Digital Humanities Part 3: Digital Humanities for Theology and Religious Studies

If you work in theology or religious studies, you already know the problem, even if you have never named it. Your evidence refuses to sit still. A church historian needs sermon manuscripts and denominational yearbooks. A scholar of Tibetan Buddhism needs woodblock prints scattered across three continents. A student of American religion needs to hear a congregation, not just read about one. The sources of religious life come in more forms than almost any other field has to handle, and most of our training prepares us for exactly one of them: the printed text.

This essay makes the case that the digital humanities matter for theology and religious studies specifically, not as a borrowed toolkit from English departments but as a set of practices that fit the peculiar shape of our evidence. It is the third essay in a six-part series. The first asked what the digital humanities are. The second surveyed tools you can use in a dissertation. This one turns to our own fields and asks what is already built, what it makes possible, what it costs, and how to teach with it.

The Multi-Form Evidence Problem #

Start with an inventory. What counts as evidence in the study of religion? Scriptures, obviously, and the commentaries that accumulate around them like coral. Manuscripts, with their marginalia, corrections, and erasures. But also ritual objects, from prayer beads to processional crosses. Sacred spaces and the pilgrimage routes that connect them. Images, icons, and the visual cultures of devotion. Music and the broader soundscape of worship, which includes creaking pews and kitchen noise as much as choirs. Oral histories from practitioners. Born-digital communities that exist only on Discord servers and WhatsApp threads. Online sermons. Prayer request forms. The institutional archives of denominations, mission boards, and seminaries.

The inventory also keeps growing at the digital end. Religious life now happens in livestreamed liturgies, prayer apps, meditation platforms, and influencer pulpits, and those materials are evidence too, as surely as a medieval sermon collection. They are also far more fragile than they look. A denominational website redesign can erase twenty years of institutional history in an afternoon. A platform shutdown can take a decade of a community's conversation with it. Scholars who study contemporary religion are already, whether they chose it or not, working in a field where the sources decay faster than parchment ever did.

No single scholar masters all of this, and no single method handles it. Yet the print-era organization of our fields quietly privileged one form above the others. If it could be edited, translated, and shelved, it was scholarship's proper object. Everything else became context, background, or the province of some adjacent discipline. Ethnomusicologists got the music. Art historians got the icons. Geographers got the pilgrimage routes. The study of religion kept the texts.

The digital humanities do not dissolve that division of labor, but they loosen it. A database can hold a scanned manuscript, an audio recording, a georeferenced map, and a transcribed census schedule in the same collection, described with the same metadata standards, discoverable through the same search. That technical fact has an intellectual consequence. When a sound recording and a printed sermon can sit side by side as evidence, you can ask questions that neither supports alone. What did this revival sound like, and how did the newspapers describe it? Where were these congregations, and what did they file with the census bureau? The multi-form evidence problem does not go away. It becomes workable.

One caution before going further. The field's best introductory literature insists that religious-studies DH is methodologically plural, and that plurality is worth defending. The De Gruyter series Introductions to Digital Humanities – Religion, the most sustained effort to map this terrain, treats databases, pedagogy, new media, and digital culture as distinct areas of practice rather than one technique with many names.^[1] Nothing in this essay should be read as saying there is a digital method for religion. There are many, and they disagree with each other in productive ways.

What Digital Methods Actually Offer #

Strip away the conference language and the digital humanities offer religious studies about eight concrete things. They preserve fragile materials before fire, war, or mold takes them. They make dispersed sources discoverable, so that a manuscript in a monastery library and its sister copy in Berlin can be found in one search. They allow comparison across corpora too large for any human reading life. They map sacred space and movement through it. They model networks of teachers, students, correspondents, and converts. They support annotation of manuscripts at a depth print editions cannot match. They build public archives that communities can see themselves in. And they teach, because a student who builds a small digital archive learns things about evidence that no seminar discussion can deliver.

Take one example of how the pieces combine. Suppose you study a nineteenth-century missionary society. Its letters are in one archive, its photographs in another, its converts' descendants in living congregations on another continent. A digital project can unite the letters and photographs in one collection, map the mission stations, model the correspondence network, and, if built with the descendants rather than merely about them, give the communities a say in how their ancestors appear. Every one of those steps uses infrastructure that already exists.

