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Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in 
Religious Studies: An Introduction

Clifford B. Anderson, Editor. Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in 
Religious Studies: An Introduction. Introductions to Digital Humanities - Reli-
gion. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. $30.99 Paperback. ISBN 978-3110534320. Open 
Access eBook https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110536539. 

All too often, “collaboration” functions as a buzzword that gestures towards a particular set of val-
ues rather than describing the real give and take of shared work. Librarians are as guilty as any 
professionals of throwing the term around carelessly. This volume, however, bears the marks of a 
deeply collaborative endeavor, from its production, to its themes, to its content. The collective labor 
of digital scholars, librarians, and the support of institutions with a shared vision has produced a 
truly accessible volume that explores the current state of Digital Humanities (DH) and the place that 
libraries are playing in supporting and advancing DH initiatives in theology and religious studies. 
The combined financial backing of Atla and Vanderbilt University’s Divinity Library make it the 
only volume in the Introductions to Digital Humanities – Religion series (at least to this point) that 
is available in an open access format. The shared knowledge, skills, and experience represented in 
these chapters back up editor Clifford B. Anderson’s insistence that, “the partnership is the project” 
(1).

The Introductions to Digital Humanities – Religion series is further evidence that the field of DH 
is not a fad, but a necessary product of humanities scholarship working to shape digital culture as 
well as to respond to it. The series is an indication that theology and religious studies are beginning 
to find their place in the broader DH discussion. This volume in particular, by bringing together the 
work of digital humanists working in religious studies with theological librarians, demonstrates 
just how deeply DH is being engaged across the spectrum of religious scholarship. As Steven E. 
Jones has pointed out, the Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa’s collaboration with IBM to produce the Index 
Thomisticus serves as the “founding myth of humanities computing.”1

With its roots in theological research, it is only fitting that theological librarians and archivists 
are beginning to be recognized for their contributions to the evolving landscape of DH. 

Anderson’s Introduction acknowledges a crucial dynamic of any DH project: “Reading the contri-
butions to this volume invariably raises feelings of inadequacy and imposter syndrome” (7). This is 
a welcome disclaimer, and it recognizes the truth that imposter syndrome is baked into the task of 
interdisciplinary scholarship. Readers will inevitably encounter DH projects far outside the scope 
of their technical abilities and language beyond their frame of reference (I certainly did), but An-
derson and his contributors take pains to include librarians from small seminary libraries as well 
as large university libraries in the discussion. In addition to his roles as editor and contributor, An-
derson crops up as a collaborator in more than one of the projects described – further evidencing 
the collaborative ethos that brought this volume into existence.

The chapters are organized under four headings. The first, “Methodological Approaches,” in-
cludes three different methods of data visualization. Michał Choiński and Jan Rybicki use stylomet-
ric analysis to examine the rhetoric of Puritan sermons and to map the genres of the writings of 
Jonathan Edwards. Matthew Handelman uses network mapping of the archived correspondence of 
Franz Rosenzweig to unearth connections between Rosenzweig and other Jewish intellectuals. Jeri 

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E. Wieringa applies topic modeling to depict shifting eschatological views represented in Seventh-
day Adventist periodicals from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. Each of these projects investigates 
questions of immediate interest to traditional scholars of religion, but they do so by employing 
computational analysis and data visualization in ways that both reveal new information and pose 
new questions.

Reservations about DH do of course remain, and the best critics warn against the possibility of 
reductive interpretations from computational methods that reduce literary texts to data. In their 
own ways, each of the authors in this section speaks to this concern by attempting to maintain the 
creative tension between qualitative and quantitative analysis. Religious scholars without program-
ming experience may be lost when reading Choiński and Rybicki’s explanation of the algebraic for-
mulas and software programs they used to produce a network analysis of the most frequent words 
used throughout Jonathan Edwards’ corpus. However, the model produced by this work – Edwards’ 
writings laid out on a map and clustered according to genre – poses creative questions to anyone 
with an interest in the theologian’s work. Specifically, these findings could send scholars back to 
Edwards’ work to ask questions about “the stylistic migration of some of his sermons towards some 
of his treatises.” They insist that “stylometry must always remember to return to the very texts from 
which it seems to depart when reaching for mathematical and statistical methods” (29). 

Handelman is concerned to embrace quantitative, computational, and digital methods in the 
humanities without becoming positivistic. He uses metadata and archival finding aids to visual-
ize connections between Rosenzweig and his correspondents, uncovering surprising connections 
between Rosenzweig and members of the Frankfurt School. Handelman recognizes the “negative 
dimension” (39) of the kind of visualization he creates, but it also signals new avenues of research 
that those with access to Rosenzweig’s scattered correspondence can pursue. Wieringa is similarly 
realistic about the limits of DH, noting that while computational methods can allow scholars to 
gather information on a scale unavailable to traditional close reading, the broad patterns identified 
by these methods do not provide easy answers to questions of meaning and interpretation. Another 
objection to DH involves methods that critics see as involving a lack of quantitative rigor. Wier-
inga effectively addresses these concerns by focusing on the “slow cultivation” of digital projects, 
“where the complex, labor intensive, and careful work of data creation, algorithm development, 
and infrastructure building that will support the next generation of computational scholarship can 
thrive” (57). These first chapters display a concern for the iterative relationship between machine 
reading and close reading, as well as a recognition of the role that religious libraries and archives 
play in providing the metadata infrastructure and properly digitized holding for these projects.

