Scripture Web: Thanksgiving

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I'm posting a scripture web using the Topical Guide topic of Thanksgiving. Like my last posting on Talents, this is a three-degree web with k-core value of 3. In other words, these are all the highly connected scriptures and topics related to Thanksgiving.

The mapping breaks up into three colored groups. I summarize them as follows:

Prayer

Matt 7:7

7 ¶Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

James 1:5

5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

2 Ne 4:35

35 Yea, I know that God will give liberally to him that asketh. Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss; therefore I will lift up my voice unto thee; yea, I will cry unto thee, my God, the rock of my righteousness. Behold, my voice shall forever ascend up unto thee, my rock and mine everlasting God. Amen.

D&C 46:7

7 But ye are commanded in all things to ask of God, who giveth liberally; and that which the Spirit testifies unto you even so I would that ye should do in all holiness of heart, walking uprightly before me, considering the end of your salvation, doing all things with prayer and thanksgiving, that ye may not be seduced by evil spirits, or doctrines of devils, or the commandments of men; for some are of men, and others of devils.

Cheerful heart

Prov 17:22

22 A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.

D&C 59:15

15 And inasmuch as ye do these things with thanksgiving, with cheerful hearts and countenances, not with much laughter, for this is sin, but with a glad heart and a cheerful countenance—

Prov 15:13

13 A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.

D&C 136:28

28 If thou art merry, praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving.

Songs and singing

Eph 5:19 (& 20)

 19 Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
 20 Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;

James 5:13

13 Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms.

D&C 25:12

 12 For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads.

Col 3:16 (15-17)

 15 And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.
 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.
 17 And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.

Scripture Web: Talents, Part 2

In the last post on Talents, I promised a follow up on additional ways of doing a scripture web. For this second part, let's start at the beginning. A one-degree web for the topic Talents looks like this:

(one-degree scripture web for Talents)

Notice that this type of web isn't very useful. It's simply a less space-effective means of the topical guide list. Moving on to a two-degree web is what I showed in the last post:

(two-degree scripture web for Talents)

In Talents, Part 1, looking at this web showed the connection of each scripture to all the other topical guide references that refer to each scripture. This also provides interconnection between scriptures that are covered by the same types of topics--you start to get a web of interconnectedness.

What about the three-degree web? Well, as you might imagine, the three-degree web then contains all the daughter scripture references for each of the Topical Guide topics that showed up in the two-degree web. It's quite a mess to look at:

(three-degree scripture web for Talents)

For the three-degree, I left all the two-degree references colored and left all the labels off. As you can see, there are now so many scriptures in the web that it is no longer useful. This should make sense--we are stretching out farther and farther from the original topic, so most of the interconnected scriptures/topics become less relevant. 

However, some of the connected scriptures are linked together in interesting ways. How do we find the relevant connected scriptures? Gephi, the program I use for creating the scripture webs, has an analysis filter called "k-core." I'm not a graph theory expert, but if you want to know more about the mathematics, I'll refer you to the Wikipedia article. In short, the k-core let's you pick only the nodes (circles) that interconnect with a certain number of other nodes. Effectively, this keeps only the nodes that are interconnected rather than the ones that are branching off into new topics.

Here's an example of the three-degree scripture web for Talents with a filter of a k-core value of 3:

As you can see, this gives a more tangled web than just a simple two-degree web. However, you start to see more interconnections. The coloring comes as a feature in Gephi to show how groups/families in a web. 

Two interesting connections from this web I found are the scriptures Ezekiel 36:26 and John 6:51

Ezekiel 36:26

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

John 6:51

I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

Initially, these scriptures don't seem to have anything to do with talents. But on further reflection, talents can be considered equivalent to gifts from God. One of the greatest gifts we can receive from God is new spiritual life through the Savior Jesus Christ. Both Ezekiel and John refer to this type of gift.

What other connections can you find?

Word Tree from General Conference October 2014: Promises

My wife, Lisa, attended a women's conference a few weeks ago where Carole M. Stephens, first counselor in the general Relief Society presidency spoke. One of her admonitions was to search through the latest general conference and mark where mentions were made of promises. My wife mentioned that she thought this would be a great idea, and was excited to pull out a red pencil and the latest paper copy of the Ensign. Now, there is no substitute for reading through conference messages carefully with a red pencil. But, I suggested we could also try it in a high tech way to more quickly focus on the desired quotations.

Below you can find two word trees (see past blog post) using the word promise. The first one uses promise on the right hand side and collects all the words preceding promise. The second uses promise on the left-hand side and collects all the words following promise. On top of each quote we added the name of the speaker.

