What even is this?
Great question. Sometimes, I’m not totally sure myself!
Years ago, when I was taking my first data analysis class, I decided to do a project centered around some major events in early Christianity. I gathered 80-ish records and turned in my project, but I kept collecting this info with the idea I could use it for other projects in the future. It also gave me an excuse to dive back into studying religious history, in a real way. Over a few years, I gathered a wide variety of data centered around all things early Christian. All of it has at least 1 source, all of it hand researched by myself in my spare time, gathered from many, many places. It is over 3,000 records, and covers many subjects. I absolutely plan to add more at some point – there are many early Christian and R-based subjects I want to explore!
I will make sets available as I work on different things. The full set of data is a real mess and stored in different formats: Excel spreadsheets, .csv, a mySQL data base, Google docs, and lately: a series of R list objects. Pulling all of this together into something cohesive is a goal of mine.
Some notes on the data and sources:
- Dates for many things, especially in the first couple centuries, were hard to verify. Unless they’re famous, well documented events, assume approximations in nearly all cases. This is, of course, a common problem for all who study ancient things. If I sourced a start/end date from multiple sources, or there are multiple possibilities, I use the earliest start date, and the latest end date available.
- I looked to academic sources first and foremost for my information. Sometimes, I had to dip into sources provided by the church(es), or other religious organizations that compiled the data I wanted. Those would often use traditional dates. Other times, a non-academic source was used if it referenced a significant amount of other academic sources and cited them. Wikipedia is an obvious example, but there are several online libraries I utilized, as well.