Durkheim with data: The Database of Religious History

Abstract

This article introduces a new online, quantitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history, the Database of Religious History (DRH). The DRH aims to systematically collect information on past religious groups from around the world in a standardized form, providing a novel digital humanities resource for the religious studies community, a forum for scholarly debates, a pedagogical aid, and a platform for testing hypotheses about religious change over space and time. We employ the DRH project as a lens through which to view some larger intellectual issues surrounding the comparative study of religion, the role of functionalism and "big data" in the study of religion, the challenges of large-scale collaborative projects, and the future of science-humanities integration.