Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies: An Introduction PDF
Preview Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies: An Introduction
Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies Introductions to Digital Humanities – Religion Edited by Claire Clivaz, Charles M. Ess, Gregory Price Grieve, Kristian Petersen and Sally Promey Volume 2 Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies An Introduction Edited by Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen ISBN 978-3-11-057160-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-057302-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057194-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944396 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Social network visualization. With friendly permission of Martin Grandjean. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Table of Contents Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen Digital Humanities and Religious Studies: A “Why” To Guide VII Part I: Texts Marcus Bingenheimer Digital Tools for Buddhist Studies 3 Lincoln A. Mullen The Making of America’s Public Bible: Computational Text Analysis for Religious History 31 Frederik Elwert Network Analysis of Religious Texts. Case Studies on Ancient Egyptian and Indian Religion 53 Rebecca Krawiec and Caroline T. Schroeder Digital Approaches to Studying Authorial Style and Monastic Subjectivity in Early Christian Egypt 71 Part II: Images Andrew Quintman and Kurtis R. Schaeffer Synthesizing Image and Text in the Life of the Buddha 97 James S. Bielo & Claire Vaughn Materializing the Bible: A Digital Scholarship Project from the Anthropology of Religion 119 Emily C. Floyd and Sally M. Promey Collaboration and Accessin the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion 143 VI TableofContents Erin Walcek Averett and Derek B. Counts Scaling Religious Practice from Landscape to Artifact: Digital Approaches to Ancient Cyprus 167 Part III: Places Abhishek Amar Sacred Centers in India: Archiving Temples and Images of a Hindu City 199 J. E. E. Pettit, Fenggang Yang, Yuqian Huang Developing a Database of Religions in Contemporary China 215 Louis Kaplan and Melissa Shiff From Ararat to Kimberley: Activating Imaginary Jewish Homelands with Augmented and Virtual Reality 227 Caleb Elfenbein, Farah Bakaari, Julia Schafer Mapping Anti-Muslim Hostility and its Effects 249 Part IV: Issues Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson Critique and Community: Podcasting Religious Studies 273 S. Brent Plate Public Pedagogy: MOOCs and Their Revolutionary Discontents 291 Wendi Bellar and Heidi A. Campbell Building Social Sites of Collaborative Research: A Case Study of the Network for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture Studies 303 Russell T. McCutcheon Learning to Code: Digital Pebbles and Institutional Ripples 319 Index 339 Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen Digital Humanities and Religious Studies: A “Why” To Guide In2018,theAmericanAcademyofReligionhostedaspecial“wildcard”panelon digital research and teaching projects that encourage students to engage with their local communities. Titled “Teaching Local Religion with Digital Humani- ties:Objects,Methods,Pedagogies,”thesessionfeaturedteneducatorswhocon- tributedtoeightdifferentprojects.Someoftheprojectswerebasedatmajorre- search universities and worked with communities across the country. Others werehousedatsmallliberalartscollegesandfocusedononeplaceofworship. Butalmostalloftheprojectsconnectedwiththescholars’researchagendaand employed the tools and methods of digital humanities (DH) in order to benefit from the work of student collaborators.¹ Despitethepanel’sexplicitfocusonteaching,thequestionandanswerses- sionthatfollowedforayedintoothermatters.Theveryfirstquestionfromtheau- dience asked how—or even if—such projects counted in tenure and promotion portfolios. Another wondered how the projects’ directors received credit for theirwork.Finally,oneaudiencemembersseemedtoquestiontheentirepremise ofthepanelaltogether,askingwhetherthetimespentdevelopingtheseprojects would be better spent producing journal articles or monographs. Suchquestionsareimportantones.Theygetatsomeofthetensionsaround integratingdigitalscholarshipintotheacademicstudyofreligion.Buttheyalso missedthepointofthesession.Whilethepresenterswereeagertotalkaboutthe pedagogical and intellectual benefits they had gained by employing digital methods,theaudiencewasconcernedwiththeprofessionalissuesthatsurround digital work. “TeachingLocalReligionwithDigitalHumanities:Objects,Methods,Pedagogies,”American AcademyofReligionAnnualMeeting,Denver,Colorado,19Nov.2018.Theprojectsfeaturedat the roundtable were Emily Suzanne Clark, “JesuitMissionson the Columbia Plateau”; Shana Sippyand MichaelMcNally, “Religious Diversity inMinnesota Initiative,” https://religionsmn. carleton.edu/;GaleKenny,“ReligionintheArchive”;RachelMcBrideLindsey,“ArchCityReli- gion,” https://www.archcityreligion.org/; Christopher D.Cantwell, “Gathering Places: Religion andCommunityinMilwaukee,”https://uwm.edu/gatheringplaces;RachelKranson,“Pittsburgh TorahScrollsProject,”https://pittsburghtorahscrolls.wordpress.com/;AmyDeRogatisandIsaac Weiner, “American Religious Sounds Project,” https://religioussounds.osu.edu/; Jennifer S. Leath,“BlackReligiousDenver”;CaraLeaBurndige,“AmericanReligionandRefugeesinthe Heartland.