Welcome! We are excited to share this app with you. Whether you are a student, a researcher, or anyone else with an interest in developing a deeper understanding of religion as it relates to the everyday lives of humans across the globe, "Where's Religion?" offers a number of tools to develop questions and seek understanding. This document addresses some key questions and provides information about the intellectual and technical design of the mobile and desktop applications.
Where's Religion? is an open-source mobile and desktop web application developed by humanities faculty and IT professionals at Saint Louis University that supports in-person research, remote data entry, media sharing, and mapping. Where's Religion? is designed to facilitate a more robust public understanding of religion through rigorous scholarly methods. Our conviction is that the study of religion must account for the wide range of embodied experiences, improvised practices, material cultures, and shared spaces that humans inhabit.
Through a research methodology that moves beyond analysis of sacred texts, creeds, and official teachings, Where's Religion? provides a platform to diversify the data we study and to advance the study of religion we all encounter in everyday life.
Where's Religion? began as a solution to the limitations for studying and understanding the embodied and emplaced experiences of religion. There was and is currently no free and open-source app for in-person research that captures all media forms and curates entries on a map. The core set of functions of this app - note-taking, media uploads, and mapping - are intended to resolve this.