In the early 2000s, Thomas Nelson publishing released a line of glossy Bibles pitched to combat Bible illiteracy, especially among younger audiences. These “Biblezines” placed the New Contemporary Version of the New Testsament into a familiar format, teen magazines. Cultural critics and pundits frequently mocked the venture as a gimmick, but Christian schools and youth groups used these to try and save a generation. This digital project archives these Biblezines and positions them as data for examining how people make, use, and contest scirptures.
Beginning in 2023, Dr. Richard Newton began collecting these out-of-print Bibliezines from online resellers and warehouses. A student team in the REL Digital Lab began to digitize them using an Optic Book A300i scanner. Early OCR versions of these texts have allowed us to do textual analysis with Voyant Tools and Logos Bible Software. Students using this data set have also experimented with ChatGPT to backward engineer the logics behind rendering an artifical Gen-Y teenage voice as was done by the editors of the Biblezine. The project lives on an Omeka site under development.
