Towards Analysis of Biblical Entities and Names using Deep Learning (original) (raw)
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In this paper we extrapolate the information about Bible's characters and places, and their interrelationships, by using text mining network-based approach. We study the narrative structure of the WEB version of 5 books: the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts of the Apostles. The main focus is the protagonists' names interrelationships in an analytical way, namely using various network-based methods and descriptors. This corpus is processed for creating a network: we download the names of people and places from Wikipedia's list of biblical names, then we look for their co-occurrences in each verse and, at the end of this process, we get N co-occurred names. The strength of the link between two names is defined as the sum of the times that these occur together in all the verses, in this way we obtain 5 adjacency matrices (one per book) of N by N couples of names. After this pre-processing phase, for each of the 5 analysed books we calculate the main network cent...
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The article joins the scholarly discussion about the meaning of righteousness lan- guage in biblical literature with consideration of changes in the concept from archaic Greek literature to fourth century Christian texts. The article seeks to showcase and evaluate how methods from the area of computational linguistics and distributional semantics can contribute to the discussion. The article suggests that, together with formal network models, namely word co-occurrence networks and similarity networks, the methods reveal changes in large corpora of textual data which are too subtle to be detected by close reading. On the other hand, some questions require or benefit greatly from combining distant and close reading methods.
Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature) , 2023
The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are known as separate religions, in fact, these two religions developed side by side. While earlier researchers conceptualized a "parting-of-the-ways," after which the two religions evolved independently, new studies reveal a multi-layered set of interactions throughout the first several centuries CE. Until recently, this question was explored with the limited source material and limited tools to analyze it. While working on a limited set of data, from a specific corpus, this project offers a new set of methodological tools, borrowed from computer sciences, that could ultimately serve for understanding the connections between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. We generated models of interreligious Christian-Jewish networks that demonstrate the scope, nature, and advantages of network analysis for revealing the complex intertwined evolution of the two religions. The Jewish corpora chosen for this research are rabbinic writings from late antique Babylonia and Palestine. Christian texts range from the first through sixth centuries CE. Instead of representing interactions between people or places, as is typically done with social networks, we model literary interactions that, in our view, indicate historical connections between religious communities. This novel approach allows us to visually represent sets of temporal-spatial-contextual relationships, which evolved over hundreds of years, in single snapshots. It also reveals new insights about the relationships between the two communities. For example, we find that rabbinic sources exhibit a largely polemical approach towards earlier Christian traditions but a non-polemical attitude towards later ones. Moreover, network analysis suggests a temporal-spatial familiarity correlation. Namely, Jewish sources are familiar with early, eastern Christian sources and with both Eastern and Western Christian sources in later periods. The application of network analysis makes it possible to identify the most influential texts-that is, the key "nodes"-testifying to the importance of certain traditions for both religious communities. Finally, the network approach is a tool for pointing scholarly research in new directions, which only reveals itself as a result of this type of mapping. In other words, the network not only describes the known data, but it is itself a way to enlarge the network and lead us down new and exciting paths that are currently unknown.
Righteousness in Early Christian Literature: Distant Reading and Textual Networks
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The article joins the scholarly discussion about the meaning of righteousness language in biblical literature with consideration of changes in the concept from archaic Greek literature to fourth century Christian texts. The article seeks to showcase and evaluate how methods from the area of computational linguistics and distributional semantics can contribute to the discussion. The article suggests that, together with formal network models, namely word cooccurrence networks and similarity networks, the methods reveal changes in large corpora of 1 This research article is a part of The Cultural Evolution of Moralizing Religions in the Ancient Mediterranean: A Distant Reading Approach project (Czech title “Kulturní evoluce moralizujících náboženství ve starověkém Středomoří: Přístup distančního čtení”) (GA20-01464S) funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR). Authors who received funding from this project are VK, TG. NN’s project “Paul’s Ideas and the Ideas of Paul in Cultural Evol...