This two-time NEH grant recipient project is a web-based digital humanities project that is digitizing the 1926 United States Census of Religious Bodies, containing approximately 212,000 individual schedules. The heart of the project is to expand the localized histories of American religion by creating an open-source data set that analyzes religion in the United States on a larger scale. By digitizing and transcribing individual census schedules, the project maps religious organizations to understand how specific groups came to thrive in particular places and how they were divided by race and social class. The Religious Ecologies Project is digitizing archives and creating a searchable database, as well as datasets, that allow them to transfer the data into visualizations. This project is at the forefront of digital public history. It demonstrates how, through the use of open-source resources such as Omeka, digital public access to archives is not only feasible but possible.
This poster will include several visualizations, such as an annotated congregational schedule, a map of urban American congregations by denomination, and a map of a denomination by populated place. The different visualizations included in this poster will demonstrate how digital history methodologies can be utilized to boost the public’s access to history and understanding of history, as well as why it is important that historians consider these methodologies when approaching different research projects such as ours.