If you have institutional access, you can find the article on The Professional Geographer's website. If not, get in touch with one of us and we'll satisfy your sheepish craving.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
October 24, 2012
New article on Religious Cyberscapes published in The Professional Geographer!
In what will go down as a shining example of need for patience when dealing with the world of academic publishing, Taylor, Matt and Mark's article on religious cyberscapes has finally been published in the print version of The Professional Geographer... and one issue earlier than expected at that!
While the online-only version has been up for just over a year already, we're happy to have this paper finally reach it's conclusion, nearly two years after its acceptance and well over two and a half years from the time we started working on it.
If you have institutional access, you can find the article on The Professional Geographer's website. If not, get in touch with one of us and we'll satisfy your sheepish craving.
If you have institutional access, you can find the article on The Professional Geographer's website. If not, get in touch with one of us and we'll satisfy your sheepish craving.
August 09, 2010
Jedi Knights as a Religious Phenomenon
As a non-religious person, I'm not sure how I feel about the fictional protagonists of my all-time favorite movies being turned into a quasi-religious sect. But that's exactly what's happened with the Jedi Knights of Star Wars. From the worldwide movement in 2001 to list Jedi as one's religious preference to the current debate over the axing of Canada's long-form census, the Jedi have long permeated the boundary between reality and fantasy. With their locations visible in Google Maps, we now have evidence that have they also permeated the boundary between materiality and virtuality [1].
This map comes from a paper we're currently working on about the cyberscapes of religion in Google Maps. Using the absolute number of references to "Jedi" in the Google Maps database as our measurement, we thought that mapping these references in the UK would present an excellent opportunity to blur the boundaries between the sacred and the farcical.
Although the concentration of most geotagged content can be explained by population density, references to Jedi conform to a more unique spatial distribution. The greatest number of references to Jedi exist in and around the cities of Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham - all fairly large in their own right - rather than in the capital and largest city of London. It's also interesting to note that most of England has some level of references to Jedi, perhaps indicating a general level of interest across the country.
And yet, based on the actual counts from the 2001 census, the three cities with the most virtual references do not represent either the greatest absolute number of Jedi (that would be Leeds with 7,543) or the greatest number of Jedi as a percentage of the total population (Brighton and Hove with 2.6%). While both Nottingham (#12) and Manchester (#19) rank highly with Jedi as a percentage of the total population, Birmingham is ranked just #227 with just 0.6% of the population declaring themselves Jedi.
So what makes them so prevalent by our measure? Are these the locations of new, secret Jedi academies? Is there an important force nexus present somewhere in one of these cities? Any clues or suggestions welcome...
[1] We currently have no evidence that this virtual representation of Jedi within Google Maps has anything to do with the mystical powers of the Force.
This map comes from a paper we're currently working on about the cyberscapes of religion in Google Maps. Using the absolute number of references to "Jedi" in the Google Maps database as our measurement, we thought that mapping these references in the UK would present an excellent opportunity to blur the boundaries between the sacred and the farcical.Although the concentration of most geotagged content can be explained by population density, references to Jedi conform to a more unique spatial distribution. The greatest number of references to Jedi exist in and around the cities of Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham - all fairly large in their own right - rather than in the capital and largest city of London. It's also interesting to note that most of England has some level of references to Jedi, perhaps indicating a general level of interest across the country.
And yet, based on the actual counts from the 2001 census, the three cities with the most virtual references do not represent either the greatest absolute number of Jedi (that would be Leeds with 7,543) or the greatest number of Jedi as a percentage of the total population (Brighton and Hove with 2.6%). While both Nottingham (#12) and Manchester (#19) rank highly with Jedi as a percentage of the total population, Birmingham is ranked just #227 with just 0.6% of the population declaring themselves Jedi.
So what makes them so prevalent by our measure? Are these the locations of new, secret Jedi academies? Is there an important force nexus present somewhere in one of these cities? Any clues or suggestions welcome...
[1] We currently have no evidence that this virtual representation of Jedi within Google Maps has anything to do with the mystical powers of the Force.
March 24, 2010
Finding Religion
We've received many comments in response to our latest series of maps of online representations of religion. Some were full of praise while others, well, weren't.
The critiques focused mainly on the fact that the maps didn't include the full diversity of religious beliefs in the world, or that the dominant belief systems of an area didn't necessarily appear in a place's cyberscape. A lot of this can be tied to our decisions about what to map and how to display it. Any map represents a whole range of decisions about what to include and how to display it and obviously some of our decisions rankled the sensibilities of some folks. The Anglicans of the United Kingdom seemed particularly incensed about being classified as Catholic. Jeez, it is almost as if there were decades of dynastical conflict and civil war about the issue of religion in England.
