the technology of religion: mapping religious cyberscapes
TRANSCRIPT
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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"
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Using geotagged internet data to demonstrate connections between material spaces and places and virtual representations of them"
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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"
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…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"
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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"
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Mapping new ecclesiastical geographies"
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References where you would expect them to be"
References to Buddhism"
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Again, references mostly where you would expect them to be"
References to Hinduism"
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But why so few references here?"
There are, of course, plenty of Christians in these places!"
References to Christianity"
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Christian Denominations in the United States"
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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."
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Cyberscapes of religious conflict"
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Correlation between religion and political boundaries"
Contested territories in both virtual and material spaces"
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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 "
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Methodological Limitations"
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References to Temple in English -->"
<-- References to Temple in Thai"
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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."
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Paper forthcoming in The Professional Geographer, February 2013."Available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2011.614571 or by request."
w: www.floatingsheep.org"t: @floating_sheep"
THANKS!"