Every six months for over a century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints holds a General Conference where leaders of the church address the members of the church and nonmembers alike across the globe. Speakers at this conference consist of the Prophet, his counselors that form the First Presidency of the Church, and each member of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles. Members of the quorums of the Seventy and auxiliary presidencies such as the General Young Women's President, also give address upon assignment.
Here's a video produced by the church that explains more:
One of the interesting things about the conference speakers is that none of them are assigned a specific topic to speak on. They share what they feel those listening will benefit from.
These talks are mainly given in English and are translated live into 55 languages. Within a week or two, the words are published into 98 languages made available to the public.
Once these talks are published, they come with topics that allow you to select one of them which directs you to other talks that also cover this topic.
I wanted to see if there were any trends in these topics shared over the most recent conference which took place October 2nd-3rd, 2021 and those in recent years.
Each person often remarks when they watch talks from General Conference, they take away different ideas or impressions. Because of that, I wanted to make something interactive for people so they can look for a certain topic in particular, or maybe wanted to look at topics the Prophet has specifically mentioned, or those related to a broader gospel doctrine.
To collect the data I manually went through each talk and found how many times a topic had been specifically included and entered it into a Google sheet. I then used Google Data Studio to create a dashboard to accomplish this. It consists of a stacked bar chart that shows topics from conferences of October 2021, April 2021 and combined from April 2018 - October 2020. At the top there are three drop down controls: Speaker Group, Doctrine and Topic. This allows you to narrow down into applicable topics you are interested in and who has talked about them in their talks.
One of the biggest insights I got here is the most popular topic is Jesus Christ and such topics like Faith, Love and Overcoming Adversity are among the most highlighted as well.
I hope if you are interested, you spend a little time looking at topics you might be interested in to see how often they have been addressed and by whom.
Let me know if there are particular insights that stood out to you!
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