When I created Mapping God’s Bloodline, I had no idea what a turning point it would be for this website. Until then, few had visited the site. Once a few influential people shared it on social media, I discovered how visualization could turn a boring, tedious subject into something people find highly engaging.
Previously only top-end software would allow students of scripture to easily find where God is called “Lamb,” “Word,” “Prince,” “Son,” “He,” “I,” etc. Timothy, the developer of Bible Analyzer, recently completed efforts to tag references like those for over 25,000 words to offer similar functionality in a low-cost program.
I love exploring new technologies, especially the ones still in “startup mode.” Sure, I like the newness of it, but they also give me ideas that help some of my projects. Lately I’ve been beta testing a technology that has led me to expand my thoughts on how to codify the conversations among biblical characters. As an added bonus, I learned of it through a former roommate of mine who is now the lead developer. That means I not only get to play with a new toy, I also get to help out an old friend.
One of their ideas is to re-imagine the way people navigate online discussions. I’ll spare the details for now; just know that my experience has shown this encourages conversations to go on and on with multiple participants. However, it shares a limitation common to almost all such tools: you can only directly reply to one person at a time. The best workaround I’ve seen for this is to “mention” other people so they’ll get a notification of your message even if they aren’t in a “To:” box.
These limitations don’t exist in real-life group conversations. Since I mentioned my goal of defining the conversational structure of biblical people, consider an example in that context. Jesus is speaking with his disciples. One of them raises a question or makes a statement that requires a response from their teacher. Does he respond only to one person? He might, but often he will address the group. Now, complicate it further. A council is arguing theology among themselves. Jesus steps into their conversation, addressing the group to answer multiple questions with one statement. It’s not in direct reply to a single person or point.
Do you see that this could not take place using today’s online discussion tools? True, replies can be seen by the world, but you must address your reply to a specific statement made by a particular person. Incredibly, the oldest communication technology on the internet is the one that allows you the most freedom in choosing intended recipients: e-mail! I routinely get a message that requires a reply and I choose to send it to more people than were originally included. Conversely, I may get a mass e-mail but only respond to the sender. Or, I may send it on to a completely new person. I can’t do that as easily or effectively on Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, etc. Perhaps that’s one reason that e-mail just won’t die.
I can envision scenarios where tools that overcome those boundaries may improve upon real-life exchanges. Maybe someone said something I really want to respond to but can’t because of an interruption. By the time I find a break in the conversation, we’re on a different subject. To speak what has been in my head that whole time would invite awkward stares. To go back in time to an earlier point in a written dialogue might not be so awkward and I don’t have to worry about interruptions. Everyone gets a turn to speak. On second thought, maybe that’s not an improvement after all…
If we can develop computer technologies which allow for the complexities of real-life conversations (startup buddy, I’m talking to YOU!) then I may find a better way to capture biblical exchanges in an electronic database. Doing so may help us better understand the whole arc of the Bible which can help us better understand ourselves. Let’s have a conversation about that some time. Find me on Google+ or in the comment section below.
The Cross Reference Index has been rebuilt due to some errors leading to irrelevant connections found by a studious reader. This data now only includes references from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge and excludes other cross reference sources.
This and all other files included in MetaV can be downloaded here.
Today, a popular church tech blog, ChurchMag, listed my site as number 14 on their 2012 list of “Top 20” blogs in that class based on website stats, social media networks, and Google PageRank. Newcomers here may be wondering how this site fits in among that list since most of my posts are not focused on gadgets, social media, or apps designed to help your ministry. So, here’s a quick introduction to SoulLiberty.com and why I think it belongs in the “tech” category.
I tend to be a “power user” or even a creator of technology meant to help spread the knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I share ideas on a very wide range of topics of concern to Christians. I have covered abortion, science, design, prophecy, data visualizations galore, and created a handful of simple apps. My communication style is mainly oriented toward demonstrating new concepts instead of discussing them. For instance, I could have written a post on how useful I thought Wolfram|Alpha could be and linked to a couple of things there. But, I didn’t. I wrote on the size of the New Jerusalem and embedded a Wolfram|Alpha widget that lets you type the size of one person’s “house” and let it tell you how many of those “houses” could fit in that city.
