Breve: Mapping American Religion
Lately, a lot of my attention has been on projects related to American religious history, and one of the projects outside of RRCHNM that came across my desk thanks to my colleagues is Uncivil Religion.
The project explores the religious symbols, identities, and banners that appeared at the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol through essays and galleries sifting through media captured by the research team and built with Scalar as a collaboration between the University of Alabama's Department of Religious Studies and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
There's a lot of content here: not only really great essays contextualizing the religious themes of January 6, but a lot of images, government documents, and video. And because it's built with Scalar, it comes with various visualizations for you to navigate your way through all of the content in the project.
Don't miss this project. It's tremendous.
I liked this clever use of Esri StoryMaps for exploring 19th century British clothing materials by Sam Huckerby, a student at the University of Saskatchewan. I think most people think StoryMaps is particularly useful for, well, maps. But there are a lot of creative ways to use the platform for things beyond maps.
It's a great use of archival materials and interactivity to wrestle with the key point made in the introduction: "Clothing has never been created in a vacuum, it has always been a product of its environment."
Task List
I’m excited to announce that my colleagues with American Religious Ecologies have launched a new map, Urban American Congregations. We're in the process of adding yet more data to the map, so expect even more soon. I hope you'll check it out.
For Earth Day, I wrote a short Twitter thread on the themes of my book. Writing and editing continues.
Reading List
- To stick with my apparent theme of religious history in this newsletter, I've recently started Neall W. Pogue's The Nature of the Religious Right.
- Mozilla offers a better vision for the web.
- If you struggle to wrap your head around the scale of the climate crisis, Probable Futures can help.
- "I'm not here to say you should quit Twitter, or that no enjoyment remains in cavorting through the network. I'm only here to say, Twitter has no future, so please, enjoy it only and exactly for what it is — every decline is surfable — and do not disregard the alternatives to its timeline, when and if they appear."