So, in response to the concerns raised by our readers we're featuring a series of maps of different religious terms. All of the maps below plot only the raw number of mentions of a particular keyword in the Google Maps database. Because these maps are not adjusted based on population or the relative specialization of placemarks with the given keyword, densely populated areas and those with higher levels of internet access are more prominently shown. Also, the sizing of the circles are unique to each map and therefore one CANNOT make direct comparisons between maps.
Despite these shortcomings, the maps are more or less indicative of the places where our readers expected to find high concentrations of Anglicans (particularly the U.K.) and Lutherans (northern Europe and the Nordic countries).
Map of Lutheran
Although it would appear that parts of the US, Canada and Australia rival the UK in the number of Anglicans, this isn't necessarily the case. Indeed, terms such as the "Church of England," "Church or Scotland" or "Church of Ireland" are used equivalently to "Anglican" in the U.K. but were not one of the keywords in our study.
For sake of comparison, we've also include a map of references to "catholic" in Google Maps placemarks. Remember, one CANNOT directly compare the size of the circles between maps. The sizing is unique for each.
Map of Catholic
The inability of capturing the variety of language used to described a single phenomenon remains a methodological issue for us, but it is one that we are continuing to address. Regardless, our concern is not with purporting to show the actual number of people subscribing to a particular religious doctrine in a particular place, but rather only how religions are represented in the cyberscapes of places.
For example, the terms Atheist and Agnostic are largely located within the U.S. (Southern California and the Northeast) and Europe. Few other parts of the world show the presence of these keywords.
The critiques focused mainly on the fact that the maps didn't include the full diversity of religious beliefs in the world, or that the dominant belief systems of an area didn't necessarily appear in a place's cyberscape. A lot of this can be tied to our decisions about what to map and how to display it. Any map represents a whole range of decisions about what to include and how to display it and obviously some of our decisions rankled the sensibilities of some folks. The Anglicans of the United Kingdom seemed particularly incensed about being classified as Catholic. Jeez, it is almost as if there were decades of dynastical conflict and civil war about the issue of religion in England.
So, in response to the concerns raised by our readers we're featuring a series of maps of different religious terms. All of the maps below plot only the raw number of mentions of a particular keyword in the Google Maps database. Because these maps are not adjusted based on population or the relative specialization of placemarks with the given keyword, densely populated areas and those with higher levels of internet access are more prominently shown. Also, the sizing of the circles are unique to each map and therefore one CANNOT make direct comparisons between maps.
Despite these shortcomings, the maps are more or less indicative of the places where our readers expected to find high concentrations of Anglicans (particularly the U.K.) and Lutherans (northern Europe and the Nordic countries).
Map of Anglican
Map of Lutheran
Although it would appear that parts of the US, Canada and Australia rival the UK in the number of Anglicans, this isn't necessarily the case. Indeed, terms such as the "Church of England," "Church or Scotland" or "Church of Ireland" are used equivalently to "Anglican" in the U.K. but were not one of the keywords in our study.
For sake of comparison, we've also include a map of references to "catholic" in Google Maps placemarks. Remember, one CANNOT directly compare the size of the circles between maps. The sizing is unique for each.
Map of Catholic
The inability of capturing the variety of language used to described a single phenomenon remains a methodological issue for us, but it is one that we are continuing to address. Regardless, our concern is not with purporting to show the actual number of people subscribing to a particular religious doctrine in a particular place, but rather only how religions are represented in the cyberscapes of places.
For example, the terms Atheist and Agnostic are largely located within the U.S. (Southern California and the Northeast) and Europe. Few other parts of the world show the presence of these keywords.
Map of Atheist and Agnostic
References to Scientology, the domain of Hollywood actors like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are similarly concentrated in the places one would expect of them. Although Scientology's status as a religion can surely be debated (and continues to be in many countries, which could help explain the cluster in Germany), one sees large pockets in Los Angeles, where the Church of Scientology is now headquartered, New Jersey, where it was founded, and Clearwater, Florida, where it maintains a large complex.
Map of Scientology
Map of Zoroastrianism
So even the descendants of a religion founded in the 5th century B.C. are on Google Maps. Who knew?
References to Scientology, the domain of Hollywood actors like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are similarly concentrated in the places one would expect of them. Although Scientology's status as a religion can surely be debated (and continues to be in many countries, which could help explain the cluster in Germany), one sees large pockets in Los Angeles, where the Church of Scientology is now headquartered, New Jersey, where it was founded, and Clearwater, Florida, where it maintains a large complex.
