Using Distant Reading to Analyze Religious Texts

As a Muslim, I find Abrahamic religious texts intriguing. As a Muslim, I also believe in the Torah and the Bible. The only difference betweeen these books and the Qur’an is that the books have been changed over time while the integrity and exact wording of the Qur’an has been maintained through oral tradition (memorizing the book cover to cover).

For my research project I want to see how similar/differnt the texts are. How closely related are they, really?

Unfortunately, the orginal languages of these three texts were not in English. For this reason, I am going to find three English versions of each text and merge/compare the results to have a more accurate view of them. There are different versions of the Torah and Bible so I will choose the most widely-used texts. For the Qur’an, there are different translations made by different scholars and so I will choose the three most-widely used versions.

I plan to run something like Tf-idf on the texts to see which words of significance are repeated the most often in each text and compare that to the other texts.

As a final deliverable, I plan on making an infographic of some sort to compare the word frequency. I will probably use tables, graphs, word clouds, and other data visualizations either in the form of a scrollable infographic or a PPT presentation.

Written on October 17, 2016 by Saja Hamayel