Datamining the WT CD (II): Acts 15:28-29 on blood through the years

by bohm 27 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  bohm

  Hello all!

  I have gotten around the compression on the WT CD, and i have been playing around a bit. What i have done is for each year between 1950-2005 i have extracted all bible citations in the WT articles on each year (about 500'000-1'000'000 quotations!) and summed them if they occured more than once. This allow me to make a graph like the following:

  

  There are a couple of things of interest. First there seem to be an increased interest in blood around 1960. Up to 1975 there is a minimum interest in blood (allmost like they was thinking about something else, hmmm) and then a spike in the years 1976-1980 - this is a trend that persist in other verses i have analysed, where everything that has to do with control spike after 1975.

  Around 1996 there is also a large interest - the same time that the article in Awake came out. It would be interesting to analyse the most recent years to see if the trend up to 2005 continue or is just a fluke.
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  maninthemiddle

  good work.

  I have seen the 2009 CD online here if that helps for more recent information.
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  gubberningbody

  That's interesting.

  Now if there could be a graph on "least cited" scriptures, that would also be interesting.
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  bohm

  gubberningbody: well, in the periode (1950-2005) there are plenty of verses in all books of the bible [i have checked] which has only been quoted one time in the WT, and I will bet there are quite a lot which has been quoted 0 times.

  to clarify, i found a total of 560'795 citations. That exclude a few which was mistyped and a few from books i do not now about - '2 revelation', 'Wisdom', etc.
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  gubberningbody

  Is there any way you could write a script, say in perl or vb to do the mining?

  I've got a meeting... be right back
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  bohm

  gubberningbody: the work is done by first extracting all articles, quotes to a mysql database (i tried sqlite but it buckled under the load) by a python script, and then extract data by a new python script and finally i generate the graphs in matlab (totally overkill but i am lazy).

  If you have some verses in mind you want to compare in a similar graph, just list it and i will upload the graphs. its really very little work for me now.
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  Mad Sweeney

  Can you do Matthew 24:45 please?
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  gubberningbody

  Interesting... Have you considered using Oracle XE? It's free and you can use pl/sql as well as sql.
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  bohm

  Mad, here you go (i threw in the top-2 most cited verses for fun. Notice the top-most cited verse is cited allmost twice as often as the second-highest from revelation. Those two pretty much sums it up: PREACH (mtthew 24:14) SLAVES, THE BIBLE IS NOT FOR YOU (rev. 7:9))

  

  same graph, smoothened:

  
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  straightshooter

  Very interesting. Thanks for sharing the graphs.