Subproject INF

Metaphor Base Camp: Providing the Common Data Basis and Advancing Digital Research Methods for Religious Metaphors

INF serves as the central infrastructure project of the CRC, providing the shared data, tools, and methodological foundations that make comparative research on religious metaphors possible across disciplines, languages, and religious traditions.

At the heart of the project is the development of the Thesaurus of Religious Metaphors (TRM), a digital research platform that enables scholars to document, classify, and compare metaphors across diverse corpora. Building on the infrastructure established during the first funding phase, INF continues to develop standards for metaphor annotation, research data management, and semantic modeling, while supporting the long-term accessibility and interoperability of the CRC’s data.

In the second funding phase, the project expands its focus beyond textual sources to include visual metaphors in images and objects. It further develops ontologies, controlled vocabularies, annotation workflows, and analytical tools that allow researchers to explore metaphorical patterns across different traditions and media. By combining expertise in digital humanities, semantic technologies, and religious studies, INF provides the common foundation on which the CRC’s collaborative and comparative research is built.

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