Book of Mormon Wordprint

For several years, researchers have used statistics to try to determine the author of a disputed literary work. These techniques have been applied to the Federalist Papers, disputed Shakespearean plays, and other works including the Book of Mormon. These methods are commonly called wordprinting or stylometry. One technique used in wordprint analysis is to count the frequency with which an author uses non-contextual words. These are words that do not convey meaning but connect the ideas into sentences. It is postulated that an author who is trying to forge a work would not be able to control their subconscious use of these words. So, if Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, we should expect to see his “wordprint” throughout the text, and the frequency of use of non-contextual words is one way to observe this. The most common non-contextual words used in The Book of Mormon are “and,” “of,” “that,” “the,” “to,” and “unto.” Blocks of text were taken from 2 Nephi 4 (Nephi, son of Lehi), Enos 1 (Enos, son of Jacob), 3 Nephi 15 (Jesus Christ), Moroni 9 (Mormon, son of Mormon), and Moroni 10 (Moroni, son of Mormon)
MATH221
religion
Author

MATH 221

Published

April 25, 2024

Data details

There are 30 rows and 3 columns. The data source1 is used to create our data that is stored in our pins table. You can access this pin from a connection to posit.byui.edu using hathawayj/book_of_mormon_wordprint.

This data is available to all.

Variable description

  • Author: Author or speaker name
  • Word: The word being counted
  • Count: How many times each word was used

Variable summary

Variable type: numeric

skim_variable n_missing complete_rate mean sd p0 p25 p50 p75 p100 hist
Count 0 1 38.93 23.11 9 21.25 31 60.5 89 ▇▃▂▃▂

Variable type: character

skim_variable n_missing complete_rate min max empty n_unique whitespace
Author 0 1 4 6 0 5 0
Word 0 1 2 4 0 6 0
Explore generating code using R 
library(tidyverse)
library(pins)
library(connectapi)

book_of_mormon_wordprint <- read_csv('https://github.com/byuistats/data/raw/master/BookOfMormonWordprint/BookOfMormonWordprint.csv')


# Publish the data to the server with Bro. Hathaway as the owner.
board <- board_connect()
pin_write(board, book_of_mormon_wordprint, type = "parquet", access_type = "all")

pin_name <- "book_of_mormon_wordprint"
meta <- pin_meta(board, paste0("hathawayj/", pin_name))
client <- connect()
my_app <- content_item(client, meta$local$content_id)
set_vanity_url(my_app, paste0("data/", pin_name))

Access data

This data is available to all.

Direct Download: book_of_mormon_wordprint.parquet

R and Python Download:

URL Connections:

For public data, any user can connect and read the data using pins::board_connect_url() in R.

library(pins)
url_data <- "https://posit.byui.edu/data/book_of_mormon_wordprint/"
board_url <- board_connect_url(c("dat" = url_data))
dat <- pin_read(board_url, "dat")

Use this custom function in Python to have the data in a Pandas DataFrame.

import pandas as pd
import requests
from io import BytesIO

def read_url_pin(name):
  url = "https://posit.byui.edu/data/" + name + "/" + name + ".parquet"
  response = requests.get(url)
  if response.status_code == 200:
    parquet_content = BytesIO(response.content)
    pandas_dataframe = pd.read_parquet(parquet_content)
    return pandas_dataframe
  else:
    print(f"Failed to retrieve data. Status code: {response.status_code}")
    return None

# Example usage:
pandas_df = read_url_pin("book_of_mormon_wordprint")

Authenticated Connection:

Our connect server is https://posit.byui.edu which you assign to your CONNECT_SERVER environment variable. You must create an API key and store it in your environment under CONNECT_API_KEY.

Read more about environment variables and the pins package to understand how these environment variables are stored and accessed in R and Python with pins.

library(pins)
board <- board_connect(auth = "auto")
dat <- pin_read(board, "hathawayj/book_of_mormon_wordprint")
import os
from pins import board_rsconnect
from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()
API_KEY = os.getenv('CONNECT_API_KEY')
SERVER = os.getenv('CONNECT_SERVER')

board = board_rsconnect(server_url=SERVER, api_key=API_KEY)
dat = board.pin_read("hathawayj/book_of_mormon_wordprint")