RLMgB606 Religious Texts and Texts on Religion from the perspective of “distant reading“

Faculty of Arts
Spring 2026
Extent and Intensity
1/1/0. 5 credit(s). Type of Completion: k (colloquium).
In-person direct teaching
Teacher(s)
Mgr. Tomáš Hampejs, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Mgr. Tomáš Glomb, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Mgr. et Mgr. Tereza Menšíková, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
Mgr. Tomáš Glomb, Ph.D.
Department for the Study of Religions – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Mgr. Kristýna Čižmářová
Supplier department: Department for the Study of Religions – Faculty of Arts
Timetable
each even Thursday 18:00–19:40 M22
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 30 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/30, only registered: 6/30, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 6/30
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 6 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives

Computers enable large volumes of text to be processed in a short period of time. This not only saves work, but also reveals patterns and themes woven throughout large volumes of text that often remain hidden when reading closely. This course uses examples from classical religious texts and students' own corpora to demonstrate the use of various techniques and technologies of "distance reading" (or computational text analysis) for research purposes in religious studies.


Current technologies make computational text analysis useful as a complementary method even for primarily "non-textual" research projects that include documents with unstructured digital text. It is also possible to compile and distance-read a research corpus based on interviews, open-ended questionnaires, or one's own digital notes.

Learning outcomes

After successfully completing the course, students will be able to 

  • understand the metaphors of close and distant reading;
  • use basic terms from the field of natural language processing and computational text analysis methods;
  • understand the properties of various computational representations of text data and the principles of their computational processing;
  • gain a general understanding of computational-analytical techniques for working with texts  (e.g., descriptive frequency statistics);
  • understand the principles of creating a digital research corpus and the importance of preprocessing and text cleaning (normalization, lemmatization);
  • analyze a corpus in a corpus manager;
  • independently perform basic research work on a digital corpus and basic computational text analysis in software that does not require programming.


Syllabus

  • Theoretical Introduction to Distant Reading and Computational Text Analysis
  • Computer-Assisted Reading I: Corpus Analysis and Possibilities of Digital Text Representation
  • Computer-Assisted Reading II: Scalable Reading and Working in a Corpus Manager
  • Stylometry, Machine Discursivity, and Fundamentals of Computational Linguistics I
  • Stylometry, machine discursivity, and fundamentals of computational linguistics II
  • Machine learning and topic modeling I: distance reading of online social behavior 
  • Machine learning and topic modeling II: distance reading of online social behavior 
  • Fundamentals of distributional semantics I: From texts to machine meaning and tracking cultural-historical change
  • Fundamentals of Distributional Semantics II: From Texts to Machine Meaning and Tracking Cultural-Historical Change 
  • Large Language Models and Generative AI as Assistants I
  • Large Language Models and Generative AI as Assistants II


Literature
  • Drucker, J. (2021). The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship (1st ed.). First edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021.: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/978100310
  • Mullen, Lincoln A. America’s Public Bible: Biblical Quotations in U.S. Newspapers. Stanford University Press, 2018. http://americaspublicbible.org.
  • Oakes, Michael P. 2014. Literary Detective Work on the Computer. Natural Language Processing (NLP), volume 12. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  • GRIMMER, Justin; Margaret E. ROBERTS and Brandon M. STEWART. Text as data : a new framework for machine learning and the social sciences. Princeton: Princeton university press, 2022, xix, 336. ISBN 9780691207551. info
  • MORETTI, Franco. Grafy, mapy, stromy : abstraktní modely literární historie. Translated by Olga Čaplyginová. Vydání první. Praha: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, nakladatelství Karolinum, 2014, 121 stran. ISBN 9788024626093. info
  • PIPER, Andrew. Enumerations : data and literary study. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, xiii, 243. ISBN 9780226568751. info
  • ROCKWELL, Geoffrey and Stéfan SINCLAIR. Hermeneutica : computer-assisted interpretation in the humanities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016, viii, 246. ISBN 9780262034357. info
  • STOLTZ, Dustin S. and Marshall A. TAYLOR. Mapping texts : computational text analysis for the social sciences. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024, xv, 307. ISBN 9780197756881. info
  • Nielbo, K. L., Nichols, R., & Slingerland, E. (2017). Mining the Past – Data-Intensive Knowledge Discovery in the Study of Historical Textual Traditions. Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 3(1–2), 93–118. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.31662
  • Nielbo, K. L., Karsdorp, F., Wevers, M., Lassche, A., Baglini, R. B., Kestemont, M., & Tahmasebi, N. (2024). Quantitative text analysis. Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 4(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-024-00302-w
  • Jurafsky, D., & Martin, J. H. (2025). Speech and Language Processing (Draft). https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/
Teaching methods
seminars; lectures; homework
Assessment methods

  • Timely submission of micro-tasks 
  • Colloquium: Students will prepare a research report on how they would use remote reading methods to examine a digitized religious text of their choice. The output will be discussed

Language of instruction
Czech
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
The course is taught once in two years.
Information on course enrolment limitations: Zápis mimo religionistiku je podmíněn souhlasem vyučujících.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/phil/spring2026/RLMgB606