Data Science Meets Ironbound Street Shrines in NJIT Undergrad Summer Research

Computer science and religion are rarely thought of together as connected research areas, but it’s going well for NJIT student Fernando Mantilla, who is performing a geospatial analysis of more than 200 street shrines in Newark’s historic Ironbound neighborhood.

The shrines are tributes to important figures in Catholicism, generally made from painted tiles but sometimes in the form of statues, canvas paintings or photographs. They are located in the windows and entryways of homes and small businesses. They are common in ancient cities like Rome, but also in Catholic communities throughout the world, as well as in other religious traditions. Here in Newark, shrines were built by Italian families in the past and more recently by the Portuguese community.

Mantilla, a junior in NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College, learned about shrine analysis from Honors College dean Louis Hamilton, who studies the shrines in Rome. Mantilla grew up in nearby Union City, which is similar to Ironbound, and wanted to use his own skills to better understand the local community.

“I’m not that religious. I’ve always had an appreciation for history. The Ironbound, it’s such a mix of different cultures, and it’s so close to NJIT — I would walk around and see those tiles. I never understood the purpose of them or if the families who put them up still lived there,” Mantilla explained. “There’s this changing of communities. That kind of stuff is not documented as well as it should be, especially for a place like the Ironbound.”

He started by learning the correct terms. Italian families called the shrines edicole sacre, while in Portuguese it’s azulejo. “My idea is to map this out,” Mantilla explained. As communities move in, expand and eventually move out, “I feel like there needs to be some way for people to be part of that community, to understand what’s happening to them.”

Mantilla initially marked the shrine locations on Google Maps. He also recorded their street name, condition, building type, and related attributes. He’s planning to analyze the data using Tableau, which is spatial analysis software.

“So to perform the geospatial analysis, we look at the different types of shrines and the types of streets they are found on. Of the shrines found, 85% of them are tiles,” Mantilla explained. Most are dedicated to Virgin Mary, with about 10% showing devotion with candles or plants.

When he’s finished — the project is extending way beyond the summer and might take a year or two — he will compare the results to census data. “It will show a story of maybe how the people came in, where they settled, how the community has, whether or not they’re connected to their religion anymore — or maybe it’ll show the opposite.”

Another student, junior computer science major Alex Patchedjiev, built a MySQL database for Hamilton and will incorporate Mantilla’s data too. “Over the past few years, we had a lot of data on all the shrines in Rome. But it was all just in one big Excel spreadsheet, which isn’t very useful. So my job was to create a database where we could import all that data into it. And then on that database, insert all the data we’ve broken down into the entities and relationships about the shrines.”

Patchedjiev knew how to make a database from his standard computer science coursework, but he hadn’t studied web development and had to learn that on-the-fly. His next challenge is to package the software in a way that it can be hosted on a public-facing official NJIT website.

“I find myself having a growing appreciation for the history of the people that lived there,” added Mantilla, the Ironbound project’s primary researcher. He and colleagues are also performing oral histories with families residing where the shrines are located. Mantilla would like to preserve the interviews in an online exhibition. Of the people interviewed so far, “They seemed very happy to have their family history celebrated. It’s very rewarding. You feel like it’s not that important, but it really is. Everyone’s an expert on their own culture.”

His team is even considering the possibility of a virtual reality exhibit, so online visitors can experience the shrines in three dimensions. “It falls mostly under data science but it’s more anthropological in nature,” he noted.

Mantilla credited Hamilton, along with faculty members Rosanna Dent, Pantelis Monogioudis, Burcak Ozludil and Margarita Vinnikov, for mentoring him on the project.

Overall, the project epitomizes how Honors College scholars are expanding their horizons beyond classrooms.

“It is important to document the rich history and culture of the Ironbound from as many perspectives as we can, especially as the city of Newark continues to grow and change,” Dean Hamilton stated. “Digital and computational tools have been part of humanities’ research methods since the 1940s, but their role in humanities research has taken off in the past 10 years and will only continue to grow. At the same time, it has never been more apparent how important it is that our technologies be built within an ethical and humanistic framework, drawing on the lessons that history can offer.”

“The multiple research projects of the Digital Spatial History Lab rely on a little more than 20 undergraduate research assistants. We find NJIT students eager to use their technical training in creative ways to ask fundamental questions about society’s past, present, and future.”