Each of these is already happening in the study of religion, at scale, funded, and peer reviewed. That is the part many theologians and religion scholars have not heard. The sections that follow tour that infrastructure, because the case for digital methods in our fields is strongest when it is concrete. You do not have to imagine what a digital library of Jewish texts would look like. You can open one right now.

Libraries of Sacred Texts, Rebuilt for Computation #

Sefaria is the example to show a skeptical colleague first. It describes itself as "a free living library of Jewish texts and their interconnections," and the phrase is precise.^[2] The Tanakh, Talmud, midrash, halakhic codes, and centuries of commentary are not just scanned but structured, so that every verse knows which commentaries discuss it and every Talmudic passage links to the biblical text it cites. Founded in the early 2010s by Joshua Foer and Brett Lockspeiser, Sefaria now underpins classroom source sheets, daily study apps, and a growing body of computational research, because the whole library is available through an open API.^[3] That last detail matters more than it sounds. An API means the texts are not trapped behind a reading interface. A graduate student who wants to trace how a phrase moves from Torah through Rashi into a nineteenth-century responsum can write a script and ask.

Islamic studies has the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative, or OpenITI, led by Matthew Thomas Miller, Maxim Romanov, and Sarah Bowen Savant. OpenITI builds machine-actionable corpora of premodern texts in Arabic and Persian, which is slower and harder work than it sounds because Arabic-script optical character recognition lagged behind Latin-script OCR for decades.^[4] The initiative's Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project, run with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, has pushed the recognition technology itself forward, which is a reminder that religious-studies scholars sometimes have to build the road before they can drive on it.^[5]

Buddhist studies may have the most ambitious of these libraries. The Buddhist Digital Resource Center began in 1999, when E. Gene Smith founded what was then the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center to preserve texts scattered by the Tibetan diaspora. It has since digitized more than twenty-seven million pages of Buddhist literature, and its BUDA platform publishes the catalog as linked open data, so that a text, its author, its printing house, and its lineage of transmission are all machine-readable entities that other projects can build on.^[6]

Smaller fields benefit even more, because digital infrastructure substitutes for the reference works that small fields never had the labor to produce in print. Syriaca.org, the Syriac Reference Portal, publishes linked-data reference works for Syriac studies, including a gazetteer of places and Qadishe, a prosopography of Syriac saints.^[7] For a field whose sources are dispersed across Middle Eastern, European, and American collections, a shared set of stable identifiers for people, places, and works is what lets the field accumulate knowledge at all rather than restart with every scholar.

Manuscripts, Recovered and Preserved #

Digitization is sometimes dismissed as mere photography. Two projects show how wrong that is.

At St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, the oldest continually operating Christian monastery in the world, the Sinai Palimpsests Project used multispectral imaging to recover texts that had been scraped away and written over centuries ago. Working with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and UCLA, the project imaged seventy-four palimpsest manuscripts and recovered erased undertexts in ten languages, several thousand pages of writing that no eye had been able to read for a millennium.^[8] These are not marginal materials. Palimpsest undertexts from Sinai include some of the earliest witnesses to Christian scripture and liturgy in languages like Syriac, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Georgian. No amount of conventional scholarship could have produced this evidence. The imaging did.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John's University in Minnesota has been doing the slower, steadier version of this work since 1965, first with microfilm in Austrian monastic libraries and now with digital photography across the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. HMML states its mission plainly, "Preserving and sharing the world's handwritten past to inspire a deeper understanding of our present and future," and it has photographed manuscripts in partnership with more than 1,500 libraries and collections, prioritizing communities whose heritage is endangered by conflict.^[9] Its online Reading Room lets you search those manuscripts by language, script, genre, and repository from your desk.^[10] Manuscripts HMML photographed in Iraq and Syria before the wars of the last two decades are, in some cases, the only surviving copies. Preservation here is not a preliminary to scholarship but sometimes the only reason any scholarship remains possible.

Listening to Religion #

Religion is heard as much as read. The projects below treat sound as evidence, not atmosphere.

The American Religious Sounds Project, directed by Isaac Weiner at Ohio State and Amy DeRogatis at Michigan State, built a sonic archive of American religious life between 2014 and 2022. Its recordings include the formal sounds you would expect, chanting and choirs and calls to prayer, but also the incidental ones, pots clattering during a langar meal, the murmur before a service starts.^[11] The project's premise is that attending to sound changes what you know about religious diversity. A city's religious life sounds different than it reads, and communities invisible in print can be loud in the archive of the ear.

