Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel (MaRGAN)

Overview

The Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel (MaRGAN) project unites two features of the twentieth century: the rise of the novel as a global form and religious change following the impact of modernity upon religious practice. The connection between the two has often been difficult to record because what religion means differs from scholar to scholar and from context to context.

The project thus defines the religious content of the novel through its connection with one or more of 32 keywords such as ritual, omens & visions, and holy people. This approach enables the project to expand the kinds of texts construed as relevant to considerations of religion rather than focusing on a genre closely identified with a religious tradition (i.e., the Catholic novel); it thus facilitates comparison between texts that approach religion differently, whether that difference is marked by opposing views of religion, familiarity with different religious traditions, or concentration on a particular aspect of the variety of phenomena collected under the term religion.

The project not only challenges understandings of the novel as a secular form through attention to the sheer range of religious representations present in this corpus of novels but also argues that these representations are responses to ongoing religious change. As the project demonstrates, the novel is a cultural form in which authors reflect on the consequences of, need for, or ongoing role of religion in societies undergoing widespread transformation. The novel, in this way, becomes an agent of religious change, exploring what religion may do to and for societies.

In its initial phase, MaRGAN will define a corpus of approximately 400 global anglophone novels published between 1890 and 1980 that engage with religion. The database powering the website categorizes these engagements using one or more pre-defined religious keywords (i.e., ritual) and annotates the novel’s relation to this keyword using free text. In addition, the database captures basic bibliographic information about the novels and biographic data about the author. The project thus assumes that the nature and value of a given representation of religion in a novel is responsive to the geographical, historical, and religious contexts of the author.

The data is visualised in three ways: a timeline (to allow for developments over the 100 years of the project); word clouds (to reveal the frequency of certain keywords with respect to religion in novels); and a map (to allow for exploration of the geographical global).

Project Data

The MaRGAN dataset currently features 44 novels.

You can browse, search, and explore the novels and their metadata using various site features:

• The Browse page
• Word clouds of novel Keywords, Religions, and Locations
• A tabular Timeline of the novels
• A Map of the novels
• Project Data searches and downloads
• Bibliography

For additional information about the featured authors, including religions and locations associated with each, you can also browse the Authors section.

Project Members

Project Team

• Elizabeth Anderson - University of Aberdeen, UK
• Jamie Callison - University of Agder, Norway
• Suzanne Hobson - Queen Mary University of London, UK
• Graham Jensen - Independent, Canada
• Mimi Winick - Virginia Commonwealth University, USA

Advisory Board

• J. Barton Scott - University of Toronto, Canada
• Michael Allan - University of Oregon, USA
• Kris J. Trujillo - University of Chicago, USA
• Shuhita Bhattacharjee - Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India
• J. Winter Werner - Wheaton College, MA, USA
• Alana Vincent - Umeå University, Sweden
• Kees de Groot - Tilburg University, Netherlands

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following students and individuals who assisted with data entry and other project tasks:

• Christer Næss Andreassen
• Andreas Kalleberg
• Rahul Mitra
• Cael Sinclair
• Nikita Inamdar

We are also grateful to the University of Agder’s Students in research and innovation projects funding scheme for funding our student contributors and the Faculty of Humanities and Education for providing some initial funding for our project.

The feature image on the homepage and at the top of this page was created using images by PURI and Skye Studios on Unsplash.

About this Website

This website was created using CollectionBuilder (see “Technical Credits,” below). However, we customized the original template significantly (e.g., to create the Authors page and populate the site with data from multiple CSV files that are interlinked, forming a relational database). All of our customizations, site data, and assets are available in MaRGAN’s GitHub repository, currently located at https://github.com/ghjensen/margan.

For collaborative data entry, we used Google Sheets. Our shared spreadsheet is set up to facilitate easy look-ups between sheets, but it also automatically transforms data entered manually, fetches novel and author data from the Wikipedia API, and populates structured sheets for easy export to CollectionBuilder. (Originally, we had considered using OpenRefine for such data transformations and API calls, but because of our customizations to the Google Sheet this extra step was no longer necessary.)