Most of the time the “tech” part of this site is subtle like that. The main exception is MetaV, my ever-expanding project to collect, visualize, and communicate data on biblical people, places, and periods of time. Some of the visualizations using the data in MetaV are featured on the home page. Others can be found under “Tools.”
Years ago when I started this site, I wrote this about the internet:
As we marvel at the technological achievements of our time, God finds a new way every day to remind me that the inventors of this virtual universe are worthy only to worship at the feet of the Creator of the actual universe.
I still feel that way all the time (you can read more on the “About” page). My hope is that readers would come to see things that way, too, but also recognize the rich opportunities before us. I want to make the most of the achievements in the Information Age to evangelize a lost world and train up disciples that grow in grace and the knowledge of the truth. If you’re a new reader or just someone I haven’t heard from before who feels the same way, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below or on Google+.
The ultimate goal of MetaV is not simply to collect biblical data. It is to make that information easier to navigate and understand. This is the last in a series of posts outlining the roadmap for MetaV, a database of people, places, passages, and periods of time found in the Bible.
The tools page on SoulLiberty.com includes several interactive visualizations dealing with readability, Paul’s life and journeys, and cross references. Most importantly, there is an interactive explorer which allows the user to filter by any combination of location, time, or canonical reference. These were all made by plugging the data from MetaV into existing applications, namely Tableau Public and Google Maps.
I am working to improve upon the widely popular graphic, “Mapping God’s Bloodline” by making it more interactive. Users would be able to zoom/center the graph by searching for that person’s name or click on a name in the graph to see details about him. The platform for this application is Flash and will be built such that it can be integrated into third-party software or migrated to a mobile (tablet) app.
Others have contacted me about using MetaV in a more full-featured piece of software (still at the very early stages of development). I also plan to experiment with the feasibility of loading data into Silk – a new platform for dynamically linking and visualizing data and pages. You can follow progress of this at bible.silkapp.com
MetaV will eventually become a suite of applications, all designed for different functions. On the web, it will be about next-generation search which is geared toward displaying knowledge about a subject rather than a list of resources you must dig through to discover that same knowledge. For mobile devices, search will be combined with limited visualization capabilities. On more powerful desktops, fully interactive, integrated visualizations (maps, family trees, timelines, word usage, etc.) will take Bible software to the next level.
This is the fourth in a series of posts outlining the roadmap for MetaV, a database of people, places, passages, and periods of time found in the Bible.
The Bible is not just one book, it is a collection of 66 books. The 40 different authors of those books often tell the same stories, though emphasizing different aspects. A key way to piece together all the details of a story across two or more books is to arrange the passages chronologically. MetaV currently tags verses with a year (from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge), but more detail would be needed to accurately sort chronologically.
We are far enough removed from these events that it is hard to trust specific dates offered by historians (such as James Ussher). That said, adding this level of detail gives us a reference point to correctly sequence events programmatically. It’s hard to reconcile exact dates because calendar systems have changed a great deal over time. We can get close by adding up lifespans or correlating events with archaeological records. Perhaps the clearest difference is that the Jewish prophetic calendar is based on a 30 day month for a year of 360 days. This is an important thing to know when studying Daniel’s 70 weeks or even Revelation. MetaV will eventually include not just our Gregorian Calendar but Jewish calendar dates as well.
Specifically identifying not only dates but particular events (or pericopes, if you will) allows more possibilities for dynamic timeline creation. At higher-level views, the event name (i.e. “resurrection”) may suffice. These headings appear in most bibles but naming systems vary widely. Once a naming system is chosen, this data will be included in MetaV.
The Bible includes not only historical books but also poetic and prophetic works. For those passages that are poems or prophecies, the dates listed indicate when that section was written. This distinction isn’t necessarily clear, and in the case of prophecy the event spoken of may be a known date other than the date of writing, it could be a date in the future, or a combination of both. This disambiguation will be added to MetaV in the future.
