The scientific aim of the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) was primarily to compile a corpus of press articles, an under-used type of sources, for two research projects: 1-Youth and Women’s Islamic Activism in Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso; 2- Muslim Minorities in Benin and Togo.This open-access database provides access to press clippings from the mainstream press in West African (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Nigeria) as well as Islamic publications, and video recordings, all of those documents related to Islam. The period covered is from 1962 to the present day. There are currently around 14,000 items, mostly press articles (11,683) equivalent to 25 million words and 150 gigabytes of data! To take advantage of this collection, the result of a form of “digital hoarding” that has become familiar to many researchers around the world, it was necessary to use distant reading tools and AI.
