LSE announces large DRH Grant
“This is a true humanities-science collaboration. The tool is a useful resource for humanities scholars - a qualitative and quantitative database of history. But for social scientists, it’s now one of (if not the) largest quantitative databases of history.”
London School of Economics press release, “The Database of Religious History receives grant from John Templeton Foundation”
The University of British Columbia: DRH Awarded Largest Humanities Grant
“UBC’s Database of Religious History (DRH) project has received the largest grant to date for a single research project in the humanities at UBC—$4.8 million from the John Templeton Foundation.
Led by Dr. Edward Slingerland and Dr. M. Willis Monroe, the project aims to democratize knowledge about religious history, enabling scholars of religion from around the world to share their expertise with a global audience by contributing to the free, searchable database. Each contribution in turn makes the database more useful—and reliable—for everyone.”
“Database of Religious History awarded largest grant for a UBC humanities research project,” The University of British Columbia, April 13, 2021.
Religious Studies News: big data approach to history
“While users can use the DRH similarly to an encyclopedia—that is, looking at individual entries—the database also reflects a Big Data approach to comparing and understanding large scale patterns or trends in the historical record.
Yes, although you can browse individual entries as in an encyclopedia, the DRH is actually a relational database with all of the powerful functionality that comes with the ability to manipulate data on a large scale. Answers to the various poll questions are ultimately grounded only in space and time, which allows users to analyze answers to specific questions within certain date ranges and geographical areas, to correlate answers with other types of geo-spacial data, or to visualize DRH data in a variety of ways.”
“Making Religious History Digitally Native,”Religious Studies News, March 2nd 2017