The North American Religion Atlas and Indiana Online

1. The North American Religion Atlas and Indiana Online Bloomington, Indiana April 16, 2002 Karen Frederickson Director, Information Systems Technology The Polis Center, IUPUI

2. Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) • Founded in 1997 at the University of California-Berkeley • Now includes over 700 scholars, librarians, and information technology experts from around the world  • Goals: • Organization and presentation of data resources in categories of time and space • Acquisition of data from a variety of research projects • Definition of metadata • Combination and comparison of other isolated scholarly data • Increase the range of applications and uses of data • Permanent archives of data resources • URL: www.ecai.org

3. North American Religion Atlas (NARA) • Goals • To enhance and make available a wide array of important sources for the study of North American religion and culture within an interactive mapping and visualization framework. • To provide a rich body of spatially-enabled contextual data for the wide variety of data sets developed by individual scholars. • To provide interpretive and curricular materials for use by students and scholars of North American cultural history. • URL: www.religionatlas.org

4. GIS Technology • Provides us the ability to collect, store, manage, and manipulate spatial data. • Has unrealized potential as a tool for information integration, analysis, and communication. • Can represent virtually any data or information that can be associated with a geographic location. • Can integrate data from widely different sources based solely on location. • Can explicitly incorporate location into any analysis.

5. GIS in the Humanities • Much of what people want to know about culture is: • formed in the context of change over time and space, and thus • depends on the ability to manipulate quantitative and qualitative data across time and space. • GIS has the potential to become a core technology that allows … humanities scholars, social scientists, journalists, and secondary educators, among others, … to examine issues of cause and effect.

6. GIS for Electronic Atlases • GIS and Internet technology support the creation of electronic atlases that serve: • Users through the provision of interactive mapping, query, and spatial analysis tools. • Readers through linkages to scholarly e-publications, curriculum, and other teaching and learning publications.

7. NARA Resources • Current and historic administrative boundaries • Current and historic spatially-enabled census population data • Multiple years of spatially-enabled census of religious bodies data • Video of various religion related subject areas such as rites of passage, holiday observations, services, programs and architecture • Presentations of various specialized subjects • Audio of sermons, choirs, and more • Special exhibitions of interest to religious scholars

8. NARA Publications • NARA will provide a rich source of data and information for research and education • NARA will serve as a portal not only to data, but also to scholarly articles, curriculum and other teaching and learning tools developed. • The first NARA-based ECAI publication, on American Mainline Protestantism, is planned for publication by the California Digital Library in Spring 2002.

9. Future Goals To extend the core set of religious census data for the United States in the 20th century in four directions: • Time • Geography • Subject matter • Multi-media resources To extend the set of: • Scholarly articles • Curriculum guides • Analysis guides • And other teaching and learning tools

10. Future Research and Development • For GIS technology to realize its potential as a tool for research and communication: • Users must be provided with data that is relevant to the thematic, spatial, and temporal context of their investigation • Data resources must be integrated in a manner that reflects uncertainty in the data • Information must be visualized in a dynamic manner that allows users to travel virtually through time and space

11. Indiana Online • Indiana Online™ as “a leading-edge interactive, multimedia resource that will convey traditional history, lore, and knowledge, as well as interactive learning resources and advanced visualizations of data.” • Indiana Humanities Council (IHC) identified The Polis Center (TPC) as its primary partner in the development of Indiana Online, with TPC managing the planning phase under the governance of IHC. • The planning process will culminate in a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities (deadline: July 1, 2002) and other funding agencies.

12. Mission Statement Indiana OnlineTM will be the premier web site for and about the state of Indiana. Designed as an electronic encyclopedia, Indiana Online will: • provide comprehensive information about the people, history, government, economy, and the cultural life of Indiana past and present; • serve diverse audiences, including students and educators, business and civic leaders, government agencies, cultural organizations, and researchers, as well as the casual browser; • promote collaborations among assorted institutions and agencies to identify materials and to create new digital resources to be made available on the site; • present the state as a national leader in the development of reliable, high-quality online new media