Research in Progress
Forthcoming:
This article should be published by the Journal of Mormon History based on the General Conference Corpus. I coauthored with Robert Reynolds (in BYU’s Digital Humanities Center). It is titled: “Moral Foundations and the Rhetoric of General Conference Talks, 1860-2020.”
Along with Spencer Stewart and Marshall Butler (both at Purdue University), I am writing an article about the content of LDS Sacrament Meeting talks over the last few years. Spencer has built a corpus of transcripts from Sacrament Meetings from more than 1,000 wards across the U.S., Canada, and England from 2021 until now. We are exploring whether a ward’s location affects the subjects discussed in church, the way topics are framed, or the moral content of the messages delivered over the pulpit.
Of late, I have become increasingly involved in Digital History projects and, specifically, the tech used in Natural Language Processing. This approach asks computers to make sense of large corpora, finding patterns and historical transitions that would be difficult for the unaided historian to find. Currently, I am partnering with other scholars (including undergraduates at BYU) to generate new research by using the following corpora:
The Congressional Record
The American Presidency Project
General Conference Corpus
The History of Movies and Television Corpus
Projects at an Early Stage:
I continue to work on projects related to congressional language and General Conference talks. Meantime, we have just obtained the movie and television database that has information (including plot summaries) of over 300,000 films and close to 1,000,000 million television episodes.
How to get Involved
If you are interested in any of these research projects please contact me (see the “Contact” tab above). There is always room for partnerships and shared research on these topics.