Exploring the Challenges and Potentialities of the Database of Religious History for Cognitive Historiography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.31656Keywords:
religion, digital humanities, cultural evolution, cognitive historiographyAbstract
This article explores the potential impact and contribution of the Database of Religious History (DRH) project within the field of Cognitive Historiography. The DRH aims to bring together, in a systematic and open-access format, data on religious groups from across the globe and throughout history. By utilizing robust, open-source technologies and best-practice software principles, the DRH constitutes a novel and innovative approach to historical and cultural studies. As a contribution to the scientific study of both religion and history, the DRH offers data amenable to statistical analyses, thus providing tools for assessing diachronic cultural innovation and adaptation, the testing of grand narrative theories of religious change, and for enriching and revitalizing traditional fields such as comparative religions, history of religion(s), and anthropology of religion. In this article we explore the methods employed in collecting and digitizing historical data, identify our unit of analysis, outline the challenges of recruiting historians of various fields, and highlight the DRH’s methodological potential for both Religious Studies and Cognitive Historiography.
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Matthews, L. J., J. Edmonds, W. J. Wildman et al. 2013. “Cultural Inheritance or Cultural Diffusion of Religious Violence? A Quantitative Case Study of the Radical Reformation”. Religion, Brain and Behavior 3: 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2012.707388
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Norenzayan, A., A. Shariff, A. Willard et al. 2016b. Parochial Prosocial Religions: Historical and “Contemporary Evidence for a Cultural Evolutionary Process”. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 27(7): 713–70.
Remesal, J., A. Díaz-Guilera, B. Rondelli et al. 2014. “The EPNet Project: Production and Distribution of Food during the Roman Empire: Economics and Political Dynamics”. In Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Cultural Heritage: Proceedings of the First EAGLE International Conference, ed. S. Orlandi, R. Santucci, V. Casarosa, et al., 455–64. Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice.
Richerson, P., R. Baldini, A. Bell et al. 2014. “Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: A Sketch of the Evidence”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences [epub ahead of print]: 1–71.
Rubin, K. S. 2012. Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley.
Saler, B. 1993. Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories. Leiden: Brill.
Slingerland, E., and M. Chudek. 2011. “The Prevalence of Mind-body Dualism in Early China”. Cognitive Science 35: 997–1007. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01186.x
Slingerland, E., and B. Sullivan. 2017. “Durkheim with Data: The Database of Religious History”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85(2): 312–47. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfw012
Smith, J. Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Tappenden, F. S. 2018. “The Database of Religious History and the Study of Ancient Mediterranean Religiosity”. Journal of Cognitive Historiography 3(1–2).
Taves, A. 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taves, A. 2011. “2010 Presidential Address: ‘Religion’ in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79: 287–314. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr004
Taves, A. 2015. “Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of ‘Religion’”. Journal of Cognition and Culture 15: 191–216. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342146
Turchin, P., R. Brennan, T.E. Currie et al. 2015. “Seshat: The Global History Databank”. Cliodynamics 6: 77–107. https://doi.org/10.21237/C7CLIO6127917
Turchin, P., H. Whitehouse, P. François et al. 2012. “A Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution”. Cliodynamics 3: 271–93.
Waterson, R. 1990. The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia. New York: Oxford University Press.
Watts, J., S. Greenhill, Q. Atkinson et al. 2015. “Broad Supernatural Punishment but not Moralizing High Gods Precede the Evolution of Political Complexity in Austronesia”. Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 282. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.2556
Watts, J., O. Sheehan, Q. Atkinson et al. 2016. “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies”. Nature 532: 228–31. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17159
Published
2018-03-29
Issue
Section
Digital Humanities, Cognitive Historiography and the Study of Religion
How to Cite
Sullivan, B., Muthukrishna, M., Tappenden, F. S., & Slingerland, E. (2018). Exploring the Challenges and Potentialities of the Database of Religious History for Cognitive Historiography. Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 3(1-2), 12-31. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.31656
