In the Blog/Varia section we publish project-related news, such as information about conferences, workshops, information about our publications and organised events, curiosities. It is also a place where short notes prepared by students cooperating with us appear.

The main idea of the project is to investigate the relationship between urban space and religion. For this purpose, in the first stage, team members collect iconic religion (Knott, Krech and Meyer 2016), which they have observed. This stage is carried out with the ArcGIS Field Maps application using a spatial database project prepared in ArcGIS Online software. It contains over a dozen attributes to allow the most accurate categorization of observed objects represented by points and lines. Each database object also has attachments (photos, videos, sounds). The huge diversity of iconic religion means that the original assumptions of the database ontology had to undergo some changes (adding new attributes, changing the list of values, etc.). This confirms how difficult it is to rigidly categorize a phenomenon like religion.

The collected data (especially points) form a numerous set, which is a rich source of information about religion in the city. Using them as input data in GIS analyses may allow to study the relationship of religion with other social phenomena, as well as to assess the saturation of urban space by religion. The attached maps show, on the example of Cracow, the density of iconic religion in the city area, as well as their number in cadastral districts. On their basis it can be concluded that religion is concentrated mainly in the city center (Old Town, Kazimierz) and Łagiewniki, where there are two large sanctuaries. The map with the administrative division gives a more detailed information of the distribution of religion in the city, due to the fact that the density map is mainly intended to present the intensity of the phenomenon, which exposes extreme values.

The analyses presented here do not exhaust the theme - they are only an example of how broadly GIS can be applied and how it can facilitate the analysis of such data.

Author: Radosław Piskorski