A Gospel of Health and Salvation
A Digital Study of Seventh-day Adventism as a Developing Cultural System, 1843 - 1920
Jeri Wieringa
Fall 2013
Who are Seventh-day Adventists?
Kellogg's Corn Flakes
Restrictive diet, including no meat, no alcohol, no caffeine.
Very effective at combining religion with medical care
William Miller
Ellen White
John Harvey Kellogg
A Gospel of Health and Salvation
How are Seventh-day Adventist positions on health and diet related to broader health and social reform movements?
How is the religious (and health) system mutually constructed with gender, race, and class?
How does this change our understanding of religion and reform in the 19th-century?
Goals
- Show the complex relationship between religion and culture
- Interrogate the standard narrative of religion in 19th-century America
- Apply text-mining and network analysis to questions of cultural history
- Develop a model for presenting history scholarship digitally
Why SDA?
- Millennial and healing movements
- Female leadership
- Archives local and well managed
- Under-studied
Digital Study?
Text-Mining
- Categorize
- Cluster
- Compare/Contrast
- Track
Network Analysis
- Where are books and periodicals published?
- Who are the editors? Distributors?
- Who published what types of pieces in which periodicals?
- What language and themes are favored by different authors? How are those authors connected to one another and to the denomination?
Digital Display
?
- Applying "Lean" methods for developing project
- Design driven by argument of the work
Design Values
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Websites (and ogres) are like onions
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All roads lead back to the data
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Design and content should form a cohesive argument
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Bad UI will kill good content
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Websites are places to learn, to play, and to question
Design Models
