Hacking Religion

An open textbook introducing data science to religious studies (or vice versa)

You can view a live demo of the book here: [https://kidwellj.github.io/hacking_religion_textbook/intro.html]

The course here has been compiled with quarto, and so the live instance of the course is compiled from openly accessible resources located in this repository. If you're interested in doing something similar, there are a number of other options, some of which have lamentably turned commercial, including: bookdown, gitbook, mkdocs, readthedocs which technically uses Sphinx or daux.

Top level files and directories in this repository are:

• README.md this README file displayed on Github
• hacking_religion a folder containing the quarto code and accompanying files which are used to render the book in html and .pdf formats
• docs a rendered sample version of the most recent version of the book (used for )

Directory structure for hacking_religion includes:

• _quarto.yml Quarto setup information
• preface.qmd Preface
• index.qmd Introduction and overview to book
• chapter_1.qmd Chapter 1: working with UK Census religion data
• chapter_2.qmd Chapter 2: survey data
• chapter_3.qmd Chapter 3: geospatial data"
• chapter_4.qmd Chapter 4: data scraping, corpus analysis and wordclouds
• chapter_5.qmd What's next?
• appendix_a.qmd Setting up reproducible workspace
• appendix_b.qmd Useful references
• references.bib a bibliography of items used for the course in BibTeX format
• cover.png The book cover
• data based on a reproducible research structure - contains datasets used for analysis.
• derived_data contains files which represent modified forms of files in the above path.
• figures contains images and visualisations (graphic files) which are generated by R.

How to produce books from this repository:

1. clone this repository using git clone https://github.com/kidwellj/hacking_religion_textbook.git (install git if you haven't already)
2. install quarto
3. install the necessary pre-requisite R libraries, including knitr, rmarkdown, ragg (primarily necessary if running R on MacOS), and here. This can be done by running the following commands in an RStudio console:

   install.packages("knitr")
   install.packages("rmarkdown")
   

4. change to the hacking_religion subdirectory and run quarto preview to get a temporary preview of the book as a website running on your local PC.
5. alternatively you can render a copy of the book using quarto render.

Cookbook

There is a companion repository which contains recipes which will replicate the example data used in the book. This can be found here: [https://github.com/kidwellj/hacking_religion_cookbook]

Copyright

Content here, unless otherwise indicated are copyright by Jeremy H. Kidwell. Please re-use them as they are covered by Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0).