Towards big religious data: RESILIENCE research infrastructure for data on religion in the digital age

Abstract

Data in and for religion is arguably as old as humanity. Religious significance has been attached to an immense variety of artifacts and documents, often in written form, in nearly all spoken and written languages over the past millennia. The rise of the digital age gives to the scholar in religious studies the opportunity to build research over a much wider array of data than ever before; institutions which have data repositories (such as libraries, museums, universities, etc.) similarly have the chance to make their collections available to a larger community. On the other hand, however, there is a serious risk that a considerable amount of data gets lost during the "Digital transition". This paper presents the approach of the RESILIENCE Research Infrastructure in dealing with the issue of big data and data loss within the field of religious studies.