“Mapping” Religious Communities in the UK: Borders, Boundaries and Big Data

Abstract

Shockingly, there is no non-commercial database of places of worship in the UK. For this presentation, I will introduce preliminary results of a large-scale participatory research project which combined big-data methods with participatory geography to address this gap in data available to researchers. Begun in earnest in 2016, we have completed initial “seeding” of the dataset and now have over 40k geocoded places of worship hosted on a free geospatial platform. For this brief presentation I will highlight 3 key problems with geospatial data on places of worship (with a critical gaze towards Ordnance Survey and Google Maps), introduce our platform, and will offer 3 key research questions facing our team as we seek to ready this project for public (scholarly) consumption.

Jeremy Kidwell

Associate Professor in Theological Ethics

Ethicist, activist, hacker, ethnographer and eco-theologian. Interdisciplinary and unafraid.