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Methods and data

Where every talk comes from, what is counted and how, what is missing, what this site publishes and what it keeps offline, and a card for each study as it ships.

Sources

YearsSourceCountNotes
1851–1886Journal of Discourses, as transcribed at jod.mrm.org1,426 discoursesSermons given in many settings, not only at conference. Dated by the discourse heading; six carry no date in the source and take the year of their neighbours in the volume, marked as estimated.
1880, 1897–1941Conference Report, split from the scanned volumes on archive.org (collection conferencereport)3,576 talksOCR text split at the printed speaker headers; speaker names corrected against the prose of the same volumes; each talk links to its page in the scan. About 0.4% of words are OCR errors, so counts and reading grades are approximate. The 1880 volume also reports the two days' meetings in the Assembly Hall that preceded the conference.
1942–1970Conference Report, as transcribed by BYU's Scripture Citation Index (scriptures.byu.edu)1,824 talksClean text with every scripture citation marked. October 1957 returns a server error on the index and is missing.
1971–churchofjesuschrist.org content API3,978 talksByline, role, session, scripture links and the official audio as published.

Talks by decade

  • 1830s1
  • 1840s2
  • 1850s411
  • 1860s388
  • 1870s382
  • 1880s271
  • 1890s121
  • 1900s719
  • 1910s798
  • 1920s924
  • 1930s809
  • 1940s613
  • 1950s612
  • 1960s693
  • 1970s851
  • 1980s679
  • 1990s745
  • 2000s760
  • 2010s747
  • 2020s277

No Conference Report was printed from 1887 to 1896, so those years have no talks here; the Journal of Discourses ends in 1886. October 1957 is missing from the citation index and has no scanned volume in the archive.org collection.

By calling when speaking

  • Quorum of the Twelve 3,527
  • First Presidency 2,701
  • Seventy 2,066
  • Other 1,576
  • Presiding Bishopric 384
  • Relief Society 165
  • Young Women 135
  • Primary 74
  • Patriarch 56
  • BYU faculty 46
  • Sunday School 23
  • Young Men 23
  • BYU leadership 6

From the role line under the title where the source prints one. Where the source gives only a title such as Elder or President, the calling is the one the leadership database records for that speaker in that year.

What is measured

Words
The prose paragraphs of the transcript. Headings, the notes after a transcript and the byline are excluded.
Reading grade
Flesch–Kincaid grade level on the prose, with syllables counted as vowel groups. Nothing under fifty words is graded.
Scriptures cited
The Church's own scripture links where they exist, the citation index's marked citations for 1942–1970, and otherwise references written out in the text. Only references with a chapter and verse count, so a bare book name is not a citation.
Speakers
Matched across sources by full name with suffixes kept, so Brigham Young and Brigham Young Jr. are different people, and split by year where two leaders share a name. A short alias table resolves byline variants. Speakers are linked to the leadership database by the same key.
Signature phrases
Words and two-word phrases scored by weighted log-odds with an informative Dirichlet prior against the rest of the corpus, after removing stop words, names of deity and the ordinary vocabulary of a sermon.

What is published and what stays offline

The talks are copyrighted by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. and their transcribers. The full texts are stored offline for analysis and never enter the site. The site publishes metadata, aggregate measures and a single opening sentence per talk, with a link to the official page for everything else. Models built on the text ship as their outputs or as small browser-side models, never as the text itself.

Model cards

One card per study, added as each study ships: data, method, validation and known failure modes.