Even Google Maps references to Zoroastrianism, purported to be the oldest known religion but now claiming relatively few adherents, are located in the parts of Iran, the United States, Pakistan and India that continue to have clusters of Zoroastrian believers.
Map of Zoroastrianism
So even the descendants of a religion founded in the 5th century B.C. are on Google Maps. Who knew?March 17, 2010
Mapping Christianity
Last week's New Technologies and Interdisciplinary Research on Religion was a fascinating collection of work in this area. Historians, data visualizationists, linguists, sociologists, economists, etc. presented on a wide range of topics which really worked well together. You can find our presentation here.
So after the last week of alcohol and drug related postings I guess you can say that we've found religion! Hallelujah! And returning to our earlier analysis of the cyberscapes of religion, the following three maps take a more fine grained look at representations of Christianity on the internet.
The first map displays references to four types of Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal and Protestant) at a global scale. Vivid patterns are visible on this map. References to "Catholic" dominate in many places. Of course, those who are making placemarks may be more likely to refer to a specific Protestant denomination (e.g., Methodist, Baptist, etc.) which would serve to overstate the level of Catholicism.
However, there are clear clusters of the three other types of Christianity. Most interesting is the fact that references to "Pentecostal" are more visible than references to "Catholic" in most parts of Brazil (and large parts of South America) despite the fact that almost three-quarters of Brazilians identify as being Catholics. Part of the issue is likely down to the fact that we thus far have confined our searches to English-language terms and are therefore missing out on all the references to Catholicism in Spanish. However, it is intriguing that Pentecostalism is so visible in Brazil (perhaps because it is rapidly growing in popularity in the region).
Taking a closer look at Europe, there is a fascinating split between Orthodox Eastern Europe, Protestant Germany, and Catholic everywhere else. In places such as the UK that contain more Protestants than Catholics it is likely that people aren't using the actual term "Protestant" as a signifier of their religion.
Too combat this issue of Protestantism being an overly general term that few people associated with, we also looked at a broader range of terms related to Christian denominations in the US and discovered patterns that are incredibly clear. Catholics are most visible in much of the Northeast and Canada, with Lutherans taking the Midwest, Baptists the Southeast, and Mormons unsurprisingly taking much of the mountain states. Methodists, interestingly, seem to primarily be most visible in a thin red line between the Southern Baptists and everyone else. The obvious (and farcical question) is against whom are they forming a defensive barrier?
Our readers might also be interested in the fact that there are parts of the country in which the Amish are most visible in religious cyberspaces: a somewhat surprising finding given the fact that they are not supposed to be using contemporary technology - let alone be annotating Google placemarks.
January 26, 2010
Google's Geographies of Religion
“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds”
Susan Sontag
Interestingly, there are are no large-scale homogeneities in the data and this reflects the sometimes scattered nature of religious practice in the world. Looking at the below map of user-created religious references in Europe, it can been seen are a significant number of places (e.g. parts of Switzerland, Germany, the UK) in which there are more references to Buddha than any other religious terms. Likewise there are parts of Belgium and France with a dominant number of references to Allah, and parts of the UK with a dominant number of reference to Hindu. (The cluster of Hindu references on the Estonian islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa is tied to a village named Hindu rather than religious practice). Also of note is the transition of religion as one moves eastward and southward with references to Allah becoming more prevalent in Muslim North Africa and Turkey. However, one can also see how this is far from monolithic with references to Jesus also sprinkled throughout this region as well as strong clusters in Israel/Palestine as well as within Armenia.
In Asia a similar amount of diversity can be seen. The United Arab Emirates is a particularly interesting example. While officially a Muslim country, Indians make up the largest demographic presence and the dominance of references to Hindu (rather than Allah) is likely a reflection of this fact. Likewise the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago (particularly the island of Java) illustrate the complexity of religious practice in this region. References to Buddha, Allah and Hindu are all in evidence on Java. Other examples include the predominately Buddhist nation of Sri Lanka with some Hindu areas to the North and the difference between Pakistan (more Allah) and India (more Hindu).
Finally, it is informative to include one additional map with this set. Here we included placemarks that reference the word ("sex"), a popular and international used term with very different connotations than the religious keywords used earlier. The purpose of including this term is to compare user interest in religion to user interest in sex. If (as some say) the three topics to avoid in polite conversation are religion, sex and politics it seems only right that this Internet blog (the antithesis to polite conversation if there every was one) takes on the question. Sadly, the inclusion of politics will have to wait until another day.
