It was nominated for this award by The Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies, an online resource platform operated by the Texas A&M University. The panel of scholars from the USA, Canada, Switzerland, the UK, Germany, Sweden, and Finland, recognized the interdisciplinarity of the study and the manner in which it brings together research on religiosity and on media and digital communication.
The publication is the outcome of the collaboration of dr Jacek Stańdo, dr hab. Andrzej Adamski, professor at the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow and an authority on Digital Religion, his doctoral student, mgr Gabriela Piechnik-Czyż, and dr Żywilla Fechner of the Institute of Mathematics, TUL.
In what follows, the authors of the award-winning publication discuss the topic researched in the study.
Was COVID-19 a disaster?
In literature you may have quite often come across the saying ‘a beautiful disaster’. In real life, we tend not to like it when disaster strikes, even though when it does, it frequently turns into a media sensation. Anyone who has ever been affected by a disaster will tell you that a disaster is …. well, a disaster. Oftentimes, it brings a dramatic, sudden, and unexpected end to a chapter of our life. It brings destruction, death, and grief. It is a collective and personal trauma.
Disaster does not necessarily mean an earthquake or a plane crash. It may as well mean an epidemic, when a dangerous contagious disease spreads rapidly over a large area. Was the COVID-19 pandemic a disaster? When you consider the course it took and what it has left in its wake you are certainly tempted to entertain that possibility.
Let us turn to Google Trends
Regardless of any accompanying circumstances, disaster is usually a time of heightened interest in matters of faith and religion. It begins to dawn on self-confident individuals that some things are simply beyond our control. We just have no power over them. So we start to look for some sort of relief. We also begin to seek ways to express our emotions. It turns out that the language of religion can be very expedient at such times.
Internet search engines bear witness to this claim. They keep the record of users' queries. In doing so, they are not silent witnesses - they share their knowledge of the world with us, by way of a range of tools and summaries. One of these is Google Trends. It offers free, albeit limited, insight into the number of searches for selected keywords.
Google Trends was originally designed for online marketing professionals, providing them with a tool to help them design websites that perfectly meet the needs of Internet users based on popular queries.
Google Trends, drawing on data from the Google search engine, measures the popularity of queries across different geographical regions and over time. You can use it to analyze search trends for selected keywords over selected periods of time. Google Trends will show you how often a search query for a given phrase was made compared to the total number of queries over the defined period of time.
Google Trends displays normalized data on a scale from 0 to 100, rather than the absolute number of queries for a given keyword. The app also gives you the option of a comparative map analysis, which shows the frequency of queries in particular regions, such as voivodeships in Poland or states in the USA.
Turning to prayer and spirituality
In the research reported in our article, we used Google Trends to investigate the level of interest in prayer and generally in spirituality in the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and in Europe. We expected to find that during the pandemic the Internet served as a virtual prayer book for religious people.
Our primary research questions focused on the frequency of the search queries that referred to the word 'prayer' but also to specific types of prayer. Further, we compared interest in prayer with the interest in the word 'prophecy' in order to examine the relationship between religiosity and inclination towards the supernatural in its broadest sense.
Our analysis showed a clear recurrence of the search terms, with the volume of some significantly increased at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The keyword searches referring to prophecies were much more frequent at turning points in Polish history (2005 - the death of John Paul II, 2010 - the plane crash that claimed the life of the President of RP) than in the months of 2020 when the pandemic began and escalated. It was search queries related to religion and faith that were more frequent during those months. A conclusion can be drawn that the outbreak of the pandemic spurred religiosity in Poles.