Revealing the Revivals: Towards a Common Nordic Framework for Digital Mapping of Places of Worship

This article proposes a Nordic GIS-based framework and platform for the digital registration and visualisation of places of worship and discusses how such a research infrastructure can be built to aid research on the spatial and temporal dimensions of religion in the Nordic countries, initially limited to Christian places of worship. The platform is scalable and can include other geographical areas or layers of information in the future. The data will be open for others to re-use and combine with additional datasets. The article presents the current data available from four Nordic countries and discusses methods of retrieving, vetting, and coordinating this data. The article then suggests a framework based on registering at least 13 fields of information at each place of worship and proposes a common taxonomy of religious affiliation facilitating research across borders. Combining spatial and temporal data with multi-level data on religious affiliations will open new possibilities for further research on the ebb and flow of religious movements in the Nordic countries.