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PANEL PRESENTATION

Digital Humanities and 
Libraries and Archives in 
Religious Studies
Richard Manly Adams Jr., Director of Pitts Theology Library at Emory University’s Candler 
School of Theology 
Clifford B. Anderson, Associate University Librarian for Research and Digital Initiatives at 
Vanderbilt University 
Michael Hemenway, Chief Information Officer at the Iliff School of Theology 
Jeri Wierenga, PhD Candidate in History at George Mason University.

ABSTR ACT This paper presents brief synopses of four contributors’ 
chapters from the forthcoming edited volume, Digital Humanities and 
Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).

INTRODUCTION

This panel brought together four contributors to the forthcoming 
volume, Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Stud-
ies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020): Richard Manly (“Bo”) Adams Jr., Direc-
tor of Pitts Theology Library at Emory University’s Candler School of 
Theology; Clifford B. Anderson, Associate University Librarian for 
Research and Digital Initiatives at Vanderbilt University; Michael 
Hemenway, Chief Information Officer at the Iliff School of Theol-
ogy; and Jeri Wierenga, Ph.D. Candidate in History at George Mason 



Panel Presentation 43

University.
The panelists briefly summarized their chapters in the edited 

book, sharing how digital humanities connects with teaching and 
learning in religious studies as well as research and practice in theo-
logical librarianship. Topics covered during the panel included data 
mining of religious archives, the library as “interface” to the digital 
humanities, digital humanities pedagogy, and algorithmic bias and 
transparency. 

In this report, the participants in the panel briefly summarize their 
presentations. Full versions of their chapters will be available in open 
access from De Gruyter after the publication of the volume.

DATA MINING OF RELIGIOUS ARCHIVES

What do digital humanities researchers do with digitized archival 
materials? And how might that change the priorities for a range of 
work in the digital humanities? 

In her talk, Wieringa described how her chapter offers one example 
of how scholars use digital materials as part of computational analy-
sis in the humanities, drawing on her dissertation, A Gospel of Health 
and Salvation: Modeling the Religious Culture of Seventh-day Adventism, 
1843-1920 <http://dissertation.jeriwieringa.com>. She argued for less 
emphasis on cutting edge “tools” in the digital humanities and more 
on the “slow cultivation” of resources and critical methods. 

Seventh-day Adventism is a Protestant denomination that devel-
oped in the middle of the nineteenth century in the aftermath of 
William Miller’s 1844 prediction of the second coming. Guided by 
the prophetic leadership of Ellen White, the denomination is distin-
guished by their observance of Saturday Sabbath, their embrace of 
health reform and vegetarianism, and their reliance on print. The 
denomination has devoted numerous resources to digitizing their 
historical materials and creating online interfaces for that material, 
including the Office of Archives, Research, and Statistics and the 
Adventist Digital Library.

For her dissertation, Wieringa looked at the relationship between 
end-times expectation, the writings of Ellen White, and the gendered 
articulation of the work of salvation within Seventh-day Adventism 
between 1843 and 1920. For this period, and even after limiting the 

http://documents.adventistarchives.org/default.aspx
https://adventistdigitallibrary.org/


44  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

corpus to periodicals produced within four geographic regions of the 
United States, the available digitized material consisted of over 13,000 
issues and nearly 200,000 pages. At first glance, this abundance of 
digital materials presented a perfect opportunity for computational 
analysis.

However, the abundance of these digital objects conceals a funda-
mental weakness for their use in computational analysis. Created 
for use by human readers, the digitization process prioritizes digi-
tal facsimiles of the original documents in the form of image scans. 
To add value to the scans, and to help with problems of information 
retrieval, a text layer is often added to the scans with OCR (Optical 
Character Recognition) software. As the human reader is most likely 
to interact primarily with the scanned images, distributed as PDFs, 
the quality of the OCR-generated text is often a secondary concern.

The problem is that computational text analysis reverses the 
order of priority. As Wieringa discussed, historical print is difficult 
for modern OCR software. As a result, the textual layer for most digi-
tized historical content contains a wide variety of errors in character 
and layout recognition. While most information retrieval tasks can be 
accomplished despite these weaknesses, studies in computer science 
and information retrieval have shown that the more complex the 
computational algorithm applied to the text, the more important the 
data quality for the accuracy and reliability of the results.

The disconnect between the data available and the data needed 
for machine learning algorithms presents an under-discussed chal-
lenge and opportunity for further collaboration between research-
ers, librarians, and archivists. In her chapter, Wieringa shows some 
of the results she was able to achieve with textual data from the SDA 
periodical literature, part of a general argument for the potential of 
computational analysis with historical materials. That potential could 
be greater, however, with better text, more detailed metadata, and the 
development of algorithms trained with humanities data for humani-
ties questions.

Wieringa’s presentation and chapter are not a call for librarians 
and archivists to do more. Rather, the development of data and meth-
ods fitting for computational humanities research requires collab-
oration between researchers and library professionals. Wieringa 
proposed that by recognizing the creation of digital editions as well 



Panel Presentation 45

as the development of datasets and algorithms as forms of scholar-
ship, and by rewarding researchers, librarians, and archivists for 
that scholarly work, the academic community can begin to create the 
digital infrastructure necessary for computational scholarship in the 
humanities to thrive.

LIBRARY AS “INTERFACE” TO THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES 

Hemenway offered reflections on the library’s role in building an 
experimental humanities lab at the Iliff School of Theology. Through-
out their long history, libraries have embodied the core values of 
digital humanities, such as collaboration, transdisciplinarity, and 
attention to the materiality of information. Thus, it is no surprise 
that libraries would provide a fecund space to develop the neces-
sary capacities needed to move scholarly communications work-
flows thoughtfully into the emerging technological landscape. The 
Experimental Humanities Lab (EHL) team at Iliff builds on Johanna 
Drucker’s notion of interface as a zone of encounter that provokes prob-
abilistic production and suggests that libraries can become an interface 
for digital humanities. This notion of library as interface foregrounds 
the collaborative challenges of DH work and attempts to highlight the 
values of difference and materiality in the process.

