In the next 4:50 I want to try to convince you that scholars of Religion in Europe should engage with geospatial data in their research. I'll start with a big undefended claim, briskly diagnose the problems with our geospatial data and offer a possible solution.

Part of the reason I became aware of this is because I started my journey as a researcher in Scotland. I quickly became aware that within the context of sociological and geographical study of the UK my colleagues in Edinburgh were not enthusiastic about being socially conflated with people who lived in London. But this happens all the time. I've come to discover that this sentiment is shared by people in Wales and Ireland and the North of England, and the West Midlands, and well, you get the idea.

Here's the big undefended claim: I believe that if we do not observe the particularities of peoples and their places, in practice, our research can be an instrument of concealment and the agent of social invisibility. Here's how this works in practice: say you've got a few thousand pounds and want to run a National-level study. Chances are, you'll take your money to a professional statistical organisation like YouGov and commission a study based on a random sample. Now here's where it gets sticky. Try asking YouGov (or whomever) whether they can generate a random sample of UK persons which will allow for data to be reliably broken down to the level of council areas in Scotland, and then by gender and age. I've asked, and they said "no"

Regional thinking, which is just a scholarly formalisation of administrative boundaries doesn't necessarily get us much further towards granular understandings of daily life and religion in practice. The small, hyper-local work of social anthropologists commends much closer scrutiny.

Many people here are doing small-scale local ethnographic work with individuals. And this gets towards addressing the problem, though we don't often enough join up individual studies towards well-qualified meta-understandings (topic for another day!). But I want to suggest that we might consider stepping one level up from the level of the individual and focussing on communities - and in the case of the study of religion, at least one facet of studying communities is to focus on places of worship. And I want to use my remaining 3 minutes to suggest what might be involved if we were to try to build some resources to support this kind of research.

This was a big project with a big team, so it seemed responsible to test out our prospective fieldwork in terms of sampling and representation across standard demographic measures. So I went to the internet to find the data on places of workship in the UK. Turns out there isn't much.

So why does all this matter? There are two key reasons why scholarly focus on these data sources might align well with our concern for public literacy about religion and frankly justice. First, for many people walking around in Europe, these data sets are reality. When was the last time you navigated somewhere without using a turn-by-turn app on some smartphone? If data is lacking in completeness, these places simply fall off the map. Second, is metadata. While this term may seem fairly innocuous, it can be a very malevolent force. Metadata is simply the practice of adding a bit of additional data to the 'main stuff'. So we have some coordinates and a name for a place of worship, and then maybe we add the opening hours, or we allow people to add ratings, or we add a category.

These categories produce borders and tacitly facilitate exclusion. Have you ever wondered how google finds content based on a given search you produce?