~/projects/byu-speeches/reuse
Who quotes whom
Speakers quote one another, quote themselves, and tell the same story again. This study finds every passage of fifteen words or more that appears in two different speechs, sets scripture aside by matching against the standard works, and asks who gets quoted, who does the quoting, and how long a passage stays in circulation.
What stands out
- Spencer W. Kimball is quoted most. 476 passages from Spencer W. Kimball's speechs reappear in other speakers' speechs; Dallin H. Oaks (419) and Jeffrey R. Holland (316) follow.
- Richard G. Scott quotes Richard G. Scott most. 133 passages recur across their own speechs, the largest self-quotation in the corpus.
- The passage in longest circulation has travelled since 1967. “far ahead of the outside world in everything pertaining to learning of every kind as we are today in regard to religious matters you mark…” appears in 21 speechs by 11 speakers, first in Spencer W. Kimball's “Education for Eternity”, last in 2023.
- A reuse comes a median of 9 years after the first use. Most reuse is within a generation; the long tail reaches back a century.
- The most quoted speech is “The Second Century of Brigham Young University”. Spencer W. Kimball's 1975 speech supplies 251 passages to later speechs.
- Quoting earlier speechs went from 39% of speechs in the 1970s to 81% in the 2020s. The share of speechs later quoted is highest for the decades that have had the longest to be quoted.
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Model card
- Data
- 1,974 speechs of 100 words or more with a known year, prose paragraphs only, lowercased with punctuation removed.
- Matching
- Overlapping eight-word shingles indexed across every speech. Shingles that occur in the standard works (every verse, including runs across verse boundaries) are dropped, as are shingles found in more than twenty-five speechs, which removes set phrases, prayers and salutations. Runs of consecutive shared shingles between two speechs are merged into a passage; passages under fifteen words are discarded.
- Direction
- The earlier speech is the source. A passage shared by two speechs of the same speaker counts as self-quotation; otherwise it counts from the later speaker to the earlier. A passage in circulation is one text shared by three or more speechs.
- Known failure modes
- Both speechs may be quoting a third source outside the corpus (a hymn, a prior leader's book, a non-scriptural quotation), which this method credits to the earlier speech. Paraphrase is invisible; only near-verbatim reuse is found. A passage quoted with attribution and one quoted silently look the same.
Methods and data for the corpus as a whole.