In the second section, “The Database as Locus of Digital Humanities,” Tracy Miller chronicles 
the process of field research and the use of XQuery and XSLT to build a database of medieval Chi-
nese temple architecture. To create this database of images, Miller had to rely on the expertise of 
colleagues to learn how to transfer much of her data collected on spreadsheets using software de-
veloped for humanities computing. Her account of the project highlights the materiality of digital 
culture, noting that emerging DH scholars will need to learn how to communicate the scholarly 
value of the work of developing digital tools. Miller’s account pushes against the characterization 
of DH as overly commercialized, showing how DH can result in open access digital tools that make 
scholars less beholding to commercial platforms. 

Perhaps more concretely than any other contribution, Christine Schwartz’s chapter demon-
strates how existing library practices can be transferred to digital projects. Princeton Theologi-
cal Seminary’s Theological Commons is a remarkable library of open access digital collections. 
Schwartz’s account of the learning curve involved in her transition from cataloger to metadata li-



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brarian bears Miller’s insistence that worthwhile digital projects entail not only collaboration with 
technical specialists but hard work on the part of scholars and librarians to develop skills outside 
their traditional fields of expertise. Schwartz combined new programming proficiencies with her 
traditional knowledge of metadata like MARC records to build and continue to grow the Theological 
Commons. Both Miller and Schwartz’s chapters are examples of digital projects involving the kind 
of collaboration required to support the multiple modes that DH scholarship involves. 

The third section, “Digital Humanities Pedagogy,” deals with library instruction and the task of 
teaching introductory programming to humanities students. Richard Manly Adams, Jr. calls for an 
approach to digital pedagogy in libraries that neither valorizes nor demonizes digital tools. The 
challenges that librarians face in instruction multiply as quickly as new information sources and 
tools develop. Adams argues that libraries have an essential role to play in equipping patrons to 
navigate a digital information environment. Instead of simply teaching students which digital tools 
can help them access, use, and create scholarship, librarians should provoke our patrons to ask 
questions about how a digital environment shapes our access, use, and creation of scholarship. 
Adams productively appeals to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, demonstrating how 
they can help patrons reflect critically on their use of digital tools. This chapter will be immediately 
helpful for instruction librarians. In our library, we frequently encounter students who use Zotero 
and other citation tools with little consideration of the information they are providing or the qual-
ity of the resulting citation. There is also the broader issue of encouraging patrons to think beyond 
a “print vs. e-book” paradigm and start to discern the utility of various types of information sources 
in different contexts. 

Anderson and Gayathri Narasimham further explore a pedagogical approach that focuses on 
critical engagement with digital tools rather than instruction on a specific tool or technique. They 
discuss the challenges and rewards of offering a hands-on DH class that teaches basic programming 
skills to undergraduate humanities students at Vanderbilt University. They go on to look at how that 
course could be appropriately contextualized for a seminary or divinity school. They describe the 
measures they took to balance instruction in general programming skills versus discipline specific 
tools, arriving at a “human-centered” design approach that prioritizes the specific questions a re-
searcher is asking over the acquisition of a specific set of skills or knowledge of a certain program-
ming language. This approach is consistent with the other contributions in the volume in that it pro-
motes an approach to digital scholarship that does not lose sight of properly humanistic methods.

Finally, “Collaboration and Beyond” consists of the final chapter, authored collectively by the 
Experimental Humanities Lab at the Iliff School of Theology. It points to the inherent interdiscipli-
narity of religious studies and encourages conceptualizing theological libraries as interfaces rather 
than mere repositories of information. While DH is an intentionally digital approach to scholarship, 
all scholarship to one extent or another is carried out in a digital environment and with digital 
tools and resources. While the chapter discusses strategies for collaboration across departments to 
accomplish DH projects, it also highlights the role that librarians have in making the implications 
of this digital environment more explicit to patrons through instruction and curation. This is a wel-
come emphasis, and just one more way that the volume makes DH relevant for libraries that do not 
have the resources, institutional support, or demand to host something like a DH lab.  

From the smallest seminary library to the largest university-based divinity library, the deliv-
ery of digital content is a daily component of religious education. Even for librarians who would 
never think of themselves as digital humanists, selecting, providing, and offering instruction in the 
discovery of e-books, electronic databases, and other digital tools is as routine as shelving a cart 
of books. This inescapably digital environment necessitates serious reflection. This volume both 



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shows and tells. It shows the work that scholars of religion are producing in DH, and it tells the story 
of religious libraries supporting, facilitating, and contributing to DH. Not only should it help librar-
ians and archivists see the relevance of DH for the task of theological education and scholarship 
(and vice versa), its practical recommendations surrounding programing languages and collabo-
rating across departments and disciplines will no doubt generate new DH ventures in theological 
libraries. For a discipline whose founding myth is rooted in theological questions, it is particularly 
gratifying to see this series continuing to tell the story of the ongoing contribution of theology and 
religious studies to DH.  

Andrew C. Stout
Covenant Theological Seminary



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ENDNOTES

1 See Steven E. Jones, Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards (New York: 
Routledge, 2016).