The Gospel Music History Archive at the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture grew out of a loss. When fire destroyed Chicago's Pilgrim Baptist Church in 2006, it took with it original sheet music and papers of Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of gospel music. The archive digitizes interviews, photographs, recordings, and documents of the gospel tradition and makes them searchable for scholars, artists, and church historians alike.^[12] Waiting to digitize is itself a decision, and the fire showed what it can cost.

The Verse and the Variant: Digital Text Criticism #

Biblical scholars have a special claim on this story, because New Testament textual criticism went digital before most of the humanities knew the word. The problem was always computational in shape. The New Testament survives in thousands of Greek manuscripts, no two identical, and the discipline's founding question, what did the earliest recoverable text say, requires comparing readings across that whole tradition. For two centuries editors managed the comparison with card files, apparatus sigla, and heroic memory.

The Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, which produces the critical editions behind nearly every modern Bible translation, now runs that comparison as data.^[13] Its New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room puts images and transcriptions of Greek New Testament manuscripts online, where anyone can examine the witnesses that editors once traveled continents to see.^[14] More consequentially, the institute's Editio Critica Maior is built with the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, an approach that uses computer-assisted analysis of agreement patterns among witnesses to model how readings flow through the manuscript tradition. You can hold whatever view you like about the method, and text critics hold several, but the debate itself is now a debate about a digital instrument, conducted in the field's most traditional venues. When the Nestle-Aland text your students carry into exegesis class changes a reading, a computational method helped change it.

The point generalizes past the New Testament. Digital critical editions let an editor encode every witness rather than flattening them into a single reconstructed text with an apparatus at the foot of the page. For traditions that never had critical editions at all, the digital edition is often the first edition. And for theologians the stakes are not merely philological. Doctrines of scripture, arguments about canon, and homiletical habits all rest, at some layer, on claims about what the text is. A generation of tools has quietly changed how those claims get made. Seminary curricula have mostly not caught up, and a course that walks students through the Virtual Manuscript Room would teach them more about the human history of their scriptures than another semester of secondary literature.

Maps, Networks, and the Shape of Religious Worlds #

Religion happens somewhere, and it moves. Two families of digital method take that seriously in ways print scholarship never quite could.

Mapping comes first. The gazetteer, a structured index of places with stable identifiers, is the unglamorous foundation. Pleiades, the open gazetteer of the ancient world, gives every attested ancient place a permanent address that projects can link against, which is why a Syriac monastery in one database and the same monastery in another can be recognized as one place.^[15] Syriaca.org built its own gazetteer on the same logic for the Syriac world. On top of such foundations, you can ask spatial questions with real bite. Stanford's ORBIS models travel time and cost across the Roman world, so instead of gesturing at how far Paul traveled, a student can estimate what a winter journey from Antioch to Rome demanded in weeks and denarii.^[16] The American Religious Ecologies maps do something similar for a later world, turning census schedules into a map where you can watch a denomination hug a river valley or an immigrant church trace a railroad line. Sacred space, pilgrimage, mission, migration, and parish geography are all, in part, map problems, and they were waiting for maps that could hold data.

Networks come second. Religious traditions are transmission systems. Teachers certify students, bishops consecrate bishops, Sufi orders trace silsilas, rabbinic authority moves through ordination, and conversion travels along kinship and friendship. Network analysis treats those relationships as data, and it can make visible what narrative history keeps anecdotal, which figures actually bridge communities, where a lineage bottlenecks through a single teacher, how a heresy spreads through correspondence faster than a council can condemn it. The Buddhist Digital Resource Center's linked-data catalog is, among other things, a network of persons, texts, and lineages that scholars can query. Prosopographies like Syriaca's Qadishe do the same for saints. None of this replaces the archive work of establishing who knew whom. It gives that work somewhere cumulative to live, and it lets the next scholar stand on it rather than redo it.

