Panel: DATASETS, WORKFLOWS, SOFTWARE AND AIS TO STUDY RELIGIONS: WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS AHEAD?



398.8 - INTRODUCING THE PLORABUNT DATASET

AUTHORS:
Ruozzi F. (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia/FSCIRE ~ Bologna ~ Italy) , El Ganadi A. (FSCIRE - Fondazione per le scienze religiose ~ Bologna ~ Italy)
Text:
Compared to other forms of political violence, attacks against worshippers and places of prayer pose distinctive challenges for systematic data collection, due to their geographic dispersion, uneven reporting practices, and systematic marginalization within broader terrorism datasets. In response, there has been growing scholarly interest in open-source event databases documenting violence against civilians. One of the major limitations of existing resources, however, is that they do not systematically distinguish attacks targeting religious spaces and communities, despite evidence that such incidents constitute a persistent and globally distributed phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce Plorabunt, an open-source dataset and publicly accessible online platform that documents 1,623 fatalities resulting from attacks on places of worship worldwide from 1982 to the present. The dataset was constructed through a curated aggregation and cross-validation of heterogeneous sources, including regional and thematic databases, press archives, NGO reports, diplomatic documents, legal records, and academic literature. Following its initial construction, the research team has undertaken continuous verification, source triangulation, and regular updates to correct inaccuracies, complete incomplete records, and incorporate newly identified cases. This paper describes the data collection and curation methodology underpinning Plorabunt, discusses the strengths and limitations of open-source data for documenting religiously targeted violence, and presents descriptive statistics on the scope, structure, and content of the dataset By combining structured data with a publicly accessible online platform designed for long-term preservation and access, Plorabunt supports comparative research on violence against places of worship, allowing a wide range of users to examine how patterns of such attacks differ across religious traditions, regions, and historical periods.