Metaphors of Religion

Towards a Shared Infrastructure for Metaphor Analysis¹ 

The collaborative research center (CRC) 1475 ²  studies the role of metaphors in religious meaning-making. In metaphors, meaning is transferred from one semantic domain to another. Metaphors can thus serve as a means to express abstract concepts with reference to more concrete ones closer to human experience. Religion, which cannot directly address its ultimate subject (the transcendent, i.e., gods, otherworlds, etc.), is especially dependent on this procedure. By adopting conceptual metaphor theory ( Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Steen et al., 2010; Nacey et al., 2019) the CRC seeks to more thoroughly understand this process theoretically and grasp it methodologically to research its semantic forms empirically and comparatively. Through its multidisciplinary subprojects the CRC contributes to the historiography of religions and to answering systematic questions in the comparative study of religions. It covers a plethora of religious traditions from across the globe, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism. The time frame ranges from 3,000 BCE to the present day, including texts from multiple languages and diverse genres, from Korean Confucian ego-documents to Christian online forums.

Motivated by the challenge of comparability and interoperability between its extremely heterogeneous subprojects, the CRC deliberately puts emphasis on digital methods. Thus, the shared infrastructure, provided by the information infrastructure (INF) project, does not only support the individual research projects, but fosters conceptual integration. Utilizing this infrastructure the subprojects annotate religious texts to make metaphorical language explicit. For this process we adapt the Five Step Method (Steen, 2011) to not only mark the presence of metaphors, but to include complex analysis of the structural functioning of the metaphor and the resulting domain mappings as well. As a standardization measure we append an additional step, where each concept is linked to a conceptual thesaurus.

The Metaphor Workbench

Within the INF project, scholars of religion, computational linguists, and computer scientists jointly establish the digital research infrastructure of the CRC and provide the necessary tools for the subprojects.

Conclusions and Future Scope

The CRC’s infrastructure – research data repository, annotation services, conceptual thesaurus and thesaurus of religious metaphors – fosters reusability as well as interoperability with external knowledge graphs by focusing on open data principles and will be published under open licenses. In particular, the emerging TRM will act as a unique resource for scholars worldwide studying religious metaphors. The INF project itself is an integral part of the CRC in providing this shared infrastructure and thus enabling comparative studies on an unprecedented scale in the field.

¹ Contributor Roles: Henning Gebhard (Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing; Data Curation; Software ), Vandana Jha (Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing; Data Curation; Software ), Philipp Tögel (Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing; Data Curation; Software ), Stefanie Dipper (Writing – review & editing; Conceptualization; Funding acquisition; Methodology; Supervision), Frederik Elwert (Writing – review & editing; Conceptualization; Funding acquisition; Methodology; Supervision), Danah Tonne (Writing – review & editing; Conceptualization; Funding acquisition; Methodology; Supervision).

² Funded by the German Research Association (DFG, Project ID 441126958), CRC 1475 “Metaphors of Religion” consists of researchers from the Ruhr University Bochum and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 14 scientific subprojects.