Semantic Network of Organized Non-Religious Discourses

Traditionally, sociologists neglected non-religion conceiving the so-called religious nones as a residual minority of individuals characterized by relatively similar worldviews. Once a neglected minority, the population of religious nones grew considerably over the past few decades turning into the new majority in several western countries. The progressive growth of non-religion eventually resulted in the re-discovery of this now salient phenomenon and in the institutionalization of non-religion studies. Nevertheless, for over a century, sociology of religion remained theoretically informed by a religion-centric understanding of the secularization thesis. Not only this influenced theoretical developments in the discipline, but it also oriented data collection itself. As a result, the existing survey data are often deemed inadequate to fully deal with newly emerging theoretical interests. However, recent developments in computational methods allow researchers to seek relevant information elsewhere. This interactive visualization tool is based on a collection of 7,308 issues of British and American non-religious magazines published between 1881 and 2019. Two long-running magazines, one more radical (i.e., that self-identifies with atheism) and one more moderate (i.e., that self-identifies with humanism), with ties to a militant non-religious organization were selected for each considered country. The corpus includes The Freethinker (UK), New Humanist (UK), American Atheist (US), and The Humanist (US). This tool combines topic modeling with community detection algorithms to allow the users to visually explore word-to-word connections in the semantic network of organized non-religious discourses.