Where's Religion

Where’s Religion? is an open-source mobile and desktop web application developed by humanities faculty and IT professionals at Saint Louis University that supports in-person research, remote data entry, media sharing, and mapping. To do this, the mobile app enables users to collect fieldnotes, image, video, and audio files – all of which are geotagged and timestamped. The desktop companion website/app provides a more feature-rich format to refine fieldnotes, edit media, make new entries, or, for certain user profiles, review or grade other users’ entries. When published, entries are automatically curated online within an interactive public map that has search and filter functions for enhanced usability. Where’s Religion? is conceptualized and designed for students, researchers, and public users to document and share their encounters with “religion” in everyday life – all with the intended purpose of democratizing data collection and visualizing religious and cultural diversity at scale.

Being a tool that initiates engaged learning and in-person experience, we seek to build greater recognition of social dynamics and social context in American public life. The ethical use of technology is key here – one of the fundamental principles driving the purpose and design of Where’s Religion? As a mobile and desktop application, the idea is not only to appeal to casual users and students with the mobile app, but also to mimic an ethnographic-style workflow from out-in-the-field data collection to at-home editing and data refinement. Human subject research and place-based research are both critical skills for the modern, media-saturated world – skills that anyone wielding the power to record, to publish, to reach wide audiences within the palm of their hand should know. Where’s Religion? seeks not just to inform users of ethical human subject research and deepen cultural awareness, but to integrate app features and functions that prompt such consideration in real time through popup warnings, curated information, or otherwise. This is not simply about gathering data, but rather about knowing when, where, and how to (or not to) gather data. Where’s Religion? is a ploy to deeply humanize the “data,” to unpack the ubiquitous media, to slow down and consider the image. Our digital tool therefore combines the computational methods of qualitative research software with an attentiveness to the nuances of “lived” religious life and practice. Our aim is to provide a free, intuitive, and compatible tool for ongoing research and classroom curriculum as well as a user-friendly method for assembling and studying digital media that curates “lived religion” across a diversity of people, places, and things.

Read more here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYQi5vc1_45wzfxXwlLN7t7-jfIKYB3_6JXzcBPs7-M/edit?usp=sharing