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cIRcle / 2023 / November / 07 / Explore cIRcle: Database of Religious History
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Explore cIRcle: Database of Religious History

By Kelly Gauvin on Nov 07, 2023

Screenshot showing an encyclopedia entry from the Database of Religious History about Kuy Traditional Religions, authored by Sarah Youngblutt. The entry includes a list of keywords, a map highlighting the relevant region, the applicable date range, and the number of questions answered within the entry.

Image courtesy: The Database of Religious History

 

The Database of Religious History (DRH) is one of cIRcle’s leading contributors of open access, expert-sourced publications on the history of religions, religious texts and places. DRH is an “independent academic initiative, based at UBC but involving partners and collaborators from all over the world,” and aims to create a digital encyclopedia of religious cultural history (Database of Religious History, n.d.).

About the Database of Religious History

Initially funded through a 2012 Partnership Grant awarded to UBC from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, DRH has received further funding over the years from UBC’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, and the John Templeton Foundation. UBC is now the permanent institutional home of DRH, with project team ties to several departments within the Faculty of Arts, including Asian Studies, Philosophy, and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies.

DRH has worked with cIRcle since 2017, with nearly 500 entries archived in cIRcle to date. Recent topics include Byzantine Iconoclasts (726-787 CE), the Cult of the Fox, Religion in the Mittani Empire, and Huamachuco Religion.

Browsing the Database

DRH aims to create an encyclopedic “core of standardized, searchable, visualizable knowledge surrounded by rich qualitative comments, references and links to otherwise scattered and hard to find on-line repositories of texts and images” (Database of Religious History, n.d.). DRH’s materials can be accessed through UBC Library’s Open Collections, as well as through the project’s online Database. The online Database brings together encyclopedia entries from a variety of expert source partners, including Pulotu – the Database of Pacific Religions, Visual Archives of the Silk and Spice Routes, and Mapping Religious Diversity in Modern Sichuan, among others.

Screenshot showing the 'Quick Visualization' feature in the Database of Religious History. The visualization depicts the number and percentage of encyclopedia entries that respond to the user's query, along with a dynamic map highlighting the number of relevant entries for different regions.

Image courtesy: The Database of Religious History

Using the DRH Database, entries can be browsed by religious group, place, or text, language, region, author, or publication date. Each entry answers a series of questions, with some entries providing research-rich answers to more than 400 questions. The DRH Database offers additional research engagement tools, including query-driven information visualizations and data analytics. The visualizations tool queries database entries, tags, comments, and regions to provide graphic responses to research questions, providing researchers with both a quick visual snapshot of their search results as well as a report with relevant encyclopedia entries.

Interested in exploring DRH’s trove of encyclopedia entries? Find them in UBC’s Open Collections.

References

Database of Religious History. (n.d.). About the DRH. https://religiondatabase.org/landing/about/about-the-drh

 

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