From here on out I will be using eBlogger to host this blog, renamed “MetaV.”  You can access it at: http://meta-v.blogspot.com/  All existing content has been migrated to the new platform but will also be archived at this address for past posts.

Most Christians have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their importance to biblical scholarship, but few have ever actually seen them. Now, that no longer has to be the case. The Israel Museum has teamed up with Google to not only make the images of the scrolls available digitally, but to make them searchable with interactive English translation.  Not only can you search the text on the Museum’s website, but now it will show up in Google search results (including in custom search results on soulliberty.com) as well.  They have even put a little bit of “flare” to it by animating the paper appear to be unrolling as you scroll through it.  Check it out here: http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/

When I first began exploring word clouds as a means of visualizing biblical data, the result using Wordle was little better than a jumble of words sized according to frequency, with random colors and angular variations to add interest.  It’s a decent proof of concept, but as I said earlier, it fails as a design concept unless it’s intelligently combined with other elements.  Since then, I have discovered more well-developed technology that can “auto-magically” create word clouds which are good enough to stand alone as an artistic element.

At least one tool, Tagxedo, bridges the gap between Wordle’s overly simplistic automation and the manual processes required for intricate typographic designs such as maps made from words placed by hand, one by one.  It’s strength is in its ability to layout and color the words based on an uploaded image.  I have re-created my original word cloud using words in the KJV (with some highly common words intentionally removed), laid out using an image of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns.

This tool allows you to save images in a range of useful formats as well as create your own products using that design.  Interestingly, when I shared the above image with the Tagxedo creator, he pointed out the fact that the Tagxedo store features a few products already designed with Bible words, albeit from a different image of Jesus.

What I particularly like about this concept is that the usual images of Jesus are merely artistic imaginations which may not have anything at all to do with how he really looked.  Instead, we get a truer, clearer picture of the Savior from the words he spoke though the writers of scripture.  How much more appropriate is it to paint his image with those words?

Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me.

-Psalm 40:7

The Bible Gateway Blog has an interesting bit of analysis today on how people share the Bible versus how they read it online (based on BibleGateway.com statistics).  From the post:

When people share Bible passages on Facebook and Twitter, they share individual verses 74% of the time and chapters only 9% of the time…when people read the Bible on Bible Gateway, they read complete chapters over 50% of the time and individual verses 20% of the time.

What I enjoy about these images (like the one above) is seeing how we can take massive amounts of data – thousands upon thousands of Tweets, Facebook shares, and website hits, then plot them out in a way that makes larger patterns readily recognizable.  Those who know nothing of statistics or data gathering can visually compare social network activity with other types of online activity.  This is possible because our brains more easily recognize patterns visually than in a massive spreadsheet.

I’m especially encouraged when I see this taking place with regard to biblical interests.  It is God, after all, who gave us these communication skills and the cognitive abilities to interpret things with our eyes.  When art and architecture was all the rage, we got the Sistine Chapel and Notre Dame – both of which are explicity meant to honor God.  Today, information is the dominant cultural theme but it most often lacks any Christian concepts.  It’s about time we started catching up to those trends, and this kind of analysis is a good step.

UPDATE:  The author of the Bible Gateway post has expanded on his methods and provided futher analysis on his website, OpenBible.info.  If you’re a data “viz wiz”, you can also download the raw data for your own analysis (thanks for making that available!).

One’s approach to Bible study has great influence on a person’s views about God and our relationship with him. The set of guidelines I prefer and recommend would be what’s generally known as the inductive bible study method. I find it’s a great way to let the text speak for itself before applying any pre-concieved ideas that may warp its intended, actual meaning. Of course, no single study method must be dogmatically practiced as long as the approach does not impose outside influences that may skew our interpretations (a.k.a “Sola Scriptura”).

Likewise, a person’s approach to understanding any other data set has a huge bearing on their eventual understanding of what that data represents.  A flawed approach tends to produce false or misleading statistics, granting that field of study a special category coined by Mark Twain in his famous line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” On a blog that I regularly visit, Flowing Data, Nathan Yau does a good job of giving examples of the right and wrong ways to analyze and present data truthfully.  The recent release of his book Visualize This promises to be as good a resource as his blog.  It comes along with a wonderful video (below) that illustrates some important points I’d like to expand on. 

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  The parallels between this approach to statistics and sound hermeneutics are immediately apparent.  Let’s walk through each step and discuss how it corresponds to inductive Bible study and how I believe we can improve upon some areas.

