Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies

The  Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies is a useful hub for scholars and researchers interested in "questions emerging at the intersections of religion, the internet and new, social and mobile media" to meet.

Founded in 2010, the site includes an extensive (500-plus items) bibliography resting heavily on the convenient shoulders of Google Scholar as well as a Scholars Index of around 200 members from around the world. The Index is comprised of the list of members with individual links to brief bio and affiliation info. Expertise tags are liberally applied to these profiles. Art Bamford's expertise lies with media ecology, orality, literacy, music recording technology, music production technology, and Stevie Wonder. Good stuff. 

A nice feature is the News section which is updated on a regular basis. I notice there is a submission today.  The submission before that was 4 days previous and that seems to be about the pace.  The most recent stories feature a gospel app development contest being encouraged by the Mormon Church, a columnist from the Times-Gazette.com calling the Bible "God's Facebook," and a 3-D game developed by the American Bible Society. It looks like these news items are intended to be crowd-sourced but it's pretty much the same few folks posting.

The site is clean and attractive, pushing all the latest related books, even jobs in the field.  The blog section offers more extended (compared to the posts in News) reflections on current research, but these articles are still quite brief. The site is informative and happening, but not time-consuming, especially for lurkers.

That's my little tour of the site. Did I mention it's "located" at Texas A&M University where it was launched with the help of their Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture.