resource, provided that they have an Internet connection. Madore is the first scholar to gather online such a large number of newspapers from Burkina Faso; he was clearly inspired by Enrique Martino who, in a similar way, uploaded most of the resources he used for his thesis, which was subsequently published as a book on Equatorial Guinea.2 Madore's project is, however, different in scale. Clearly, an incredible amount of work has been poured into this database, as numerous individuals and institutions have played a part in its creation (as is the case with most Digital Humanities projects). The "About" section acknowledges the main authors and sponsors of the database. Even if it might be interesting to know exactly who did what and when during this project, this database is the result of a collaboration between IT specialists and librarians working for the University of Florida Libraries programme, LibraryPress@UF, and a historian. Many scholars (and I am one of them) increasingly feel the urge to do more with the documents they collect during their research. We can now make many sources available to our readers in the same way that scientists publish their data. After all, isn't this the founding principle of research? Frédérick Madore is already the author of La construction d'une sphère publique musulmane en Afrique de l'Ouest (Presses de l'Université Laval/Hermann, 2016). The database is thus the continuation of Madore's work in a digital form. What the interface also [End Page 325] clearly offers is a potential re-interpretation of the documents used by Madore and new possible enquiries for students and professional researchers. The two exhibitions available on the website demonstrate the potential of such an approach and the way the database can also become part of our teaching. One can easily grasp the potential for future research on the topic, especially considering that bibliographic references are also added to the website to contextualize the documents. The database is not just a large repository of documents related to Islam in Burkina Faso. The digitised files were OCRed and have excellent metadata, which means that they are easily searchable. The index will be particularly useful for those interested in a specific individual, organization, place, topic, or event. The collection has an OAI-PMH repository, which means that even machines can harvest the contents of its database. With such a solid basis, the project could be easily expanded. There is no doubt that Madore's idea to increase the number of documents in the database is in good hands. Quite interestingly, if users want to understand the copyright or the licence for the digitized material, they would have to read the article Madore wrote in French in 2021.3 This can easily be fixed, but it would be recommended to publish an explanation in French and English on the website as well. Madore was able to obtain an agreement from the copyright owners for the documents to be freely available online. It would be a shame for this information not to appear clearly on the website. This would inform the users how they can re-use the material. The article mentioned above also retraces the genealogy of the project, and having such a...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".