• The Making of America’s Public Bible: Computational Text Analysis for Religious History

    Author(s):
    Lincoln Mullen (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Digital Humanists, Religious Studies
    Subject(s):
    Religion, Religions, History, United States, Humanities--Research--Data processing
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Religious history, American religious history, Digital history, Humanities computing
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6WW76Z8Q
    Abstract:
    This chapter describes the creation of "America's Public Bible," an interactive work of digital scholarship that identifies quotations of the Bible in U.S. newspapers. The chapter explains how the project works from a computational perspective and, more importantly, how those computational methods connect to research questions in American religious history and religious studies. The site enables a disciplined serendipity that turns up new and unusual examples that one would be unlikely to find with more traditional methods, but which also rigorously contextualizes those examples. This method helps researcher make better evaluations of whether the phenomena under study are typical or unusual.
    Notes:
    This is a preprint of a chapter to appear as “The Making of America’s Public Bible: Computational Text Analysis in Religious History,” in Introduction to Digital Humanities: Research Methods for the Study of Religion, edited by Christopher D. Cantwell and Kristian Petersen (DeGruyter, under review). This version incorporates revisions suggested by the editors but has been posted prior to peer review. Please cite the forthcoming version.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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