Data Driven Methodology for a Democratic Future of Historic Religious Contexts

Abstract

Our current society is heavily fueled by digital culture, due to which urban practice and their manifestations have transformed themselves into entities that simultaneously change states of pause and action. This is evident in most modern practices such as commerce, medicine, law, performing/applied arts, etc. Although, the most interesting observation is to see old human practices being added upon or replaced with digital culture, of which religion and its related practices are one of the major examples. Historically, religion has been known as a resilient ideological construct that provided civilization with a safe haven for practicing faith and valuable code for social conduct. And they preserve themselves in physical geographies of significant areas of cities and towns, from the past till present. These geographical contexts are termed as ‘religious precincts’ (during this study). These precincts due to their longevity, become cultural Palimpsests. The current layer superimposed on them is that of the digital culture. This is clearly seen in the transition of religious practices to cyberculture, especially in India, using epuja, live darshan, online religious cults / communities and more. The main facilitator of these shifts can be assigned to cyberculture interfaces such as social media platforms, that have become significant in letting the devotees, priests and tourists to socially express their religious experiences through platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Do these platforms, then, only become a facilitator of mere expression? Rather, the study envisions crowdsourcing data and information from these stakeholders, providing opportunities for designers to make historically significant religious contexts adaptive to current development pressures and cater to growing needs of their users. This idea can then employ a localized data mining platform to make efficient design choices.