What Counting Can Teach: Lincoln Mullen and America's Public Bible #

If one scholar's work can stand for what quantitative methods offer the history of religion, it is Lincoln Mullen's. Mullen is a historian of American religion at George Mason University and director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and he has spent a career demonstrating that counting, done carefully, is a form of close reading's ally rather than its rival.^[17]

His America's Public Bible is the clearest demonstration. Published by Stanford University Press as an interactive scholarly work, it detects biblical quotations across millions of pages of digitized American newspapers in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection and Gale's Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.^[18] The scale is worth pausing on. The project identified roughly 1.8 million biblical quotations and traced quotation trends for nearly three thousand individual verses across a century of print.^[19] No scholar could read fifteen million newspaper pages. A model can, and what it found reshapes how you think about the Bible in American public life. Verses surged and faded with wars, elections, and panics. Editors quoted scripture for jokes and advertisements as readily as for sermons. The Bible in the newspaper was contested common property, quoted constantly and interpreted in mutually exclusive ways, its meaning far more often assumed than explained. The project won first prize in the National Endowment for the Humanities' Chronicling America Data Challenge in 2016, before growing into the Stanford publication.^[20]

The method did something specific there. It did not replace interpretation. It generated a new object for interpretation, a record of quotation practices that had always existed but had never been visible. That is the honest promise of computational methods for theology and religious studies. They will not tell you what a verse means. They can tell you, for the first time, who quoted it, when, where, and alongside what, and then the interpretive work begins. Mullen's earlier book, The Chance of Salvation, a history of conversion in America, shows the same sensibility applied with traditional methods, which is the point.^[21] The computation serves questions a historian of religion already cared about.

Rebuilding a Census: American Religious Ecologies and RRCHNM #

Mullen also co-directs, with John Turner, a project that shows what patient infrastructure-building looks like in our fields. In 1926 the U.S. Census Bureau conducted a Census of Religious Bodies, collecting a schedule from individual congregations across the country, hundreds of thousands of them, recording membership, buildings, finances, and languages of worship. The tabulated summaries were published. The schedules themselves, the congregation-level records, sat on microfilm, effectively unreadable at scale. The American Religious Ecologies project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is digitizing and transcribing them, calling the schedules "the single richest historical source of data about American congregations."^[22]

By late 2020 the team had digitized more than forty thousand schedules and released them publicly, in the public domain, with datasets and an API.^[23] A second National Endowment for the Humanities grant, awarded in 2023, funds the work of digitizing and transcribing the rest.^[24] Instead of denominational totals by state, you get a congregation-by-congregation map of American religion in 1926, the Black Baptist church and the Yiddish-speaking synagogue and the Norwegian Lutheran parish each visible as a point with its own record. Local historians can find their own congregations. Scholars can ask ecological questions, in the project's language, about how religious bodies inhabited neighborhoods, counties, and regions.

The institution behind this deserves attention as much as the project. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, founded in 1994 by the historian Roy Rosenzweig and renamed in his honor after his death, has spent three decades pursuing a stated mission "to democratize history."^[25] It built tools you may already use without knowing their origin, including Zotero, the reference manager, and Omeka, the collections-publishing platform that runs thousands of digital archives.^[26] It publishes Current Research in Digital History, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that insists digital projects should make discipline-specific arguments rather than just showcase technology.^[27] And it runs multiple religion projects at once, from the 1926 census work to Pandemic Religion, an Omeka-based collection documenting American religious life during COVID-19.^[28] For theological schools and religious-studies departments wondering what institutional commitment to digital scholarship looks like, RRCHNM is the working model: shared staff, shared tools, grant funding, student labor treated as training, and projects that outlive any single grant cycle.

Between Close and Distant Reading #

A worry runs under every conversation about these methods, and it deserves a direct answer before we go further. The worry is that counting is the opposite of reading, that a field built on the patient interpretation of difficult texts betrays itself when it starts treating scripture as data.

The strongest digital scholarship in religion answers the worry by refusing the choice. It is built on movement between scales. Mullen's project counts 1.8 million quotations so that it can then read single newspaper columns with new eyes, because now you know this joke about Jonah appeared during an election season when that verse was surging nationally. The census maps show you a pattern, a denomination thick in one county and absent in the next, and the pattern sends you back to the archive asking why, where only close reading of local sources will answer. Distant reading without close reading produces trivia. Close reading without any sense of scale produces confident generalizations from three examples, which our fields have published for decades without embarrassment.