1. Get Your Data. Normally we choose some passage that is manageable in the time we’ve set aside for study.  When studying an entire book, it must be broken into smaller segments.  This is a good way for individuals to dig really deep and meditate on certain points, but it can be inadequate and unnecessary for other purposes.  Enough people over time have taken this approach, tabulated and published key information that can now be used alongside many other such resources to efficiently study the entire Bible as a whole.  The data sets I’ve chosen come from renowned scholars over several centuries, now combined in one linked data set (MetaV). 
2. Ask a Question.  Once we’ve chosen what passage(s) to pick apart, we must make some basic observations.  What people, places, or time frames are mentioned?  Much of this can be gleaned directly from the text, but helps such as maps or time lines are often necessary to really understand where in the world that place is or what else might have been going on in that period of history.  This is why MetaV includes a year assigned to every passage and why every identifiable place is given a latitude/longitude.
3. Choose your tools. These days we’re stuck with either pen and paper or study software which does a great job of putting a microscope on the text, but nothing is yet available which can handle analysis of the entire Bible.  If you’re computer-savvy, you may be comfortable with various spreadsheets, databases, or statistical computation tools, but let’s face it – not everyone just loooves to do stats in their spare time! 
4. Explore.   This goes along with the observations you may have when asking some basic questions, but now it may be expanded to look for trends, patterns, and differences.  Like the video points out, it’s useful to compare things according to categories, space, and time.  The only real way to do this on a scale larger than a chapter or two is to take each place mentioned in the passage and find it on a map (hopefully one that corresponds with the time period you’re studying) or take a similar approach to finding/plotting events through time.  To help in that regard, you may find this interative visual to be useful.  On a smaller scale, highlighting key elements by marking them with colors and shapes can help you identify repeating or contrasting phrases.  Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if your study tools did that for you, allowing one to apply this to everything in the Bible at once so you can spend more time thinking and less time marking?  I think that day is fast approaching.
5. Get your story.  Once you have some idea of what’s being emphasized, compared, or explained, it’s time to put it all together. What does this text actually mean? How does it relate to other stories?  How does it relate to your own life?
6. Design your visual.  It’s just not enough that you understand it.  You want to share what you’ve learned…but how?  How might you communicate key points in a meaningful, truthful way without simply reciting the text or handing over a list of raw data?  This is another reason why most analysis, both biblical and otherwise, is limited to smaller, more manageable bites.  It’s a fairly unique skill set to handle large volumes of facts and communicate them in a way that isn’t overwhelmingly complex or else too watered-down for the sake of simplicity.  I am finding more and more folks out there like Nathan Yau who are teaching others these skills and I’m learning a great deal from their online resources.  I sincerely hope that the visuals on this blog do a decent job of that for you as well.

This is just one of the ways that I believe MetaV can be applied to broaden our understanding – taking the Bible as a whole, seeking common or diverging elements while remaining true to the intent of each individual passage.  If you’re looking for other ways to understand the data in MetaV, keep checking this blog for upcoming visualizations or do what I do: find sites like Flowing Data to get some ideas and “how-to” articles.  Then, let me know what you come up with by leaving your comments below.

Producing content for SoulLiberty.com, this blog, and projects like MetaV are a labor of love.  We currently have no need or desire to solicit donations, but the next phases of MetaV will require some investment.  Plus, we have received some requests for prints of our more popular graphics.  To that end, today we are announcing the Soul Liberty store, powered by Zazzle.  The products featured on this store will mainly be high-quality prints of the various infographics and other popular illustrations I have made for this website.  We’ll also have a few other items just for fun.  Happy shopping!

Click the image above to go to an interactive, zoomable version

What you’re looking at is a QR code.  Anyone familiar with these would immediately recognize that it is unlike all other such codes – a distinction which will be explained shortly.  They have become prolific in marketing campaigns because they allow smart phone users to point their camera at the code then get a quick response (QR) that usually takes them to a website with further information without having to remember or type in a long URL.  It can also be used to share contact info on business cards, encode some bit of text, and much more.  Those unfamiliar with QR codes can think of it as a souped-up bar code.

In thinking about applications for MetaV, I thought about ways to crunch huge amounts of information into smaller spaces so that a “big picture” is readily apparent while still making it possible to get further details on demand.  While this illustration is not built directly using the MetaV database, is does represent this vision rather well. 

