A STUDY BY THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC • 2022

A Religious Studies Map of Literary Meanings:
Biblical Citations in the Press during the First Republic

The Bible is the most quoted text in European history. Reaching far beyond the field of religious reading, orthopraxy, liturgy and theology, it has entered the public sphere, becoming an inexhaustible source of literary as well as broader cultural inspiration. The Bible is not only an important religious or moral foundation, but also the cornerstone of socio-political views with significant implications for culture and its bearers.

Pán na lavičce

The innovative processing of digitised texts in the DL4DH project has enabled the development of a procedure for the machine recognition of biblical citations in a corpus of selected First Republic periodicals from 1925–1939. We have built on the extensive project America’s Public Bible, devoted to the study of biblical citations in old periodicals in the USA, and transferred it on a smaller scale to the environment of the public Czechoslovak press during the First Republic. This is a specific area in which libraries in the Czech Republic have authoritative collections at their disposal, thanks to already digitised sources that are further enriched by regional variants of the main titles. Despite certain limitations in the availability and quality of some of the digitised sources (the selected sample does not represent the complete set of issues of the periodicals mentioned, let alone the entire Czech-language First Republic press), we managed to ascertain some information about the frequency of biblical citations in the public press. This approach is carried out using ‘distant reading’ methods, i.e. the use of quantitative text analysis tools assisted by the machine processing of natural language.

After processing the data, a total of more than 7,000 probable Biblical citations were identified (complete results for a more detailed evaluation can be found here). There are significant differences in the number and profile of citations between the selected journals. The charts on this website provide a new perspective on biblical citations in the First Republic press: they show the prominent presence of biblical citations in the mass media of the increasingly secularised world of the 20th century, a society undergoing a gradual disenchantment, the atomisation of the family, rapid urbanisation, social mobility, and enormous scientific and technological development. Running counter to these phenomena was the development of individual religiosity, including esoteric trends as well as non-religious spirituality.

  • Periodicals
    • 11 journals
    • 149 volumes
    • 16,022 issues
    • 167,263 pages (1,131,851 standard pages)
    • 316,972,671 words
  • The Bible
    • 5 translations
    • 202 books (74 unique ones)
    • 89,485 verses (36,745 unique ones)
    • 1,620,772 words in total

In the specific period and environment of the First Republic, however, one can also find other complex factors influencing the biblical citations, such as the specific intertwining of state ideology and support for the development of the Czechoslovak Church (since 1971 also called the Czechoslovak Hussite Church) and the attempts of Roman Catholics to navigate new paths in a democratic society after the collapse of Austria-Hungary. Using the example of the once dominant Roman Catholic Church, it is possible to perceive the complexity of the period, which was expressed in the periodical press. Since the Roman Catholic Church was originally closely linked to the ruling elite of the Austria-Hungary monarchy and the conservative attitudes of Rome, the Church and its faithful floundered somewhat in a modern democracy. The existential confrontation with the horrors of the recent world war, which shook the worldviews and beliefs of many of the devout, whatever their faith, the schism with the newly fashioned concept of the Czechoslovak democratic state, and a general dissension with the anti-modernist attitudes of the Roman Catholic centre – all these, among other factors, contributed to reduced numbers of priests and declining support for the Roman Catholic Church during the 1920s. This did not apply to the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, which had the support of the state’s top political representatives and thus became stronger. During the 1930s, however, there was a temporary reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Czechoslovak elites, as well as the church’s gradual stabilisation, thanks to the overall political situation as well as an internal revival. In Moravia and the Sudetenland, however, developments followed a partially different path, which may have had an impact on the literature of these regions. In areas beyond Czech-language periodicals (where we focus our research), such as in Slovakia, the Roman Catholic Church played an important role in supporting the autonomist forces which, in cooperation with Nazi Germany, would subsequently lead to the dissolution of the Republic.

In the complex environment of the national composition of the Czechoslovak Republic, the centrifugal tendencies of the linguistic minorities from the original multiethnic state of Austria-Hungary, coloured by different cultural, religious, political, and economic backgrounds, were also on the rise. This was also a time when the importance of communism and far-right nationalist parties was increasing. We mention these characteristics in passing mainly because they allow us to outline the complexity of the overall social situation of the First Republic.

