CEDRR lecture by Dr. Paul Robertson

Centre for the Digital Research of Religion would like to invite you to a lecture delivered by Paul Robertson. Dr. Robertson is a Senior Lecturer of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Quantifying ancient religious literature: Computational case studies in early Christianity

Most of our data from ancient western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Greece, Rome) relies on texts, their comparison, and questions of their style and genre. Yet scholars have devoted little work to quantifying how we characterize and compare literary form and style. This talk provides an overview of statistical approaches to one literary dataset - the Christian New Testament - in a broader methodological survey showing that most empirical work has been ‘bottom-up’ stylometry that relies only on the basic unit of vocabulary. Instead, a ‘top-down’ approach is proposed as an alternative that better integrates qualitative expertise with quantitative computation. Several case studies are given that draw from traditional, cultural and literary approaches but operationalize those findings using methods from machine learning, probability theory, and statistics more broadly.