I wanted to find a way to use this technology to bring people information about God rather than some product or service I’m trying to sell.  An easy way to do this would be to encode a URL to some Bible passage.  YouVersion.com uses this principle in its Facebook sharing tool, for instance.  One could create a collection of these codes about a particular topic, but how might you arrange those codes in a meaningful way that represents the over-arching concept? 

The answer I arrived at was the three level QR Code, above.  The first level is a code that simply returns the text “God.”  The second level, shown in the colored squares which are normally solid squares that serve as alignment markers, represents the three persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The third level is the area with the smallest squares which again are usually a solid color arranged according to normal QR code specifications.  These individual squares return 129 different Bible passages that tell us more about each person of the Trinity, the relationships between them, and our relationship to God.

Beyond the directly encoded text, this work is a sort of metaphor for the Trinity and the Bible itself.  The allusion to the Trinity is obvious from the fact that three different levels of the code are used to represent a single Godhead.  The parallel with the Bible is a bit more subtle, but just as relevant.  Taken on the whole, everyone knows the Bible speaks of God.  One has to get just a little deeper to know that it’s talking about a Triune God.  Go deeper with your study to discover more details in specific passages.  Another interesting aspect of QR Codes that they have in common with the Bible is the “error-correction” properties of it.  What this means is that some portion of it can be destroyed or be otherwise unreadable and yet the overall code retains its message accurately.  When we compare Scripture with Scripture, unclear or isolated portions become understandable when put within the greater context.

I would encourage anyone with a mobile device capable of reading QR codes (all you need is a decent camera and a free scanner app) to play around with this on our zoom-able version.  It works best with low glare and low ambient lighting, as demonstrated in the video below.  You can also get this as a poster to put up in areas where tech-savvy people may take a second glance to dive into it and hopefully learn more about who God is.

Note: QR Code is a registered trademark of Denso Wave Incorporated in the following countries: Japan, United States of America, Australia and Europe.

I’m a little late joining the bandwagon on celebrating the 400th anniversary of the KJV, but here’s my contribution to the mix. I found an interesting web site called Bible Reader’s Museum which, among other things, has extensive listings of Bible versions throughout time.  Being the chart junkie that I am, I converted their English Bible version list (used by permission) to an interactive graph of versions over time.  It begins at quarter-century intervals and then changes to smaller intervals as you filter out the years.  The list at the bottom filters along with it, making it simple to find one or several, then click the name to go to that version’s website.  It’s amazing to see just how many translations there have been over the years. Take a look!

For many in our day, to picture the Bible is to think of an old dusty book on the shelf with leather binding and golden accents.  Its pages are so thin you’re afraid you’ll destroy them at every turn, or perhaps you believe the words on its pages will destroy you.  I have taken the words from those pages and linked them with explanatory works in order to show you the Bible in a way that you’ve never seen it before.

Scripture contains stories about thousands of people over thousands of years in thousands of places.  We can take those thousands of words and make them into a picture.  The root word from which we translate the term “Scripture” is graphe. This same root word is also the basis for our English word “graph.”  How appropriate is it then to to translate the words of scripture into graphs as we use that word today?

Christians of the renaissance “visualized” the Bible with works of art that are now considered priceless.  Now we can replace the oil and canvas with data and computers.  I would contend that this approach is no less beautiful or creative.  Now that the foundation has been laid, in the coming months on this blog I will bring forth the realization of this vision.  Never before seen patterns may emerge.  Beautiful structures may unfold.  Readers will see the consistency of design in God’s words and works through time, space, and the soul of mankind.  This is truly an exciting time.

MetaV 2.0 is now available to download as an Access database or as a group of csv files.  I have attempted to make it as easy as possible to understand the structure of the data, but feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

This is perhaps the most complex undertaking I’ve ever engaged in and I know it simply would be impossible without the ongoing guidance and helping hand of the Lord our God.  There are many improvements that can and will be made in future versions, but the time for collecting information is past and the time for turning it into action is upon us.  As I’ve seen from the response to my infographic, “Mapping God’s Bloodline,” visual presentations of biblical data can reach far and wide, gaining influence in some of the most unlikely sectors of our society.

MetaV provides the foundation for more visualizations of this type.  With it, data experts can correlate biblical people, places, and timelines in ways not yet imagined.  For the foreseeable future, I shall be focused on bringing the big picture of the Bible into view using modern data techniques.  I welcome your ideas and would be happy to share on this blog any visualizations or analyses you have performed.

Click Here to go to the download page.