The identification of biblical citations and their connection with important publications related to the various political trends of the time only allow us a limited quantitative study of selected mass media. We conducted the research fully aware of the fact that this approach cannot capture all the nuances and connections to the schools of thought and politics outlined above; on the other hand, automated text matching does allow us to describe the use of culturally significant texts, in our case the Bible, in the target corpus of selected First Republic periodicals. This method enables us to determine which citations appear most frequently in the texts, what is the representation of the New and Old Testaments, how prevalent are the gospels among the New Testament citations and the moral compass of the Ten Commandments among the Old Testament citations, and how biblical citations have evolved over time within the selected periodicals and their various mutual relationships.

This website serves as an exploratory online ‘Religious Studies Map of Literary Meanings’, mapping the presence of the Bible in public spaces through descriptive statistics and network analysis focused on the periodical press, i.e. the most important media of the time, which was widely consumed by cultural, social, political, and religious figures. These figures would subsequently use the biblical citations to support their agenda. Our approach illustrates the possibilities provided by well-processed, machine-readable texts for the digital humanities. We also present a model workflow for mining and processing literary texts which may be used for other projects as well. Extensive periodicals, as well as other texts, are an important but nevertheless quantitatively understudied part of our cultural heritage. This heritage has been preserved and, at last, is digitally accessible through the systematic efforts of leading Czech libraries.

Trends

All the presented charts are based on machine processing of the corpus; it is therefore impossible to avoid a certain number of citations not being recognised (false negatives) and mistakenly recognised as biblical citations (false positives). We took a relatively conservative approach in all cases, mostly trying to reduce the proportion of false positives, even at the cost of not recognising some citations, see here.

Intertextual links within the Bible are resolved by combining the two verses into one (e.g. “Thou shalt not kill” is listed as a verse in Ex 20:13/Dt 5:17, but is counted only once in this pair of verses). However, some verses may therefore be presented as parts of multiple subsets (e.g. “The voice of one crying in the wilderness” is found in several gospels, but at the same time, they all refer to the Old-Testament Isaiah). Although the content of the verses may differ, only the shared part is usually quoted, and therefore it is less misleading to combine them as a single citation. However, the fact that we have by no means covered all the intertextual links that are in the Bible, but only the most common, must also be taken into account.

We therefore recommend all those interested in a deeper analysis of biblical citations to take a closer look at our results. In this CSV file, you can find results that are further reflected in the statistics, containing both a link to the specific page of the periodical where they occur and the part of the periodical in which the quote was found. In this file, you can find the citations that were discarded from the results based on stop-subqueries (see workflow), but which may still contain many biblical allusions.

The results presented here are based on processed data which are fairly accurate, but not 100% perfect (see workflow). Please take this into account. Similarly, when interpreting the charts, also keep in mind that a different amount of material is available for different years, see data overview. For example, the lower number of citations after 1934 is mostly caused by the unavailability of the Catholic periodical Čech.

The most frequent citations during the years

In this part, you can view charts depicting the development of citations during these years. Please use the dropdown menu ‘filter by’ to switch between individual charts. The values depicted here show the total number of citations.

The most frequent citations in total

The chart shows how the citation rate of the ten most referenced parts of the Bible in the corpus evolved. There is persistent interest in the Ten Commandments, where the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13/Dt 5:17) is the most quoted verse overall, and in the gospels, where the most quoted excerpt overall is Luke 2:14: “Glory to God in the highest”. You can find an overview of the most frequent citations in total here.

Filter by

Switch chart type
This audiovisual map has been created as part of a project of the programme to support applied research and development in the field of national and cultural identity (NAKI II, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic) No. DG20P02OVV002 entitled ‘DL4DH – developing tools for the effective utilisation and mining of data from digital libraries to reinforce digital humanities research’.
Recommended citation format: Válek, František; Vozár, Zdenko; Zbíral, David; Bežová, Michaela; Hrzinová, Jana; Novák, David; 2022. A Religious Studies Map of Literary Meanings: Biblical Citations in the Press during the First Republic [online].