What They Preach

by J. Nathan Matias, MT Media Lab Center for Civic Media

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What parts of the Bible do Christian speakers focus on? This datavisualisation compares my two churches over more than ten years. Both Eden Baptist (Cambridge UK) and Park Street (Boston USA) are prominent evangelical churches in university towns. They both help shape the agenda of evangelical Christianity within their countries.

What's the point? I want to do a big data analysis of how religious texts are used across cultures. Previous religious text visualization projects include my Audio Psalter and religious poetry reading projects.

To create the visualization, I scraped data about every Sunday sermon recording from the Eden and Park Street websites. I collected book and chapter information from a Creative Commons edition of the Bible. Sometimes, sermons just reference a book. In those cases, books containing more than 5 chapters were omitted.

Hover over a chapter to see the number of sermons. Click on a chapter to read the text in question. Or Read my analysis.