Theology, of all disciplines, should recognize this rhythm. Exegesis has always moved between the verse and the canon, the word study and the biblical theology. Systematicians move between a doctrine's precise formulation and its place in the whole dogmatic structure. The movement between scales is not foreign to us. What is new is only that one of the scales now runs on software, and that the software's assumptions, like a lexicon's or a concordance's before it, have to be learned and criticized rather than trusted. The tradition of suspicion we bring to every other instrument of interpretation applies here too, and that is an argument for our involvement, not our abstention.

The Ethics of Digitizing the Sacred #

Everything so far has been the good news. Here is the harder part, and for theologians it may be the most important section of this essay.

Digitization is not neutral. When a sacred object becomes a digital image, something changes. The image can travel where the object never would, appear in contexts its community never sanctioned, and be seen by people who, within the tradition, have no standing to see it. Some Indigenous communities restrict certain materials by season, by gender, by initiation status, or by family. A database with a public search box overrides all of that by default.

The scholar who has thought hardest about this is Kimberly Christen, whose work asks directly whether the open-access ideal fits every kind of knowledge. In a widely cited article she argues that the binary logic of open and closed "cannot handle the mire of fine-grained and overlapping types of relationships" that actually govern access to Indigenous knowledge.^[29] Her answer was not to abandon digital archives but to redesign them. Mukurtu, the content management system she helped build, lets communities set cultural protocols that control who sees what, and the Traditional Knowledge Labels developed with Local Contexts let source communities attach their own conditions of access and use to digitized materials, even materials legally in the public domain.^[30] For scholars of religion, this is not someone else's problem. Ritual objects, ceremonial recordings, and esoteric texts raise exactly these questions, whatever the tradition.

Colonial archives raise a second set. Much of what religious-studies scholars digitize was collected under conditions of grossly unequal power, by missionaries, colonial administrators, and anthropologists whose subjects did not consent to being documented. The art historian Temi Odumosu, writing about digitized images of enslaved people in Danish colonial archives, poses the question that every digitization project involving such materials must answer: what does it mean to provide open digital access to materials representing violated subjects who never agreed to be recorded in the first place?^[31] Making a colonial archive searchable multiplies its reach, for researchers and descendants, but also multiplies the exposure of the people caught inside it. Gerben Zaagsma has argued that digitization choices are themselves political, shaping which pasts become visible and on whose terms.^[32] And the Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data, a widely endorsed set of principles for treating cultural collections computationally, insists that collections as data should be developed with care for the people they represent, not just efficiency for the researchers who query them.^[33]

Then there is born-digital religion, where the ethical questions arrive before the archive does. Online prayer requests, congregational Facebook groups, grief posts, and confession threads are all technically collectable. A prayer request is data to a scraper and a cry of the heart to the person who typed it. If you harvest ten thousand of them for a corpus study, what have you done, and who did you ask? Theologians are, if anything, better equipped than most humanists to take these questions seriously, because our fields have never pretended that texts and objects are inert. A discipline that understands what it means for something to be consecrated should understand what it means for something to be exposed.

None of this is an argument against digitization. It is an argument that access is a relationship, not a switch, and that religious-studies scholars should be helping to design the relationship rather than inheriting defaults from commercial platforms.

Working with Communities, Not Just About Them #

The ethics questions have a constructive corollary. Digital projects change the relationship between scholars and the communities they study, and the best projects treat that change as an opportunity rather than a risk to be managed.

A print monograph about a congregation is written for other scholars, and the congregation may never see it. A digital archive of the same congregation is visible to its members the day it goes online, and they will have opinions. They will correct your dates, identify the people in your photographs, and tell you which items should never have been public. That friction is the method working as intended. The American Religious Sounds Project recorded in partnership with the communities it documented. Pandemic Religion invited people to contribute their own materials, so the archive of American religious life under COVID-19 is partly self-authored by the people who lived it. Mukurtu goes furthest, handing communities the keys to their own collections. Each of these projects treats the community as a source of authority about its own religious life, not merely a source of data.

For theologians this should feel familiar rather than radical, because many of us are answerable to communities already. Seminary faculty serve churches. Scholars trained in traditions they study answer to teachers and elders as well as tenure committees. The digital humanities did not invent accountability to living communities. What they did was make it structural, built into permissions systems and contribution forms and takedown policies, instead of leaving it to the individual scholar's conscience. That is worth having, and religious-studies scholars, who navigate these relationships as a matter of professional survival, have expertise the wider digital humanities needs. This is one of the places where our fields should be exporting wisdom, not importing it.

