In studies on historical, religious texts, references occur frequently and quite naturally. For example, Christian authors will frequently cite the bible, Muslim authors will refer to the Qur’an. Documenting these references as linked data, however, is not self-understood. Issues regarding text copy rights naturally apply, so the question also remains, which corpora can be mined.
In this article, I want to mention some “linking projects” that touch upon religion that I came across in my research. If you have suggestions for additions, please message me at jacob.langeloh [at] teol.ku.dk
Running and publishing data
Biblindex: “BiblIndex is an index of biblical references found in early Christian literature, both Western and Eastern texts, so far covering the first three centuries, along with part of the following century. The eventual goal is to cover the whole of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages to help renew the study of the interpretation and the history of biblical texts.” To the website
Monastica (University Lund): “Monastica is an open access digital platform for research on the transmission of the so called Sayings of the Desert, known in Greek as the Apophthegmata Patrum and in Latin as the Verba Seniorum, as well as closely related early monastic literature.” To the website
Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS): “The focus of the SAWS project is on collections of ideas and opinions – ranging from pithy sayings to short passages from longer philosophical texts – which make up the ancient genre of Wisdom Literature.” Published editions of Wisdom literature and linked them with each other. Despite not focusing on religious texts per se, many of these texts refer to the Bible as an authority. Description and website
Kitab-Project: “KITAB provides a digital toolbox and a forum for discussions about Arabic texts. We wish to empower users to explore Arabic texts in completely new ways and to expand the frontiers of knowledge about one of the world’s largest and most complex textual traditions.”; offers a corpus of Arabic texts and identifies parallel passages. While religion is not explicitly the main topic, the corpus still contains many religious texts and automatic detection of Qur’an quotations is one of the sub-project’s goals. To the Website. They regularly release their data at the Zenodo repository
Qur’ān 12-21: Presents European Qur’an translations from different times (from the 12th to the 21st century, hence the name) and languages (Latin, French, English, Russian, Italian, …) in a great parallel viewer. See the website.
Announced and/or on the way
MIDRASH: Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script“ (newly approved ERC Synergy Grant): “Tens of thousands of handwritten medieval manuscripts in the National Library of Israel’s KTIV International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts will be analyzed by AI-driven technologies thanks to an unprecedented 10 million euro grant from the EU European Research Council.” A synergy grant usually has large resources, so this should be exciting. See the reporting in French and English.
The European Qur’an Database (EuQUDB): Housed in another ERC Synergy project,the goal is tocreate a “GIS-mapped database in which we collect all the available data about the circulation of Qur’anic manuscripts in medieval and early modern Europe, as well as data about all published and unpublished European editions and translations of the Qur’an in Arabic, Greek, Latin and the European vernaculars.” Information on the EuQu website
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jacob Langeloh (January 30, 2023). Linked (Open) Data Projects in Religious Studies – An incomplete list. OTRA-Blog. Retrieved May 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/voye