Paper short abstract:

We are proposing a methodology for the creation of computational resources centred around religious texts and relevant domains of knowledge (e.g. religious diversity), which is designed to assist traditional investigative techniques in the field of religious studies.

Paper long abstract:

Religious studies, like other disciplines within the field of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), are benefiting from the increasing use of technology: digital textual resources, archives, and tools are constantly expanding, with a growing amount of searchable information, useful for purposes of analysis and interpretation of texts. However, religious texts, especially when written in ancient languages for which computational resources of support are scarce or even absent, can present different issues in terms of material digitization challenges, high complexity, and the need for analyses that require the involvement of different expertises, in a multidisciplinary perspective. However, at the moment, there are very few tools and approaches for religious studies that may support scholars in their research without requiring them to have knowledge of the underlying digital technologies. Building upon these initial assumptions, we are proposing a methodology for the creation of computational resources centred around religious texts and relevant domains of knowledge (e.g. religious diversity), which is designed to assist traditional investigative techniques in the field of religious studies. The description of the methodology takes into account how to model and to interlink textual, linguistic, and conceptual information in the form of an integrated resource focusing on the religious domain; in particular, the proposed case study (the domain of body parts in the biblical “Book of Ruth” in Hebrew) is first introduced from a scholarly point of view and then translated, with the support of specific tools, into its computational representation.