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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 talks, 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
- Heber J. Grant is quoted most. 1383 passages from Heber J. Grant's talks reappear in other speakers' talks; David O. McKay (963) and Brigham Young (754) follow.
- Thomas S. Monson quotes Thomas S. Monson most. 2312 passages recur across their own talks, the largest self-quotation in the corpus.
- The passage in longest circulation has travelled since 1897. “a foundation ye saints of the lord is laid for your faith in his excellent word what more can he say than to you he…” appears in 23 talks by 19 speakers, first in George Teasdale's “”, last in 2002.
- A reuse comes a median of 13 years after the first use. Most reuse is within a generation; the long tail reaches back a century.
- The most quoted talk is “Stand Strong against the Wiles of the World”. Gordon B. Hinckley's 1995 talk supplies 131 passages to later talks.
- Quoting earlier talks went from 3% of talks in the 1850s to 65% in the 2020s. The share of talks later quoted is highest for the decades that have had the longest to be quoted.
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Model card
- Data
- 10,549 talks of 100 words or more with a known year, prose paragraphs only, lowercased with punctuation removed.
- Matching
- Overlapping eight-word shingles indexed across every talk. 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 talks, which removes set phrases, prayers and salutations. Runs of consecutive shared shingles between two talks are merged into a passage; passages under fifteen words are discarded.
- Direction
- The earlier talk is the source. A passage shared by two talks 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 talks.
- Known failure modes
- Both talks 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 talk. 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.