Metaphors of Religion

The CRC studies the role of metaphor in religious meaning-making. In metaphors, meaning is transferred from one semantic domain to another. By adopting conceptual metaphor theory, the CRC seeks to more thoroughly understand this process and to research its semantic forms empirically and comparatively. Through its multidisciplinary subprojects the CRC contributes to the historiography and the comparative study of religions. It covers various religious traditions from across the globe, working with texts from multiple languages and diverse genres, dating from 3,000 BCE to the present.
To enable comparability and interoperability between its extremely heterogeneous subprojects, the CRC deliberately puts emphasis on a shared digital infrastructure (data repository, annotation-tool, conceptual thesaurus), provided by the information infrastructure (INF) project. Utilizing this infrastructure, the subprojects annotate religious texts to not only mark the presence of metaphors, but to include complex analysis of the structural functionings of the metaphor and the resulting domain mappings.

A contribution to the 9. Tagung des Verbands "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum" - DHd 2023 Open Humanities Open Culture.