Where the Work Gets Shared: Knowledge Commons #

Digital scholarship needs somewhere to live that is not a publisher's paywall or a personal hard drive. For scholars of religion, the most important address is Knowledge Commons, the open scholarly network at hcommons.org. Launched as Humanities Commons and hosted at Michigan State University, it connects a community of scholars now numbering in the tens of thousands, with Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who has long directed the effort, among the most thoughtful voices in academia on why scholarly infrastructure should be community-owned.^[34]

Two features matter most in practice. First, the network hosts groups and sites, so a research seminar or a scholarly society section can share syllabi, working papers, and discussion in the open. Religion scholars are already there, including groups connected to American Academy of Religion research programs.^[35] Second, and more consequential for your CV, its repository, CORE, now branded KCWorks, gives every deposit a persistent DOI.^[36] That means the conference paper you would otherwise let die in a drawer, the syllabus you spent a summer on, the dataset behind your article, each can become a citable object with a stable address, open to anyone, counted by citation trackers. For fields like theology, where so much intellectual labor circulates informally through guild meetings and never enters the published record, an open repository with DOIs is a real shift in what counts.

Knowledge Commons also signals something about where this work finds institutional homes. Michigan State's digital humanities program, which offers an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate and anchors an active DH@MSU community across departments, is the kind of program where a religious-studies student can now get formal methods training without leaving the humanities.^[37] If you advise students who want these skills, programs like MSU's are where to send them looking.

Teaching Theology and Religion Digitally #

The pedagogical case for digital humanities in theological education is easy to state. Students learn about evidence by handling it, and digital projects force the handling.

Ask a seminar to write a paper about a local congregation's history and you will get prose about sources. Ask them to build a small public archive of it, and suddenly every decision teaches. What do we photograph? What do we call this object, and in whose vocabulary? Who might be harmed if this photo is public? What metadata does a scholar in fifty years need us to record now? Those are the questions of archival theory, description, and research ethics, and students meet them not as readings but as decisions with consequences. Instructors across the humanities use Omeka, the RRCHNM-built platform, for exactly this kind of student-built collection work, and it fits religious-studies courses naturally because congregations, cemeteries, shrines, and family devotional objects are all nearby and under-documented.

For narrative and spatial assignments, the free tools from Northwestern University's Knight Lab have become a standard classroom kit, and they deserve their reputation.^[38] TimelineJS builds interactive timelines from a spreadsheet, which makes it a one-class-session tool for visualizing, say, the sequence of the Reformation pamphlet wars or a century of a diocese's bishops. StoryMapJS ties narrative to place, and religious studies is full of journeys that students understand differently once they trace them: Paul's travels, the hajj routes, the Great Migration's remaking of American Black church life. JuxtaposeJS compares two images with a slider, perfect for a church before and after iconoclasm or a neighborhood before and after a mosque was built. SoundciteJS embeds inline audio, so an essay about chant can let the reader hear the chant mid-sentence. Knight Lab reports that TimelineJS alone has been used by more than 250,000 people.^[39] These tools cost nothing, require no code, and produce work students can put in a portfolio.

Assignment design is where the pedagogy succeeds or fails, and the principles are teachable. Keep the corpus small enough that students can know it whole, a single congregation's newsletters, one missionary's letter book, the gravestones of one cemetery section. Make the technical layer thin at first, a spreadsheet feeding a timeline, so the intellectual work stays in front. Build the ethics conversation into the assignment rather than appending it, by requiring students to justify in writing what they chose not to publish. And end with an audience beyond the instructor, because students who know a congregation's members will see the site behave differently with evidence than students writing for a grade. None of this requires the instructor to be a technologist. It requires the same judgment about scope and sources that any good seminar paper assignment already demands.

There is also now a scholarly literature on this teaching, so you do not have to improvise alone. The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, the field's dedicated teaching institute, publishes the open-access Wabash Center Journal on Teaching, where instructors document what digital assignments actually do in religion classrooms.^[40] A representative example is Randall Reed and Alaina Doyle's account of teaching religious-studies majors to work with data, arguing that data-analysis assignments serve both humanistic inquiry and students' employability.^[41] That dual argument matters in theological education, where enrollment pressures are real and students reasonably ask what skills a religion degree carries into the world. A graduate who can build an archive, clean a dataset, and tell a story with a map has an answer.

