Project information
Doctoral student
Martin van der Linden
Supervisor
Stefan Arvidsson
Assistant supervisor
Beate Schirmacher
Timetable
2022–2026
Subject
The study of religion, Faculty of Arts and Humanities
More about the project
I aim to study how Shinto is portrayed and conveyed on digital (social) media, focusing on YouTube. Based on the idea that in current times most information about religion, in general, is disseminated through the Internet, the study seeks to map how information about Shinto has been affected by the accelerated and expeditious, breakneck charge of global digitalization and how this information is then produced and reproduced in digital media-specific spaces.
Through a three-step method study, each step layering in a related research field (digital humanities, multimodality, and intermediality) and aesthetics of religion as the theoretical framework, I seek to find answers to how digital media changes and essentially (re)creates information about Shinto. The first step seeks to map the digital presence of Shinto on YouTube, the second step seeks to study the audio-visual tendencies and trends in the digital representations, and the third step seeks to understand how and why Shinto information has taken on certain media-specific audio-visual forms on YouTube and to place these findings in a larger religious aesthetic context.
The project is part of the research in Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS)
