2015 Grant to Analyze Islam and Science Online Videos

The Center for the Study of Science in Muslim Societies has received a grant from the Templeton Foundation to continue its work with online videos by analyzing the discourse created by the videos and the participants who engage in the discourse.  

The new grants builds upon the work done in the past (previous?) year identifying the landscape of online videos that address both Islam and the natural sciences. That research found that while a Google search might return tens of thousands of “results,” closer examination finds that the vast majority of the results are either spurious or copies. The cataloging process resulted in only about one thousand unique videos. The Science and Islam Video Portal, which will provide evaluations of a few hundred videos identified through the cataloging process, will be available starting in the fall of 2015.

In order to examine the videos and their context more thoroughly, the research done under the new grant will select the more popular (those with more views) videos from among those about Islam and either astronomy or evolution. The research will include interviews with individuals involved with circulating the videos on the web. Through these conversations, we will learn more about reasons for creating and uploading videos with this content, as well as examining the networks through which the videos travel.

Since videos of his lectures are by far the most numerous among the videos on science and Islam, part of the research will focus on videos of Zakir Naik, a Muslim preacher whose original training was as a medical doctor. A public lecturer since the 1990s, videos of him circulate both among those who believe his representations and those who use his lectures to spoof either him or Islam generally.  

The work will generally follow the methodology used by Lela Mosenghvdlishvili and Jereon Jansz in "Framing and praising Allah on YouTube:  Exploring user-created videos about Islam and the motivations for producing them" New Media & Society 15/4 (2013).  

Salman Hameed, the director of the Center, is the primary investigator. Continuing their work from the 2014-15 grant will be Vika Gardner, as a post-doctoral research fellow, and undergraduates from across the Five College Consortium.