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110573022-001 VIII ChristopherD.CantwellandKristianPetersen Itisadisconnectthatalsooftendefinesconversationsaboutdigitalhuman- itiesmorebroadly.Fromthemomentscholarsfirsttookuptheterm“DH”inthe early 2000s to describe work that either harnessed new technology for human- isticinquiryorstudiednewtechnologieshumanistically,debatesaboutDHtend tocirculatearound“how”questions.Howisdigitalscholarshipgoingtocount? Howisitgoingtobepeerreviewed?Howisitmade?²Though,again,important, whatcangetlostinthesemorepracticaldiscussionsisasustainedreflectionon whyonemightwanttotakeupdigitalmethodsinthefirstplace.Whyareanin- creasingnumberofscholarsandeducatorsfindingdigitalhumanitiesrelevantto theirwork?Whatadvantageshavethesemethodspresentedtothem?Howhave theybenefited?Andwhy mightdigital scholarship be vital for the studyof reli- gion’s future? Thiscollectionaimstotakeupthislatersetofquestions.Ratherthanaddto thealreadyrobustliteratureonbestpracticesintheproduction,evaluation,and promotion of digital scholarship, it aims to focus on the ways scholars have found that digital methods enhance their research, teaching, and service to the profession. Gathering together the lead investigators of more than a dozen projects, the collection covers a wide swath of the digital work now being doneinthestudyofreligion.Itconsiderswhypodcastingandsocialmediaplat- forms might be the future in promoting the public understandingof religion. It showcases why digital projects might be an invaluable resource in helping our students become critical producers of knowledge about religion. And it dwells uponwhy twenty-firstcentury technology mightbe the most productiveavenue for answeringsome of the questions that have animatedour fields for almosta century.Thoughbynomeansacomprehensivesurveyoftheever-growingbody of digital work taking place,the collection does hope to serve as a snapshot of theinspirationsandrevelationsthathavepropelleddigitalscholarship’sgrowth oflate.Inassemblingthevolume,weaskedcontributorstooutlinethejourneyof their inquiries andthe logicbehindthe approaches they used.We hope that by Onthehistoryofdigitalhumanitiesandtheperennialdebatesthathavedefinedthefield,see SusanHockey,“TheHistoryofHumanitiesComputing,”inACompaniontoDigitalHumanities, SusanSchreibman,RaySiemens,JohnUnsworth,eds.(Oxford:Blackwell,2004),http://digital humanities.org:3030/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213. xml&chunk.id=ss1-2-1&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-2-1&brand=9781405103213_brand; Matthew Kir- schenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanitiesand What’s It Doing in EnglishDepartments?” ADE Bulletin150(2010):2–3;MatthewK.Gold,“TheDigitalHumanitiesMoment,”inDebatesinDig- italHumanities,Gold,ed.(Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress,2012),http://dhdebates. gc.cuny.edu/debates;ChristopherD.CantwellandHusseinRashid,Religion,Media,andtheDig- italTurn(NewYork:SocialScienceResearchCouncil,2015). DigitalHumanitiesandReligiousStudies:A“Why”ToGuide IX mapping the terrain in such away—showcasing why digital tools aided in pro- ducing, managing, or teaching religious studies—the reader might come away withanalternativeperspectiveonresearchingtheirownsubjectsorbeinspired to try new methods that resonate with their materials. Why Digital Humanities? Asthecasestudiespresentedherehopefullywilldemonstrate,thereareasmany reasonsfordrawingupondigitalmethodsastherearedigitalprojects.Scholars oftenfindthemselvesdrawntodigitalmethodsbecausetheyhelpgrapplewitha question peculiar to their field, or because they open up new avenues for ad- dressing perennial issues related to teaching, research,or service. But taken as awhole,theessayscollectedheredopointtoaseriesofoverlappinginspirations thathavepropelledthefield.Forinstance,severaloftheauthorscollectedhere turnedtodigitaltoolsbecauseanalyzingabodyofsourcematerialbytraditional methodsprovedimpractical.LincolnMullen’sinterestindocumentingthemost widelyquotedpassagesofscripturethroughoutAmericanhistorywouldhavere- quiredhimtoreadhundredsofmillionsofnewspaperarticles.Similarly,Freder- ickElwert’sresearchonthefrequencywithwhichcertaincharactersorideasap- pearinsacredtextsacrosstime,space,andtraditionwouldhavenecessitateda lifetimeofclosereadingandcataloging.Theseareissuesthatconfrontscholars acrosstheacademytodayasthesheervolumeofmaterialordatarelatedtoour workgrowsexponentially.Andbyusingtextualandnetworkanalysissoftware, both Mullen and Elwert were able to process colossal quantities of data over a reasonable amount of time in order to contribute to debates in their field in new andvital ways. Theabilityofdigitalresearchmethodstofacilitatetheinterpretationofdata goesbeyondjustcomputationalanalysis,however.Anumberoftheprojectsfea- tured here have turned toward digital platforms in order to fostercollaboration or consolidate resources around a particular kind of source material. Rebecca Krawiec and Caroline T. Schroeder’s work on the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM, for ex- ample, not only uses text analysis software to analyze Coptic texts. It also takesadvantage of open-source textencoding methods to create a shareddata- baseofCopticitemsfrommultipleinstitutionsacrosstheglobe.JamesBieloand Claire Vaughan’s piece on the Materializing the Bible project, meanwhile, simi- larly curates a collection of texts, images, and multimedia related to those in- stances when Christian communities across North America attempted to make Bible stories “real” through art, sculptures, plays, and other public performan- ces.What’smore,theexpanseofBieloandVaughn’sworkisalsomadepossible
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