Working with Digital Data in Religious Studies

Modern research in religious studies and related areas typically requires working with digital data in several steps. Students in this course will learn the first two of these steps, that is, (1) how to create and access digital sources, and (2) how to structure their data for analysis.

Relevant digital sources for religious studies research include those that are “born digital” as well as those digitized after their creation. They may be social media posts from a few seconds ago or historical objects thousands of years old. They may be visual or textual, and they may have been created as research datasets or without any consideration of their use in research.

Students will critically consider how the origin of a data source impacts its use in research. They will also learn to apply the “FAIR” (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) criteria of open access in evaluating their own and others’ datasets.

Two topics that will receive special consideration are

-      how to use artificial intelligence tools (AI, such as ChatGPT) to access and process data, including attending to potential biases and inaccuracies, and

-      how to work with non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew, which sometimes lack support in digital tools.

During the course, students will develop their own projects in the form of datasets that are ready for the further steps of analysis and publication.