The Technology of Religion: !Mapping Religious Cyberscapes"

Taylor Shelton, Clark University"Matthew Zook, University of Kentucky"Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute"

108th Annual Meeting of the AAG"New York, NY – February 24th, 2012"

Using geotagged internet data to demonstrate connections between material spaces and places and virtual representations of them"

From to religious geography…"•  The trajectory of religious geography has

been long and multifarious, using a variety of theoretical approaches (cf. Kong 1990, 2001a, 2010)"

•  Began with ‘ecclesiastical geography’, but religion has been incorporated into larger body of critical geographic research"

…to religious cyberscapes"•  How are the geographies of religious

practice and representation being reflected online?"

•  What can the prevalence of some religions over others in geocoded cyberspace tell us about socio-spatial processes in the material world?"– e.g., conflict, uneven development, censorship"

Measuring Religious Cyberscapes"

•  Automated Google Maps queries at ~250,000 points, derived from a ¼ degree grid"

•  Flexibility in search terms allows for diversity of topics"

Mapping new ecclesiastical geographies"

References where you would expect them to be"

References to Buddhism"

Again, references mostly where you would expect them to be"

References to Hinduism"

But why so few references here?"

There are, of course, plenty of Christians in these places!"

References to Christianity"

Christian Denominations in the United States"

Crawford, Thomas W. 2005. Stability and Change on the American Religious Landscape: A Centrographic Analysis of Major U.S. Religious Groups. Journal of Cultural Geography 22(2): 51-86."

Cyberscapes of religious conflict"

Correlation between religion and political boundaries"

Contested territories in both virtual and material spaces"

Jerusalem populated by references to all three religions"

Parts of Palestine largely excluded "(cf. Ben-David et al 2008)"

References don’t conform to political boundaries"

Christianity overrepresented, Islam underrepresented relative to share of population "

Methodological Limitations"

References to Temple in English -->"

<-- References to Temple in Thai"

Conclusions"•  Virtual representations of place are, in many

ways, reflections of the offline lived realities in those places."

•  At the same time, however, these representations serve to remake these places, mutually constituting the virtual and material."

•  There are, of course, some caveats."•  Cyberscapes as useful tool for investigating a

variety of socio-spatial processes not limited to the internet."

Paper forthcoming in The Professional Geographer, February 2013."Available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2011.614571 or by request."

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THANKS!"