DRH Call for Contributors

The Database of Religious History encourages qualified scholars to contribute entries on ancient or pre-modern religious belief and practice. If you have academic expertise in the history of a particular religious group, tradition or phenomenon, as indicated by a PhD (or status as a PhD Candidate) in a relevant field, please consider contributing an entry to the DRH.

A current list of contributors is here.

Your contribution can be thought of as analogous to an encyclopedia article that summarizes the state of the field on a particular subject. 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 on-line qualitative resources, such as text or image archives.

For frequently asked questions about the project, see here.

The DRH is designed to be a community resource for religious historians, a centralized, constantly-updated, open access repository for the state of the art in scholarly opinion on religious history. Its minimal gatekeeping also facilitates broad reach and inclusiveness: only qualified experts can contribute, but they can volunteer themselves from anywhere in the world, rather than having to be known to and selected by a single editor or small group of editors. The result should be a much more comprehensive and diverse snapshot of scholarly opinion in any given field.

Commitment

  • Experts create an entry through the DRH site and then navigate through a questionnaire of mostly “Yes”/ “No”/ “Field Doesn’t Know” buttons, adding comments and references when appropriate, and simply skipping questions (or entire sections of the questionnaire) that are irrelevant or outside the expert’s knowledge. We are aiming to survey your expert intuitions and not expecting you to have to perform new research to answer the questionnaire.
  • Most expert find that the process of creating an entry and completing the questionnaire takes 3-5 hours in total. You work can be saved as you go, and you can complete the entry at your own pace, whenever you have free time to log in.

Incentives

  • Contribute your expertise to 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-source platform. This includes access to all entries currently published in the database
  • Entries are private until published, and can always be added to or edited, ensuring that they remain up to date
  • Entries published within the DRH are archived and preserved within the UBC Library system, this assigns them a publicly citable Document Object Identifier (DOI). Contributors should also list their DRH entries on their personal CVs. Because our database is essentially a quantitative and qualitative encyclopedia, we suggest the following form of citation that acknowledges the input of the experts (using one of our early contributors, Lothar von Falkenhausen (UCLA) as an example):
    • von Falkenhausen, Lothar. 2013. Shang-Western Zhou (1750–850 BCE): Religion Variables. Database of Religious History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
  • Small honorarium of $300 for entries published.

How to Contribute

Just visit our “getting involved” page!

We look forward to welcoming you to the DRH team!

Edward Slingerland, Projector Director (edward.slingerland@ubc.ca)

Willis Monroe, Associate Director (willis.monroe@ubc.ca)