Project MaRGAN: «Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel, 1890-1980» aims to curate an accessible database to aid in future research on religious themes in English-speaking novels.
Working on the project alongside two of my English Literature second-year MA students, our work consisted in gathering data for two novels each that we had previously read as part of our studies. We were given a list of thirty-two keywords and tasked with selecting a handful of keywords that we thought best applied to each given novel.
Jack Kerouac’s «The Dharma Bums» was the first novel I worked on, and I selected the keywords: «Arts», «Nature», «Performance», «Sexuality», and «Spirituality», and wrote short summaries for each keyword and how they applied to «The Dharma Bums». This means that anyone who searches for «Nature» in the MaRGAN database will find Kerouac’s novel, and any other novel that might have the same keyword attached to it, along with the short, 150-word summary.
Before submitting our work, the three of us had a meeting where we shared feedback on each other’s work and challenges that arose during the process. I edited my work based on the feedback I received, and sent it to our supervisor, Professor Jamie Christopher Callison. Following the work on our first novels, we had a meeting with our project supervisor to discuss any challenges we might have had, and our experience with the project so far, before moving on to our second novel.
I was tasked with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s «The River Between», for which I selected the keywords: «Belief», «Ritual», «Community», «Critique», «Ethics», and «Sacrifice», and wrote short summaries for each. While the process was similar to the first novel, I did find that the work stayed fresh and engaging, largely due to how different the two novels are. In addition, we were also tasked with writing a guide for future participants in the project. We had a meeting where we discussed how we had gone about our work, and wrote a concise list detailing the process. Edits were made individually, before we agreed on the final structure and sent it to our supervisor.
Working on this project has been a very rewarding experience for me. While the work certainly was challenging in parts, choosing only a handful of keywords when you feel like you could include ten or more does force you to be selective, I do think that having such constraints made the process not only more engaging, but also a better learning experience. I look forward to seeing the MaRGAN database expand, and I’m really proud to have taken even the smallest part in pushing the database toward completion.