Visualizing Collocations in Religious Online Forums

We present results of a project examining the application of text visualization in the context of religious studies and sociology. Our goal is to analyze and compare the online communication of various religious directions. For this contribution we focus on the visualization of collocations for specific religious and spiritual key concepts. As a corpus, we acquired the content of the three religious subreddits /r/Islam, /r/Christianity and /r/Occult for a one-year time span. The overall corpus consists of 700,000 comments and around 50 million tokens. We explore and visualize collocations for the concepts “life”, “religion” and “love”. We discuss the results and to what extent we were able to gather new insights