Digital Humanities – Page 2 – Studying Religion in Culture

Mining Futures for the Philosophy of Religion: What to Do with 80,000 or so Journal Articles

March 2, 2020 by Nathan Loewen

vizualization of the topics generated by latent dirichlet analysis

By Nathan Loewen and Jackson Foster We have some questions. Given its conventional focus on topics and problems specific to Western Christianity, how might the philosophy of religion enter the 21st century, globalized world? How may researchers build bridges from those conventional approaches towards other topics and problems? Steven Dawson’s essay reviews some conventional approaches to answering these questions. Were it useful to find complimentary research from other (sub)fields, however, how might this be done across thousands of other, specialized […]

REL Adds New Faculty Member

January 2, 2020 by admin

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama is extremely pleased to announce that Dr. Jeri E. Wieringa — a digital historian and affiliate faculty member with the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University — will be joining the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor for the start of the Fall 2020 semester. She received her Ph.D. in History from George Mason University (2019); her M.A. in Religion, with a concentration in the History […]

American Examples: “An intriguing experimental workshop.”

October 1, 2019 by Keeley McMurray

Travis Cooper holds a double PhD in Religious Studies and Anthropology and lectures at Butler University. His dissertation project, “The Digital Evangelicals: Contesting Authority and Authenticity after the New Media Turn,” examined religious boundary maintenance strategies in the era of social media. His current research focuses on the various social architectures that structure everyday American life-worlds, rituals, and traditions—systems ranging from media ideologies and print culture to the ideologies of urban design and the built environment. An ethnographer of the American Midwest, […]

7 Things I Learned at HILT for the Digital Study of Religion

June 14, 2019 by Nathan Loewen

Prof. Nathan Loewen specializes in the philosophy of religion and digital humanities among other things. This summer his research interests are taking him in a new direction at their intersection. Last week, I travelled to the 2019 Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching event to learn about text analysis from Katie Rawson. Here are just a few outcomes from those five days. […]

Reading, Writing and… R: How I Began to Study the Philosophy of Religion with Digital Tools

June 4, 2019 by Nathan Loewen

Prof. Nathan Loewen specializes in the philosophy of religion and digital humanities among other things. This summer his research interests are taking him in a new direction at their intersection. In Fall 2018, I took my research in a new direction. I began learning how to study the philosophy of religion with digital tools. The objective is to determine how to quantitatively test my qualitative argument that the field is historically structured by commitments to theism in ways that challenge its […]

Dr. Richard Newton is Coming to Tuscaloosa

March 1, 2018 by Russell McCutcheon

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama is extremely pleased to announce that Dr. Richard Newton will be joining our faculty to begin the 2018-19 academic year. Richard is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and received his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in 2009. His research explores how people create “scriptures” and their links to identity formation and the maintenance of cultural boundaries. His current project uses Alex Haley’s Roots as […]

On the Problem With Reproducing Ourselves

November 3, 2017 by Russell McCutcheon

It’s long past when faculty in doctoral degree-granting schools in our field need to start reconsidering what it is that we’re doing in graduate education. I’m hardly the first to say that, I know. […]

The New Triple Threat: Programming Omeka

November 2, 2017 by Sarah Griswold

Our Public Humanities and Religious Studies class built a digital collection of @AARWeb material culture: https://t.co/1bzVzAf1cC #aarsbl17 — UA Dept. of REL (@StudyReligion) October 23, 2017 You may have seen this tweet. As part of the Public Humanities and Religious Studies foundations course in our MA program, I collaborated with Sierra Lawson and Emma Gibson and helped to build AARtifacts. The project was built in Omeka and is meant to represent interesting artifacts gathered from people’s experiences of the annual […]

Digital Religious Studies

October 11, 2017 by Russell McCutcheon

If you’ve followed our Department then you might know about our new MA, which started this Fall. While it’s focused on helping students develop their social theory skills, it also has a focus on the digital skills that have become increasingly relevant in scholarship — whether to communicate with wider audiences, via a variety of online projects (what might be called the public humanities), or to enhance the traditional research that we do. That’s why every incoming group of grad […]

A Modest Proposal for the AAR’s Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Scholarship

August 7, 2017 by Nathan Loewen

The Sneetches. Do you know the story? Dr. Seuss’ story has stuck with me. Somehow, this is what came to mind when I read through the AAR’s draft guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship. After reading through the draft, I began to wonder whether appending “digital” to the work of a scholar is akin to the differentiation made between Sneetches with or without stars. In brief: whose scholarship is, today, not imbricated with digital technologies? The number of scholars who care […]

Studying Religion in Culture

Ongoing Discussions at the University of Alabama

Tag: Digital Humanities