





































310  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

Slave Narratives, the Bible 
and Hymns, Oh My...
Religion Text-Mining as a Liaison Service
By Joshua Been, Baylor University Libraries; Bill Hair, Baylor University Libraries

ABSTR ACT Learn how theological librarians can forge collaborative 
enterprises to help integrate digital humanities into academic research 
and teaching. Coordinating partnerships among digital humanities 
specialists, faculty, and other researchers allows theological librarians to 
provide additional services while also enhancing their standing within 
the academic community. We will highlight specific examples of text 
analysis, including identifying and visualizing Deuteronomic phrases 
with African-American slave narratives, and visualizing similarities 
between George Whitefield’s sermons and hymns. We will share and 
demonstrate custom-developed applications and methods to help 
theological librarians quickly get started in digital humanities. We look 
forward to sharing with you our successful collaborative endeavors.

ARTICLE

Are libraries still the “the heart of the institution,” and are we librar-
ians still “the keepers of the sacred flame?” Each year we strive to 
justify our continued existence to top administrators because our 
governing boards press us to justify the skyrocketing expense of 
maintaining our academic/theological libraries. Sure, everything is 
not freely available on the internet, but why and from where did this 
fallacy arise? We librarians must shoulder some, if not most, of the 
blame, as we all could have done better jobs to educate our constitu-
ents regarding the truth about electronic resources. As our collec-
tions’ landscape has changed from print to electronic, we have made 
the transition so simple and seamless that in many cases our clients 



In-Conference Workshops  311

do not know the difference between the “free” internet and the very 
expensive databases to which we subscribe. It is up to us librarians 
to adapt and change our roles in the academy. Failure to find ways 
to partner and collaborate with teaching faculty colleagues is not an 
option for the long-term survival of our profession.

This leads us to the present moment at George W. Truett Seminary 
of Baylor University. One year ago, in August 2017, Baylor University 
Libraries hired a Digital Scholarship Librarian, which, in itself, is not 
all that unusual, particularly when one assumes most of the work of 
this librarian will be with liaison librarians in non-theological fields. 
However, what made this different was the fact that this new Digital 
Scholarship Librarian wanted to work especially with the Theology 
& Philosophy Librarian. Up until that moment, we had never consid-
ered that theological disciplines would be candidates for working 
on anything with the Digital Scholarship Librarian. However, pretty 
quickly our partnership grew pretty quickly to involve a wide assort-
ment of text-mining research support for seminary and religion 
faculty at Baylor. 

Support for text-mining as a library service can be divided into 
three tiers. Tier 1 focuses on exploring individual texts or individual 
bodies of work and can be supported by liaisons with minimal to no 
training. Tier 2 focuses on exploring the relationships between texts 
and can be supported by liaisons with some introductory training. 
Tier 3 is fully customizable and can be adapted to answer very specific 
research questions. Tier 3 requires a technical expertise that can be 
challenging for a liaison to attain given their primary responsibilities, 
leading to a collaborative relationship between liaison and library 
functional specialists.

“Anyone can do it!” shouts Bill Hair, Religion and Seminary Liai-
son Librarian. Tier 1 represents introductory text analysis tools that 
require minimal to no training. Examples of Tier 1 resources include 
Textalyser (http://textalyser.net/) and Voyant-Tools (https://voyant-
tools.org/). These two web tools require no downloading or instal-
lation and allow copy/paste or document uploading. For individual 
texts, Textalyser provides analytics such as Complexity Factor, Read-
ability, Average Syllables per Word, Average Sentence Length, and 
much more. Voyant-Tools contains many more tools and provides  
visualizations and so may require a bit more exploration of the interface 

http://textalyser.net/
https://voyant-tools.org/
https://voyant-tools.org/


312  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

before a liaison can confidently support this resource. Tools within 
Voyant-Tools include Word Clouds, Word Frequency per Document 
Segment, Topic Modelling, and much more.

While Tier 2 requires some basic training, religion liaisons should 
be able to accommodate training in these resources to provide support 
exploring the relationships between texts. A perfect example of a 
Tier 2 resource is NVivo Plus (https://www.qsrinternational.com/
nvivo/nvivo-products/nvivo-12-plus). NVivo is a commercial prod-
uct but does offer affordable student licenses (https://www.qsrin-
ternational.com/nvivo/products?pm=Student). NVivo’s primary 
function is its ability to facilitate coding, which is the assignment 
of keywords to sections of text. These codes can be used to analyze 
texts, compare texts by comparing the prevalence of codes, and to 
create thematic visualizations based on assigned codes. Codes in 
NVivo can be assigned manually, assisted with thesaurus-enhanced 
keyword searching, and fully automated using NVivo’s Automated 
Theme Analysis.

Sure, researchers can cobble together resources and techniques 
from the first two tiers to integrate text-mining into their research. 
However, this approach will often bump up against software limita-
tions and black boxes where software methodology is not transparent, 
and this often leads to work-around solutions that can limit research 
questions. Tier 3 represents the fact that programming is the only way 
to ensure that the tools can be customized to fit the specific needs of 
the researcher. Examples include customized document similarity 
analysis, emotional analysis of the language used, and customized 
parts of speech analysis. Tier 3 requires a religion liaison to partner 
with a functional specialist with programming and digital humani-
ties experience. 

While Baylor University has the resources and structure in place 
to provide Tier 1 and Tier 2 support by the Religion Liaison, as well 
as Tier 3 support in collaboration with the Digital Scholarship Librar-
ian, liaisons everywhere can—with very little setup—begin to offer 
Tier 1 and soon after Tier 2. Remember what Bill Hair said: “Anyone 
can do it!”

Presentation: http://sched.co/ECfV

https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo/nvivo-products/nvivo-12-plus
https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo/nvivo-products/nvivo-12-plus
https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo/products?pm=Student
https://www.qsrinternational.com/nvivo/products?pm=Student
http://sched.co/ECfV

