General Conference is a semi-annual event where members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gather to listen to church prophets, apostles, and other leaders.
This package both scrapes General Conference talks and provides all talks in a data package for analysis in R.
# install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github("bryanwhiting/generalconference")Load the package:
library(generalconference)Load the General Conference corpus, which is a tibble with nested data for each conference, session, talk, and paragraph.
data("genconf")
head(genconf)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 4
#> year month date sessions
#> <dbl> <dbl> <date> <list>
#> 1 2021 4 2021-04-01 <tibble [5 × 4]>
#> 2 2020 10 2020-10-01 <tibble [5 × 4]>
#> 3 2020 4 2020-04-01 <tibble [5 × 4]>
#> 4 2019 10 2019-10-01 <tibble [5 × 4]>
#> 5 2019 4 2019-04-01 <tibble [5 × 4]>
#> 6 2018 10 2018-10-01 <tibble [5 × 4]>Unnest it to analyze individual talks, which can be unnested further to the paragraph level.
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
genconf %>%
tidyr::unnest(sessions) %>%
tidyr::unnest(talks) %>%
head()
#> # A tibble: 6 × 14
#> year month date session_name session_id session_url talk_urls
#> <dbl> <dbl> <date> <chr> <int> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 2021 4 2021-04-01 Saturday Morn… 1 /study/general-… /study/gene…
#> 2 2021 4 2021-04-01 Saturday Morn… 1 /study/general-… /study/gene…
#> 3 2021 4 2021-04-01 Saturday Morn… 1 /study/general-… /study/gene…
#> 4 2021 4 2021-04-01 Saturday Morn… 1 /study/general-… /study/gene…
#> 5 2021 4 2021-04-01 Saturday Morn… 1 /study/general-… /study/gene…
#> 6 2021 4 2021-04-01 Saturday Morn… 1 /study/general-… /study/gene…
#> # … with 7 more variables: talk_session_id <int>, url <chr>, title1 <chr>,
#> # author1 <chr>, author2 <chr>, kicker1 <chr>, paragraphs <list>Analyze individual paragraphs that contain the word “faith”:
library(gt)
genconf %>%
# unpack/unnest the dataframe, which is a tibble of lists
tidyr::unnest(sessions) %>%
tidyr::unnest(talks) %>%
tidyr::unnest(paragraphs) %>%
# extract just the date, title, author and paragraph
# date, title, and author will be repeated fields, with paragraph unique
select(date, title1, author1, paragraph) %>%
# Filter to just the paragraphs that mention the word "faith"
filter(stringr::str_detect(paragraph, "faith")) %>%
# take top 5 records
head(5) %>%
# convert into a gt() table with row groups for date/title/author
# (use row groups since these data are replicated by paragraph)
group_by(date, title1, author1) %>%
gt() %>%
tab_options(
row_group.background.color = 'lightgray'
) %>%
tab_header(
title='Paragraphs on Faith',
subtitle='Grouped by talk'
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#kjgmesdonl .gt_title { color: #333333; font-size: 125%; font-weight: initial; padding-top: 4px; padding-bottom: 4px; border-bottom-color: #FFFFFF; border-bottom-width: 0; }
#kjgmesdonl .gt_subtitle { color: #333333; font-size: 85%; font-weight: initial; padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 6px; border-top-color: #FFFFFF; border-top-width: 0; }
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#kjgmesdonl .gt_column_spanner_outer:first-child { padding-left: 0; }
#kjgmesdonl .gt_column_spanner_outer:last-child { padding-right: 0; }
#kjgmesdonl .gt_column_spanner { border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-color: #D3D3D3; vertical-align: bottom; padding-top: 5px; padding-bottom: 5px; overflow-x: hidden; display: inline-block; width: 100%; }
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#kjgmesdonl .gt_empty_group_heading { padding: 0.5px; color: #333333; background-color: #D3D3D3; font-size: 100%; font-weight: initial; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 2px; border-top-color: #D3D3D3; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-color: #D3D3D3; vertical-align: middle; }
#kjgmesdonl .gt_from_md > :first-child { margin-top: 0; }
#kjgmesdonl .gt_from_md > :last-child { margin-bottom: 0; }
#kjgmesdonl .gt_row { padding-top: 8px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; margin: 10px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; border-top-color: #D3D3D3; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: #D3D3D3; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 1px; border-right-color: #D3D3D3; vertical-align: middle; overflow-x: hidden; }
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#kjgmesdonl .gt_footnote_marks { font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; font-size: 65%; } </style>
| Paragraphs on Faith |
|---|
| Grouped by talk |
| paragraph |
| 2021-04-01 - God among Us - By Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf |
| The doubting He would infuse with faith and courage to believe. |
| He would recognize and honor honesty, humility, integrity, faithfulness, compassion, and charity. |
| To you, my dear brothers and sisters, my dear friends, and to all who are searching for answers, truth, and happiness, I do offer the same counsel: keep searching with faith and patience. |
| 2021-04-01 - Essential Conversations - By Joy D. Jones |
| Have faith in Christ, the Son of the living God. |
| Elder D. Todd Christofferson said, “Certainly the adversary is pleased when parents neglect to teach and train their children to have faith in Christ and be spiritually born again.” |
- See Example Analysis for more examples on how to analyze the data.
- See genconf for a schema of the data.
See documentation for scrapers, if you need them. But you shouldn’t need them since all the data is available.