01/07/2026 15:00 - 17:10

HALL: Pola - A102

Contact: Motley C.

Chair: Motley C.

Over the past several decades, the rise of digital humanities has reshaped the intellectual and technological landscape of the humanities. What began as a relatively specialized set of computational methods—often focused on text encoding and database construction—has developed into a broad interdisciplinary field encompassing digitization, data modeling, computational analysis, visualization, platform design, and public-facing scholarship. Within the study of religion, these developments have had especially significant implications. Religious texts and traditions are deeply rooted in material archives, linguistic complexity, and historically situated interpretive communities, and digital humanities approaches have transformed not only how these materials are studied but also who can access them.
Yet increased availability does not automatically produce meaningful access. Digital religious materials are mediated through technical infrastructures—interfaces, metadata, encoding standards, and platform design—that shape how texts can be discovered, interpreted, and compared. These design choices often reflect scholarly priorities that may remain opaque to non-specialists, creating new forms of gatekeeping even as older barriers fall.
This panel therefore asks what democratization means in the context of digital religious scholarship. Is it simply a matter of making materials freely available, or does it require deeper forms of participation and interpretive agency? How do digital tools redistribute authority among scholars, institutions, religious communities, and the public? And how might digital humanities projects be designed to promote equity, inclusivity, and sustainability rather than reproducing existing hierarchies in digital form?