This dataset consists of talks given in LDS General and Relief Society Conferences and at BYU and CES devotionals. It was Scraped from the web by Matt Gardener and includes talks from 1880 through April 2010. It can be accessed here.

There is only one index for this data, since it could be broken into classes many ways (e.g. venue, speaker, time, etc.). However, each document begins with a header that contains various meta-data about that particular talk. The header is in the format of key value pairs, separated by a : symbol, one-per-line. For example:

SPEAKER: Thomas S. Monson
CALLING: P
GENDER: M
TITLE: Welcome to Conference
TOPIC:
TYPE: GC
YEAR: 2009
MONTH: 4
DAY: 1
LINK: http://lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-1032-1,00.html

Callings are coded, so an “A” indicates that the individual is an apostle, “P” indicates “prophet”, etc. Note also that keys can have missing value. The header is separated from the body of the document by an empty line.

The data was scraped from the web with only a minimal amount of cleansing, and so can contain non-ascii unicode characters.