Hemenway discussed EHL@iliff as an experiment in library as 
interface. EHL@iliff is a cross-functional team with team members 
from different areas of the institution and from outside the insti-
tution meeting regularly through synchronous and asynchronous 
hybrid communication technologies (e.g., Zoom and Slack). Together, 
they work on digital projects, learn new skills, share resources, and 
run workshops to get others involved. Hemenway discussed how 
learning the python programming language in the context of Jupy-
ter Notebooks and natural language processing has helped the team 
take seriously the different materialities of digital methodologies as 
scholars partner with machines in the reading, research, and writing 
tasks of scholarly communications. 

DIGITAL HUMANITIES PEDAGOGY

How does the instructional role of the librarian shift in the digital age? 
In this essay, Adams invited librarians to be more creative in their 



46  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

approaches to preparing patrons to learn, work, and thrive in a world 
filled with new digital tools and methods. Adams began by consider-
ing definitions of the term “digital pedagogy” and its application in 
librarianship. For some, the term means teaching the new tools and 
methods of the digital age. In this view, the work of the instructional 
librarian is often viewed as a supplement to an existing curriculum, 
adding workshops focused on the latest digital tools. For others, “digi-
tal pedagogy” suggests a shift in the form of teaching, rather than the 
content. As schools begin to make use of digital tools for the deliv-
ery of content, often through hybrid or fully online courses, librar-
ians find themselves in an instructional support role, managing the 
learning management system or consulting with faculty about how 
to achieve learning outcomes through new digital platforms. The 
central argument of the essay is that neither of these understand-
ings of “digital pedagogy,” both of which Adams labeled as “buttonol-
ogy,” fully captures the opportunity for librarians in the digital age; 
to adopt either one is to fail to prepare patrons for the world in which 
they work. Drawing on philosophies of technology that far preceded 
the digital age, Adams argued that the real work of the librarian is not 
simply to teach tools, but to engender in patrons the ability to adapt 
to new technologies and to think critically about the impact techno-
logical shifts may have on teaching, worship, and research. Adams 
offered practical suggestions for how librarians can embrace critical 
digital pedagogy, focusing more on the theological reasoning a patron 
would use for adopting or adapting particular tools, rather than a 
“buttonology” approach to teaching the tools themselves. The goal 
of the librarian in the digital age should be to ensure our patrons are 
equipped not only to build websites, but also to think critically about 
how their building may impact their work and their communities. 
The librarian must help patrons live and work in the digital age, but 
also embolden them to think carefully about why the church or acad-
emy may or may not need these tools. This critical digital pedagogy 
is essential for library instruction, for if the library is not going to do 
it, it is not going to be done.

ALGORITHMIC BIAS AND TRANSPARENCY 

In the concluding presentation of the panel, Anderson spoke about the 



Panel Presentation 47

problem of algorithmic bias. Algorithms may incorporate the presup-
positions and prejudices of the programmers who create them or, in 
the case of machine learning algorithms, they may develop biases 
from the streams of data they receive as inputs. Safiya Noble, Associ-
ate Professor in Information Studies and African American Studies at 
UCLA, has recently demonstrated how Google search results reflect 
and propagate cultural prejudices about black women in Algorithms of 
Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU, 2018). The prob-
lem of bias also affects theological faculty at universities because 
research information systems for faculty evaluation can be biased 
toward the sciences, privileging conference papers and journal arti-
cles over monograph publications and also lacking data from denomi-
national publishers, making it seem as if theological scholars are less 
productive than other faculty members at the same institution.

The causes of algorithmic bias are manifold. The lack of diversity 
among software engineers leads to bias when programmers make 
assumptions about users based on their limited and perspectival 
knowledge. Problems may also emerge from data and metadata. For 
instance, many researchers in the natural and social sciences have 
signed up for ORCIDs, making it easier to track their activity across 
information platforms. Fewer scholars in theology and religious stud-
ies have ORCIDs, meaning that efforts to collate their activities may 
default to string matching on names, which, as any authority librar-
ian can attest, vary between platforms. The messiness of matching 
on strings rather than with explicit identifiers can lead to missing 
publications or false attribution. Of course, librarians can help to 
connect scholars in religious studies and theology to these informa-
tion systems by assisting them with the creation of ORCIDs, DOIs, and 
other contemporary identifiers.

Anderson argued that theological librarians should teach faculty 
and students to recognize and respond to algorithmic bias when 
teaching critical information literacy classes. He admitted that theo-
logical librarians face challenges when addressing algorithmic bias. 
Proprietary information systems do not provide access to the software 
code or data sets that, taken together, produce results, rendering it 
difficult to audit those algorithms for potential bias. Furthermore, 
theological librarians generally do not have sufficient background in 
computer science to analyze algorithms, making calls for transpar-



48  ATL A 2019 PROCEEDINGS

ency at the algorithmic level beside the point. The lack of expertise 
in software engineering and machine learning does not present an 
insuperable barrier to auditing information systems for bias. Theo-
logical librarians can document incidents of bias by illustrating the 
divergence between results they get from searches relying on their 
expertise and results produced by automated searches of information 
systems. By using such examples (and sharing them with vendors), 
theological librarians can stand up for the interests of their patrons 
as well as their discipline in an increasingly algorithm-driven infor-
mation universe.


