An open-source project to track, visualize, and analyze the textual evolution of the Book of Mormon across nearly 200 years and over 40 printed editions.
This project brings a rigorous, data-driven approach to a long-standing academic and religious question: how has the Book of Mormon changed over time?
Despite official claims of minimal change (mostly editorial), thousands of documented textual alterations exist between the original 1829 manuscript and the modern edition. However, this is not the full story. This project is working on comparing every publicly available edition to allow interested parties to see how the text has evolved over time across multiple editions.
- Completed: Initial OCR and edition ingestion complete
- Ongoing: OCR cleanup and alignment (10 of 40 editions)
- Planned: Web-based interactive edition viewer and visual analysis tools
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Designed to be academically robust and independently verifiable.
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Custom software tool
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Automatic OCR of multiple editions using Tesseract AI
Status: Complete -
Manually audit OCR and align editions' texts
Status: 25% Complete
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Automatic Edition Lineage Analysis
Status: Completed
Compute the textual lineage of editions, identifying which editions influenced which others.
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Website
Status: Not started-
Editions explorer
Read any page of any edition and instantly see where changes have been made via clear visual indicators. -
Edit Pattern Analysis
Explore common types of changes, such as the removal of "And it came to pass", and count how often and where they occurred. -
Historical Visualization
Interactive tools to explore how the Book of Mormon evolved over time.
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MIT