The Limits Are Interpretive Too #

An honest advocate has to say what these methods cannot do, and the limits are not mainly technical. They are interpretive, which means they belong inside our scholarship rather than in a methods appendix.

Every corpus has boundaries, and the boundaries are arguments. A study of the Bible in American newspapers is really a study of the Bible in the newspapers that got digitized, which skews toward certain regions, languages, and publishers. Sefaria's library, for all its richness, encodes decisions about which textual traditions and editions represent Judaism. OpenITI's corpus grows fastest where OCR works best. Optical character recognition itself has error rates that vary by script, typeface, and print quality, so the archive is always cleanest for the best-printed, which usually means the best-funded, corners of a tradition. Metadata categories carry assumptions too. A census schedule that asks for a congregation's denomination imposes a Protestant organizational logic on communities it fits badly. A catalog field for author sits awkwardly on texts a tradition regards as revealed.

None of this is a reason to abstain. It is a reason to treat preservation, encoding, and metadata as knowledge-making practices rather than clerical preliminaries, which is precisely how the strongest projects already treat them. The scholars behind the infrastructures in this essay write about their categories and their error rates in public, and reading those methods essays is now part of reading the scholarship. Your training in hermeneutics is precisely what this work demands. A field that has spent two centuries asking how a canon gets formed is well prepared to ask how a corpus does.

Where to Start #

If this essay has worked, you are asking what to do next, so here is a modest sequence. Spend an hour inside one infrastructure near your own specialty, Sefaria or BUDA or the HMML Reading Room or the American Religious Ecologies maps, and pay attention to what its structure lets you ask. Create a Knowledge Commons account and deposit one thing you have already written. If you teach, replace one paper assignment with one Knight Lab assignment and see what your students do with it. And if you are beginning a research project, ask the ethics questions at the design stage, before the first scan, using Christen and Odumosu as your guides.

When you want training, it exists and much of it is free. The Programming Historian publishes peer-reviewed, novice-friendly lessons on the exact methods this essay has described, from text analysis to mapping, and you can work through one in an afternoon.^[42] Summer institutes and workshops in the digital humanities now run on several continents, and your library likely has a digital scholarship unit whose staff would be delighted to hear from a theologian, because they field the same questions from historians and literary scholars every week. You will not be starting alone, and you will not be starting from zero. The infrastructures in this essay were built to be used, and the communities around them were built to teach.

The deeper invitation is to stop thinking of the digital humanities as someone else's field that religion scholars borrow from. The projects in this essay were built by scholars of religion, for questions about religion, often against real technical odds. The evidence of religious life is multi-form, dispersed, fragile, and contested, and it always has been. What has changed is that the methods finally match it.

One more word to the skeptics, because every department has them and they are often right. You do not have to become a programmer. You do not have to believe that data will settle interpretive questions, because it will not. You do not even have to like these methods to benefit from what they preserve, since the manuscript HMML photographed before the war does not care whether its eventual reader admires databases. The claim of this essay is narrower and harder to dismiss. The evidence of religious life is being digitized, structured, and made computable, by scholars of religion among others, and the standards being set now will govern what future scholars can see and ask. The only question is whether people with theological and religious-studies training are in the room while it happens. Our absence would not stop the work. It would just make the work worse.

In this series #

1. Digital Humanities Part 1: What Are the Digital Humanities?
2. Digital Humanities Part 2: Digital Humanities Tools for Dissertations
3. Digital Humanities Part 3: Digital Humanities for Theology and Religious Studies
4. Digital Humanities Part 4: Why We Need the Digital Humanities
5. Digital Humanities Part 5: Preserving Digital Humanities Projects
6. Digital Humanities Part 6: Preservation through Minimal Computing and GO::DH

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1. Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen, eds., Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies: An Introduction, Introductions to Digital Humanities – Religion (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110573022/html. ↩︎

2. "About Sefaria," Sefaria, accessed July 14, 2026, https://www.sefaria.org/about. ↩︎

3. Sefaria's developer resources and API documentation, Sefaria, https://developers.sefaria.org/. ↩︎

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6. "About Us," Buddhist Digital Resource Center, accessed July 14, 2026, https://www.bdrc.io/about-us/. The BUDA platform is at https://library.bdrc.io/. ↩︎