In Asia there are very few places where there are more references to sex than Allah, Buddha, Hindu or Jesus.
Constrasting this is Western Europe (especially the UK and Scandinavia) and North America (especially the East and West Coasts) there are more references to sex than any of the four religious terms that we searched for. The distribution in the U.S. mirrors our early maps of the virtual bible belt and church-bowling-firearms-strip clubs. There are, however, exceptions such as the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal which continue to show more references to Jesus.
So it would seem that Susan Sontag's observation has some merit, at least in the European and North American context.
Susan Sontag
Following up on the earlier discussion of the user-created geographies of religion, the following maps simultaneously display all four religious references (Allah, Buddha, Hindu, Jesus) in order to visualise distinct religious cyberscapes. Below we see the data on a global scale. This map clearly mirrors many of the expected religious geographies of the offline world: references to Allah being most prominent in the Middle East, references to Buddha being most prominent in East Asia, references to Hindu being most prominent on the Indian subcontinent and references to Jesus being prominent in Europe and much of the Western Hemisphere.
Interestingly, there are are no large-scale homogeneities in the data and this reflects the sometimes scattered nature of religious practice in the world. Looking at the below map of user-created religious references in Europe, it can been seen are a significant number of places (e.g. parts of Switzerland, Germany, the UK) in which there are more references to Buddha than any other religious terms. Likewise there are parts of Belgium and France with a dominant number of references to Allah, and parts of the UK with a dominant number of reference to Hindu. (The cluster of Hindu references on the Estonian islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa is tied to a village named Hindu rather than religious practice). Also of note is the transition of religion as one moves eastward and southward with references to Allah becoming more prevalent in Muslim North Africa and Turkey. However, one can also see how this is far from monolithic with references to Jesus also sprinkled throughout this region as well as strong clusters in Israel/Palestine as well as within Armenia.
In Asia a similar amount of diversity can be seen. The United Arab Emirates is a particularly interesting example. While officially a Muslim country, Indians make up the largest demographic presence and the dominance of references to Hindu (rather than Allah) is likely a reflection of this fact. Likewise the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago (particularly the island of Java) illustrate the complexity of religious practice in this region. References to Buddha, Allah and Hindu are all in evidence on Java. Other examples include the predominately Buddhist nation of Sri Lanka with some Hindu areas to the North and the difference between Pakistan (more Allah) and India (more Hindu).
Finally, it is informative to include one additional map with this set. Here we included placemarks that reference the word ("sex"), a popular and international used term with very different connotations than the religious keywords used earlier. The purpose of including this term is to compare user interest in religion to user interest in sex. If (as some say) the three topics to avoid in polite conversation are religion, sex and politics it seems only right that this Internet blog (the antithesis to polite conversation if there every was one) takes on the question. Sadly, the inclusion of politics will have to wait until another day.
In Asia there are very few places where there are more references to sex than Allah, Buddha, Hindu or Jesus.
Constrasting this is Western Europe (especially the UK and Scandinavia) and North America (especially the East and West Coasts) there are more references to sex than any of the four religious terms that we searched for. The distribution in the U.S. mirrors our early maps of the virtual bible belt and church-bowling-firearms-strip clubs. There are, however, exceptions such as the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal which continue to show more references to Jesus.
So it would seem that Susan Sontag's observation has some merit, at least in the European and North American context.
December 16, 2009
User-Created Geographies of Religion: Allah, Buddha, Hindu, Jesus
Are there distinct geographies to religious references in user-created content indexed by Google? The following maps will demonstrate that there undoubtedly are.
High rankings (in terms of specialization and absolute references) are often found in the most likely regions. For example, the Middle East, North Africa, and Muslim parts of South and Southeast Asia are all characterised by a significant amount of specialization and a large number of references to "Allah."
High rankings (in terms of specialization and absolute references) are often found in the most likely regions. For example, the Middle East, North Africa, and Muslim parts of South and Southeast Asia are all characterised by a significant amount of specialization and a large number of references to "Allah."
References to "Buddha" are similarly clustered in East and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas and Sri Lanka. The geography of references to "Hindu" is even more clustered. Here, the Indian Subcontinent, Afghanistan, Angkor Wat, Bali, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur (two cities with large Indian populations) have a large number of references.
References to "Jesus" are more broadly distributed than any of the other three terms, but still show an incredible degree of concentration. The Americas, Western Europe and the Philippines are blanketed by references to Jesus.
Unlike user generated references to sex and business, religious search terms tend to display a geographic concentration in both absolute and relative terms. Or in other words, it is interesting that sex and business are far more global in scope than even these four very global religions.
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