America's Public Bible

America's Public Bible: A Commentary is a project to detect the biblical quotations in the Chronicling America and 19th Century U.S. Newspapers corpora of historical newspapers, then to interpret and visualize the patterns.

Suggested citation

If you use this project for academic work, here is a suggested citation.

Lincoln A. Mullen, America's Public Bible: A Commentary (Stanford University Press, 2023): <http://doi.org/10.21627/2022apb>.

Repository organization

This repository supersedes the original repositories. The website directory contains the code and visualizations for the digital monograph. The quotation-finder directory contains the code to find the quotations in the text corpora. The data is served by RRCHNM's data API.

Copyright

Except for the illustrations credited to third party sources, the copyright to the America's Public Bible website is held by Stanford University.

ISBN 9781503605244 | DOI 10.21627/2022apb | OCLC tbd

The copyright to the code is held by Lincoln A. Mullen.

All data is copyright 2016-2022 Lincoln A. Mullen.

License

The website's content, including text, user interface design, style, and imagery---unless otherwise indicated---are licensed under the creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The code is licensed under the MIT license and the underlying data is licensed under the Creative Commons License CC0. For more information and the complete text of the license for the website, please go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode. See the file LICENSE.md in this repository for the license for the code.

Project news

• 14 March 2022. This digital monograph has been approved by the Stanford University Press editorial board and will soon be submitted for publication.
• 24 June 2021. The Wall Street Journal featured this project in a story titled “Library of Congress Looks to AI to Help Users Sift Through Its Collection.”
• 17 June 2021. The Library of Congress Labs announced that I will be applying my search for biblical quotations across their digital collections as part of Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud.
• 22 February 2021. A chapter on “The Making of America’s Public Bible: Computational Text Analysis for Religious History” was published in Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies.
• 5 February 2021. Jimmy Byrd’s A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood has been published by Oxford University Press, and it includes an appendix based in part on the America’s Public Bible algorithm.
• 11 April 2019. Delivered an invited talk and seminar titled “Towards Quantitative Cultural Histories in America’s Public Bible,” at the Center for Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University.
• 27 February 2019. Delivered an invited talk for the “Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn in Historical Studies,” at the Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies in Toronto.
• 29 October 2018. Delivered an invited talk on “Finding Biblical Quotations in Historical Newspaper Corpora,” to the Math and Computer Science Colloquium at the University of Richmond.
• 31 July 2018. A preprint of a chapter titled “The Making of America’s Public Bible: Computational Text Analysis in Religious History,” to be published in Introduction to Digital Humanities: Research Methods for the Study of Religion, is now available.
• 15 June 2018. Published an article for The Atlantic titled “The Fight to Define Romans 13.”
• 7 June 2018. Invited as a panelist for “The Bible in Public Life,” hosted by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, with Mark Noll, Valerie Cooper, and Paul Gutjahr. A recording of the session is available.
• 18 April 2018. The Immanent Frame has published a blog post on “Digital Projects in the Classroom,” featuring this project.
• 1 March 2018. This project was reviewed in the Journal of American History by James P. Byrd.
• 9 January 2018. A related essay on “Bibles and Tracts in Print Culture in America” has appeared in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.
• 4 January 2018. This site was presented in a paper titled “How 19th-Century Americans Quoted Their Bibles” for the panel “The Digital History of 19th-Century U.S. Religion,” co-sponsored by the American Society of Church History and the American Historical Association.
• 9 May 2017. Delivered an invited talk on “The Bible in the Newspaper: Computational Text Analysis for American Religious History” at St. Olaf’s College.
• 27 February 2017. A much expanded version of this site will be published as a digital monograph in the digital publishing program of Stanford University Press.
• 3 August 2016. The Washington Post published an article titled “Newspapers were once full of Bible quotes—and a local professor’s tool lets us learn from them.”
• 25 July 2016. This project won first place in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Chronicling America Data Challenge.
• 13 June 2016. Initial release of the prototype website and data.