Cartography of Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network

This interactive open access tool visually explores over 350 academic contributions (journal articles, conference papers, blog posts, book series, annual lectures and workshops) directly connected to Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network (NSRN). NSRN is an international network of scholars researching a variety of topics related to non-religion. The lexical cartography visualizes the Research Network arranging the scholars on the base of lexical distance. Authors whose dictionaries tend to significantly overlap will therefore be displayed closer to each other. Isoclines are then used to graphically represent a relative measure of authors’ relevance within the community of reference on the base of the sum of TF-IDF scores of the top tokens. This visualization method represents scholarly affinities using shared verbal units rather than citation. Since citations partially reproduce pre-existing academic hierarchies, an approach based on word usage allows identifying lexical neighborhoods leveling inequalities.