Syriaca.org director Daniel L. Schwartz will present on “The Social Context of Religious Change in Late Antique Syria” at a workshop on Open Sourcing Religion organized by the Center for Science and Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Abstract of the paper is as follows:
Best practices in digital religion and cultural heritage preservation urge an approach to data curation that serves the needs of both scholars and the heritage communities. Syriaca.org’s SPEAR project (Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations) draws on developments in the study of social history and popular religion in order to achieve this goal. SPEAR seeks to capture data from the broad range of literary genres preserved by Syriac communities, some of which have been marginalized in modern scholarly practice. The unprecedented scale allowed by recent developments in digital prosopography make possible for the first time this level of integration of data on a broad range of elite and subaltern actors. Principles of linked open data allow the collection and querying of material from chronicles, saint’s lives, and episcopal letter collections so that scholars and members of the heritage communities might better understanding the social context of developments critical to the formation of Syriac history and theology.