Mining Analysis of Religious Texts

Religious text scholarship explores the meaning of passages and uses critical/rhetorical research methods. In contrast, automated tools that perform shallower but broader quantitative analysis have been created. These tools process entire books and help illuminate relationships between religious texts. We have automatically extracted and categorized noun and verb phrases from nine religious texts: the Book of Mormon, the Greater Holy Assembly, the New Testament, the Old Testament, the Popol Vuh, the Qur’an, the Rig Veda, the Tao Te Ching, and the Torah. The extracted topics were used as input to a Self-Organizing Map (SOM). The map uncovered some interesting relationships.