Information Infrastructure for Studying Religious Metaphors : The Backbone of Collaboration

Metaphors are present everywhere in both everyday language and in religious texts, playing a significant role in religious meaning-making processes. CRC 1475, "Metaphors of Religion," is developing a shared infrastructure to facilitate metaphor analysis across diverse religious traditions and time periods. The infrastructure, based on the WADM, stores and manages complex annotations resulting from metaphor analysis. The INF within CRC 1475 provides the necessary frameworks and services to standardize metaphor analysis across 13 subprojects, which encompass a wide range of religious traditions. This paper introduces the shared infrastructure, highlighting key data modelling and infrastructure decisions, its development, and how it supports established metaphor-analytic approaches for metaphor identification and conceptual mapping. The infrastructure enables interdisciplinary collaboration, making the comparative study of religious metaphors possible on an unprecedented scale.