Md Zakir Hossain (Alamgir) Memorial & Digital Library
A lifetime of Bangla scholarship — fifteen books, ten generations of genealogy, and thirty thousand institutional records — recovered from obsolete encoding and published as a permanent, searchable archive.
Md Zakir Hossain (Alamgir), Deputy Registrar (retd.) of Dhaka University, spent his later years self-publishing around fifteen Bangla books: local histories, a first-person 1971 testimony, a genealogy spanning 1780 to 2017, and research datasets of tens of thousands of educational institutions. After his death in 2023 the entire body of work existed only as printed copies and Bijoy/SutonnyMJ-encoded Word files — an encoding that predates Unicode adoption in Bangla publishing and renders as garbage in any modern browser. Automated conversion produces text riddled with systematic defects: broken ligatures, mis-ordered rephs, and stray control characters, thousands of instances each. Left as-is, the work was unreadable, unsearchable, and one hard-drive failure from gone. The genealogy carried a second problem: it documents thousands of living relatives, with birth details and contact information that cannot simply be published.
A Bangla-first Django site that is both a memorial and a working digital library. The core engineering was the text-recovery pipeline: a rules engine that fixes the conversion defects systematically rather than by hand, with each rule verified empirically against the corpus before being applied — the greedy reph reordering, for example, was validated by confirming that correctly-formed rephs were essentially absent from the source (6,833 broken instances against zero pre-existing correct ones), making the transformation safe to apply globally. Antword-mangled tables are parsed back out of their delimiter-separated form into real HTML tables. Import commands load the cleaned corpus, parse the genealogy tables into structured person records with marriage and parent-child relationships, and ingest the institutional datasets from their original spreadsheets. The privacy question is answered in code rather than by editorial deletion: living persons' birth details are gated behind a Django group, so family members see the full record and the public sees only what the family agreed to publish. The biography is assembled exclusively from the author's own words — his prefaces, his author-bio pages, his closing statement about food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education — rather than written about him.
Outcome
Live at mdzakirhossainalamgir.com. 17 works across 1,047 readable sections, 5,699 genealogy records across two family lineages, an 18-event life timeline from 1948 to 2023, and 33,709 searchable institutional records from the author's own research data. Deployed to shared cPanel hosting with Let's Encrypt certificates issued via acme.sh and automated renewal, with every deployment step logged alongside its undo procedure.
Key features
- Bijoy-to-Unicode recovery pipeline with empirically validated cleanup rules for ligature, reph, and control-character defects
- Table reconstruction from delimiter-mangled antiword output back into structured HTML
- Online book reader with chapter navigation and per-work landing pages carrying dedication and preface excerpts
- Genealogy explorer covering two family lineages across ten generations, 1780 to 2017
- Privacy gate that reveals living persons' birth details only to authenticated family members
- Person search by name and village, with generation-based tree browsing
- Life timeline from 1948 to 2023, including a dedicated page for the author's first-person 1971 testimony
- Biography assembled solely from the author's own writing
- Searchable institutional dataset with district and thana filters, presented as his research
- Photo gallery with family-facing admin upload
- Full-text Bangla search across the corpus
- Bangla-first responsive typography with Noto Serif and Sans Bengali, dark-mode aware
- Repeatable import commands so the corpus can be re-cleaned and reloaded from source
- Django admin curated for non-technical family members
- Sitemap, robots, and bilingual SEO metadata
- Documented SSL and deployment procedure with an undo step for every change
Tech stack
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