On Wednesday 25th June 2025, the Digital British Islam team hosted a symposium on ‘Digital Methodologies for the Study of Religion’ at Coventry University. The event was attended by over 30 academics and practitioners from diverse international contexts – including institutions in Germany, France, India, USA and the UK – who participated both online and in-person.
The event comprised a range of panels covering innovative methods, digital archives and cataloguing, multi-method research and emerging ethical challenges. Presentations included explorations of digital Shi’ism (Dr Akif Tahiiev, Goethe University, Frankfurt), using the UK Web Archive to explore religion (Helena Byrne, British Library), the ethics of privacy in digital ethnography (Barbara Denuelle, University of Kent), and the representation of Islam in museum digital catalogues (Dr Nur Efeoglu, Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University).
Contributions from the Digital British Islam team comprised a discussion of our web archiving method for researching Muslim spaces online (Prof Gary R. Bunt, UWTSD), an exploration of the complex ethics of digital research with religious communities (Prof. Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor, Coventry University), and a framework for combining multimodal digital methods in the study of religion (Dr Laura Jones, University of Edinburgh). The full list of presentations is available [here].
The Digital British Islam team would like to thank all those that participated in the insightful and fruitful discussions during the event including presenters, panel chairs and attendees. The contributions of this conference will be explored for an upcoming edited collection, a follow-up volume to Digital Methodologies in the Sociology of Religion (Cheruvallil-Contractor and Shakkour, 2015). Keep an eye on our website for further updates.
