[First posted in AWOL 7 January 2018, updated 26 February 2022]
The DRH began as one of the flagship initiatives of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It now continues as an independent academic initiative, based at UBC but involving partners and collaborators from all over the world.
It is intended as a platform for unprecedented academic collaboration, reflecting a commitment to rigorous, scholarly standards and a deep appreciation for interdisciplinary work in the sciences and humanities.
Accessible, centralized clearing house for historical data
The DRH is designed to serve as a centralized clearinghouse for scholarly knowledge of the historical record, bringing together a core of quantified, standardized data with qualitative comments, references to crucial resources, and links to on-line text and image databases.
The pace of scholarly production concerning the religious historical record has increased rapidly over the past decades, making it difficult for scholars maintain a comprehensive overview of new monographs, journals and on-line resources. The DRH aims to respond to the problem of information overload by creating a core of standardized, searchable, visualizable knowledge surrounded by rich qualitative comments, references and links to otherwise scattered and hard to find on-line repositories of texts and images.