We found the promises that had the words "I promise" to be particularly insightful. There were three instances of this in the last general conference:

#1--Let us acknowledge that most often gaining a testimony is not a task of a minute, an hour, or a day. It is not once and done. The process of gathering spiritual light is the quest of a lifetime. Your testimony of the living Son of God and His restored Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, may not come as quickly as you desire, but I promise you this: if you do your part, it will come. And it will be glorious. (Receiving a Testimony of Light and Truth, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf)

#2--I bear witness of the miracles, both spiritual and temporal, that come to those who live the law of the fast. I bear witness of the miracles that have come to me. Truly, as Isaiah recorded, I have cried out in the fast more than once, and truly God has responded, “Here I am.”¹⁷ Cherish that sacred privilege at least monthly, and be as generous as circumstances permit in your fast offering and other humanitarian, educational, and missionary contributions. I promise that God will be generous to you, and those who find relief at your hand will call your name blessed forever.  (Are We Not All Beggars?, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland)

#3--Elder David A. Bednar has promised: “I invite the young people of the Church to learn about and experience the Spirit of Elijah. … I promise [that] you will be protected against the intensifying influence of the adversary. As you participate in and love this holy work, you will be safeguarded in your youth and throughout your lives.” (The Book, Elder Allan F. Packer, quoting Elder David A. Bednar)

In addition to the promises given above, some of the other promises include:

• The promise of peace to all who accept & follow Christ (The Reason for Our Hope, Elder Boyd K. Packer)
• Receiving in the temple "the promise which [He gives] unto [us] of eternal life, even the glory of the celestial kingdom." (Continuing Revelation, President Henry B. Eyring)
• The promise of being spiritually strengthened through taking the sacrament and taking upon ourselves the name of Jesus Christ (The Sacrament--A Renewal for the Soul, Cheryl A. Esplin)
• The promise of peace from scripture study (Make the Exercise of Faith Your First Priority, Elder Richard G. Scott)

Scripture Web: Talents, Part 1

The LDS Topical Guide is a fantastic scriptural resource. An abundance of references and cross references are available by flipping through paper pages, utilizing the Topical Guide on LDS.org, or by using one of the many LDS scripture mobile apps. One of the big advantage to the electronic versions is that you can click on a link to a scripture and it can open up in a new browser page making it easy to go back and forth between the listed scriptures and the topical guide. I mean, who hasn't done it the old-fashioned way and gotten frustrated by losing their spot multiple times. Inevitably, that scripture ribbon bookmark is going to fall out, and then you're re-looking-up the topical guide entry you had first turned to.

However, even with an electronic topical guide, you are still limited by the list-like nature of the topical guide. For example, I recently taught a lesson on "Talents" in my primary class. Below is the text for the topical guide entry for Talents:

unto one he gave five talents, to another two: Matt. 25:15 . ( Luke 19:13 . )
unto whomsoever much is given: Luke 12:48 . ( D&C 82:3 . )
Neglect not the gift that is in thee: 1 Tim. 4:14 .
all things are given them which are expedient: 2 Ne. 2:27 .
thou wilt prove them, and take away their talent: Ether 12:35 .
every good gift cometh of Christ: Moro. 10:18 .
lay hold upon every good gift: Moro. 10:30 .
thou shalt exercise thy gift: D&C 6:11 .
every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God: D&C 46:11 .
hide the talent which I have given unto them: D&C 60:2 .
neither shalt thou bury thy talent: D&C 60:13 .
that every man may gain other talents: D&C 82:18 .
if a gift is bestowed … and he receive not the gift: D&C 88:33 .
See also Gen. 39:6 ; Ex. 31:6 ; Ex. 35:35 ; 1 Chr. 25:7

Notice that entries in this list are sorted in book/chapter/verse order. But what if we want not just a list, but we how entries are interconnected? One way to do this would be to take each scripture entry and find out what other topical guide entries refer to that scripture. We would expect that several of the scriptures in the list would not only be co-entries in the topic "Talents" but would also be co-entries under other topics, say, for example "Gift." Now you no longer have just a list, but an interconnected web. Of course, this begins to be rather complicated to find and track all the interconnections.

Fortunately, with all the interest in mapping social media connections, there are several open-source software solutions for graphically mapping interconnected webs. With a little web scraping plus the help of the software Gephi, I created the map below. The map has "Talents" at the center with all the scriptures under the "Talents" topic. Then every scripture in the "Talents" topic has a link to all the other topical guide entries that refer to those scriptures. The software then links up all the similar entries to create the web shown below. As a helpful aid, I created an image map that should let you click on the scripture reference in the .jpg image and hyperlink to the associated scripture on LDS.org (this may not work on mobile devices, though).

Take a look and explore the connections in the web below. In my next blog post, I will look at additional ways to map the connections on this topic.