The following project information is limited solely to the direct digital scholarship portion of the research.
Project Title: Deuteronomy & Slave Narratives
Description: Identify citations to the Book of Deuteronomy within slave narrative transcriptions provided by the University of North Carolina’s ‘North American Slave Narratives.‘
Researchers Involved:
- Dr. Stephen Reid, Truett Theological Seminary
- Joshua Been, Baylor Libraries
- Bill Hair, Baylor Libraries
Procedure:
- TopVerses.com: The most popular Bible verses from Deuteronomy was identified as containing the phrases that would be cited in the narratives.
- The Python library Beautiful Soup was used to clean the TopVerses.com webpage into this text file.
- The Python library Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) was used to chunk the narrative texts into n-grams and the difflib.SequenceMatcher provided a similarity score between 0.0 and 1.0 between the narrative n-grams and the Deuteronomic phrases. The highest matching score from each narrative to each phrase, with a minimum score of 0.55, was written to this text file. False hits were manually removed but only the initial results are produced here.
- The NodeXL application (Microsoft Excel extension for networks) was used to create a visual network between phrases and narratives.
- The Tableau Desktop application (data visualization software) was used to publish this network to the web. Click the screenshot below to launch the interactive visualization.
Deuteronomy & Slave Narratives