1.
DATA ANALYSIS IN
THE HEBREW BIBLE
CLIN 2014-01-17
Dirk Roorda (DANS/TLA), Martijn Naaijer and Gino Kalkman (VU ETCBC)

2.
RESEARCH @
just
started

3.
EXEGESIS
preaching the word of
God
the devil is in the details
meanings of specific
words

4.
DISTANT READING
scan large quantities of text
find patterns
signals in the noise
study other aspects than meaning
text transmission
linguistic variation
literary form

5.
VARIATION IN BIBLICAL
HEBREW
Timespan of Hebrew Bible writing: ~1000 years
Assumption: we can divide the books in 2 groups
EBH (early biblical Hebrew)
LBH (late biblical Hebrew)

6.
"PROOF"
Select some features that differ for EBH and LBH
Risk of circularity
We need data analysis that is
comprehensive (not eclectic)
critical (not everything is a signal)

7.
SYNTACTIC VARIATION
syntactic features
drivers of change
phrase, clause, text
diachrony
variation
large units
chapters
books
geography
demography

8.
THE HEBREW BIBLE AS DATA

9.
THE HEBREW BIBLE IN LAF
LAF ISO
24612:2012
SHEBANQ
(github)
2.27 GB
1.5 M nodes
1.5 M edges
40 M features
400 K words
13 M XML ids

10.
PROCESSING LAF
it is XML
but not document-like (not asTEI)
and not database like (not nice for XQUERY)
it is graph-like

11.
PROCESSING LAF
eXist (>30min loading time, simple queries >60min)
indexes needed: but which ones
tried POIO (>60min loading time, needs >20GB RAM)
straightforward object oriented in Python
scripting language overhead

12.
LAF-FABRIC
LAF-Fabric
also Python
loads in a few seconds
uses C-like arrays
executes in a few seconds
on a laptop
can run
in a Terminal
as an IPython notebook

13.
gender
notebook

14.
COOCCURRENCES
1 Common Nouns
2 Proper Nouns
Nodes are books
Edges are cooccurrences of lexemes (1 or 2)

15.
WEIGHTED EDGES
S(lex): number of books containing lex
C(b1, b2): intersection of lexemes of b1 and b2
L(b1, b2): union of lexemes of b1 and b2

16.
cooccurrences
notebook

17.
cooccurrences
notebook

18.
cooccurrences
notebook

19.
cooccurrences
notebook

20.
cooccurrences
notebook

21.
cooccurrences
notebook

22.
cooccurrences
notebook

23.
Common Nouns
no weight

24.
Common Nouns
with weight

25.
Proper Nouns
no weight

26.
Proper Nouns
with weight

27.
DATA-DRIVEN THEOLOGY
m.naaijer@vu.nl
g.j.kalkman@vu.nl
dirk.roorda@dans.knaw.nl
Thank You