On the Category of Religion: A Taxonomic Analysis of a Large-Scale Database

Abstract

The Database of Religious History is a large-scale digital humanities project dedicated to capturing scholarly perspectives on the history of religious groups across the globe. Analysis of the current state of the data shows a remarkable consistency between a taxonomic tree generated from the entries submitted by our expert contributors and larger assumptions within religious studies as they pertain to the similarities and differences between religious groups. Additionally, there is broad agreement between how experts answer questions and the tags they use to categorize their own entries, demonstrating a consistency between top-down and bottom-up approaches to describing religious groups. We see both of these results as affirming a commensurable understanding of the category of religion while demonstrating the value of these types of large-scale quantitative analyses for answering larger questions within the field.