7. "About Syriaca.org," Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal, ed. David A. Michelson et al., accessed July 14, 2026, https://syriaca.org/about-srophe.html. ↩︎

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14. New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, Institute for New Testament Textual Research, University of Münster, accessed July 14, 2026, https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/. ↩︎

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18. Lincoln Mullen, America's Public Bible: A Commentary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), https://americaspublicbible.supdigital.org/. ↩︎

19. Lincoln Mullen, "Introduction," in America's Public Bible: A Commentary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), https://americaspublicbible.supdigital.org/essay/introduction/. ↩︎

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21. Lincoln A. Mullen, The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674975620. ↩︎

22. "40,000 Documents from Religious Bodies Census Digitized Nearly a Century Later," American Religious Ecologies, December 14, 2020, https://religiousecologies.org/blog/40000-documents-from-religious-bodies-census-digitized-nearly-a-century-later/. The project overview is at https://religiousecologies.org/about/. ↩︎

23. "40,000 Documents from Religious Bodies Census Digitized Nearly a Century Later," American Religious Ecologies, December 14, 2020, https://religiousecologies.org/blog/40000-documents-from-religious-bodies-census-digitized-nearly-a-century-later/. ↩︎

24. "American Religious Ecologies Receives Second NEH Grant to Work with 1926 Census of Religious Bodies," Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, April 2023, https://rrchnm.org/blog/american-religious-ecologies-receives-second-neh-grant-to-work-with-1926-census-of-religious-bodies/. ↩︎

25. "Our Story," Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, accessed July 14, 2026, https://rrchnm.org/our-story/. ↩︎

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27. "About," Current Research in Digital History, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, accessed July 14, 2026, https://crdh.rrchnm.org/about/. ↩︎

28. Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, accessed July 14, 2026, https://pandemicreligion.org/. ↩︎

29. Kimberly Christen, "Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness," International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 2870–2893, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1618. ↩︎

30. Mukurtu CMS, accessed July 14, 2026, https://mukurtu.org/. Traditional Knowledge Labels are maintained by Local Contexts at https://localcontexts.org/. ↩︎

31. Temi Odumosu, "The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons," Current Anthropology 61, no. S22 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1086/710062. ↩︎

32. Gerben Zaagsma, "Digital History and the Politics of Digitization," Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38, no. 2 (2023): 830–851, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac050. ↩︎

33. "The Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data," Always Already Computational: Collections as Data, accessed July 14, 2026, https://collectionsasdata.github.io/statement/. ↩︎

34. Knowledge Commons, accessed July 14, 2026, https://hcommons.org/. On Kathleen Fitzpatrick's role and the network's scale, see "Kathleen Fitzpatrick Named New Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies," Michigan State University, May 27, 2025, https://wrac.msu.edu/2025/05/27/kathleen-fitzpatrick-named-new-associate-dean-for-research-and-graduate-studies/. ↩︎

35. For example, the AAR Artificial Intelligence and Religion Research Seminar group, Knowledge Commons, https://hcommons.org/groups/aar-artificial-intelligence-and-religion-research-seminar/. ↩︎

36. "CORE," Knowledge Commons, accessed July 14, 2026, https://hcommons.org/core/. The repository is at https://works.hcommons.org/. ↩︎

37. Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, accessed July 14, 2026, https://digitalhumanities.msu.edu/. ↩︎

38. Northwestern University Knight Lab, accessed July 14, 2026, https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/. TimelineJS: https://timeline.knightlab.com/. StoryMapJS: https://storymap.knightlab.com/. JuxtaposeJS: https://juxtapose.knightlab.com/. SoundciteJS: https://soundcite.knightlab.com/. ↩︎

39. "About," Northwestern University Knight Lab, accessed July 14, 2026, https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/about/. ↩︎

40. The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, published via Atla Open Press, https://serials.atla.com/wabashcenter/. The Wabash Center is at https://wabashcenter.wabash.edu/. ↩︎

41. Randall Reed and Alaina Doyle, "Teaching Religion with Data," The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching 2, no. 2 (2021), https://serials.atla.com/wabashcenter/article/view/563. ↩︎

42. The Programming Historian, accessed July 14, 2026, https://programminghistorian.org/. ↩︎