Get Involved

Experts Wanted

The Database of Religious History (DRH) is currently recruiting historians, archaeologists, and religious studies scholars in all areas of expertise (PhD students and above). If you have academic expertise in the history or anthropology of religion, please consider contributing to the DRH.

How Can I Get Involved?

The DRH is built upon the knowledge of our expert contributor community. You can help by adding your own expertise in the form of a new entry or by commenting on existing entries.

Each entry is built around answers to one of our polls. A poll is a list of questions organized around a particular unit of analysis, such as religious group, a religious place, a text, etc.

There are two ways to contribute:

• by creating an entry and answering questions for a new entry,
• by commenting upon existing entries.

An entry can be thought of as analogous to an encyclopedia article that summarizes the state of the field on a particular topic.

Experts create an entry by defining its name, region and date range. Then they proceed by answering questions from the poll. The answers are mostly “Yes”, “No”, “Field Doesn’t Know”, “I Don’t Know”. An expert can add comments and references (using a built-in reference tool) to each answer to flesh out their choice or provide further reading, and upload images and even videos to flesh out their responses. Experts can also simply skip questions (or entire sections of the questionnaire) that are irrelevant or outside of their knowledge. We are aiming to survey your expert intuitions and not expecting you to have to perform new research to answer the questionnaire.

In addition to the questionnaire answers, we encourage contributors to add qualitative comments and references, and will soon be introducing tools that will allow you to organize, and link to, your own or existing online qualitative resources, such as text or image archives.

Do I qualify as an expert?

Contributors to the DRH must have academic expertise with regard to the particular religious phenomenon for which they prepare an entry. Our current rule of thumb is being ABD or above in a relevant department or program, subject to approval by the relevant Editor, but exceptions are sometimes made at the discretion of the Editor.

Why should I participate?

Your expertise will help to strengthen what we hope will become a standard reference source for scholars, teachers, students and the general public.

Join an academic community dedicated to sharing scholarly knowledge in an entirely new fashion, on a radically open-access platform. This includes access to all entries currently published in the database.

Contributions to the DRH are formal publications that are recognized both on the database website and within the database itself. Each is assigned a DOI and stored in PDF form by the UBC Library for ease of citation and access. Contributors should also list their DRH entries on their personal CVs.

The Database of Religious History pays a thank-you honorarium to contributors of $300 CAD, subject to the availability of funds and editor approval, and the entry being completed within 60 days of creation. Please note that the DRH is a grant-funded project, and honoraria availability is limited and dependent upon outside sources – any questions about the current status should be directed to adam.barnett@ubc.ca.

Who has already contributed?

Although the project is in the early stages of development, a growing number of distinguished historians have agreed to help us with the data collection in their respective fields of expertise. A list of participating DRH experts can be found on our contributors page. Our Editorial Team help us to coordinate the increasing pool of contributors.

How do I start?

The process of entering data on your area of expertise is both intuitive and flexible. After signing up you can get started right away: please read the instructions on the Getting Started page, and then click on Contribute to begin creating your entry. The interface is self-explanatory, and you can run through the data entry procedure at your own pace, when you have moments of free time, over the course of a 3 month period. Once you are approved by the Editor you have chosen during the sign up process (this usually only takes a few days) you will be able to publish your entry and also begin commenting on other entries.

If you have any questions or concerns about the approval process, or have not received a timely response to your sign-up request, please feel free to contact our Managing Editor.

We’re recruiting editors, too. Please read our Call for Editors.