This is the third in a series of posts outlining the roadmap for MetaV, a database of people, places, passages, and periods of time found in the Bible.
In addition to a concordance, the back of your Bible will likely include a set of maps. Commonly you will find a map of Israel, Jerusalem, the Exodus, or Paul’s Missionary journeys. The data in MetaV is intended to help programmers dynamically create maps based on any set of passages selected. It comes from OpenBbile.info, which gives a latitude and longitude for every place mentioned in the Bible with a known location (or a well-educated guess).
The problem inherent in assigning every place a latitude and longitude is that it represents a country or region with a single place mark at that country’s capital or geographical center rather than drawing a border. While it has become an increasingly simple matter to overlay modern borders on a map, it is a monumental challenge to do so with historical borders.
One obvious reason for that is that we may not have a detailed map of those places from each time period. Another challenge is that instead of creating an overlay representing a single point in time, we must define borders for every period of that country’s history. Just look at how much Israel’s borders change from one century to the next! Fortunately, MetaV already includes a timeline which can be used to grab the right border overlay for that time period whenever someone manages to draw them.
Cities are places unto themselves, but as borders shift they may be part of one empire in 400 B.C. and part of another empire in the first century A.D. What is needed, especially as an aid in (loosely) defining historical borders, is an explicit assignment of each landmark to a city, each city to a country, and each country to a region. Scholars know a lot of this already, it just needs to be systematized and gathered together so we can more easily answer questions like: “Was this city I’m reading about part of Rome or Babylon at the time this story took place?”
Just as people can be discussed with pronouns (he, she, they, etc), places can be referred to as “here”, “there”, etc. While it may be simple to understand where “here” is when reading the text, searches looking for “Jerusalem” may only find passages with that exact name. A more robust search to find all references to that specific city must have these ambiguous references defined.
MetaV is not only about linking people, places, and periods of time to the passages that tell their story; it is also about helping people see how the Bible relates to our world today. There are many resources which can give a wealth of data about places, including:religions, population, income, literacy rates, and government type. Consider a study on prophecy where you’re exploring the places that various prophets mentioned in relation to the end times. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know some things about how that country looks now when discerning where we may be on the prophetic timeline? These data can be integrated programmatically through tools like the Wolfram|Alpha API since the latitude and longitude are already defined.
Like the names of people, names of places usually have a meaning behind them. J.B. Jackson’s Dictionary of Proper names will be a good place to start working up name meanings for places.
Few things are more commonplace in the back of study Bibles than a concordance. MetaV contains Strong’s concordance, which is the most widely used, compiled by David Troidl as a contribution to the Open Scriptures project. It can be hard to imagine improvements on such a “staple”, but allow me to offer a few ideas.
First, the definitions in MetaV include some details about word origins and both the long and short definitions given by Dr. James Strong. By splitting these three elements into their own fields, some advanced tools can be made. Take, for instance, “adynatos” (G102). It comes from G102 which comes from G1 which is of Hebrew origin. I can think of many visualizations or programmatic comparisons to find similar words throughout the Bible or simply understand the meaning of that word more fully.
Strong’s Concordance includes many proper names of places and people. In order to more deeply integrate the distinct parts of MetaV, these proper names could be linked to the place ID or person ID in those tables. I have found these activities helpful in finding gaps, inconsistencies, and other potential errors in corresponding data sets.
A minor improvement can be made in the near future to remove accent marks from transliterations for better readability.
That’s all for now. Keep an eye out here to learn how we can improve upon data describing places and periods of time, or find out about the applications being developed to explore this data.
This is the first in a series of posts outlining the roadmap for MetaV, a database of people, places, passages, and periods of time found in the Bible. Much work has gone into developing it, but there is much work left to do. There are gaps to be filled in, new data to add, and (most importantly) applications to be developed which aid in data exploration. This roadmap provides a thorough understanding of the improvements I currently envision. It does not include any timelines for completion of these ideas.
When we study the Bible and come across a person, we’d like to know a few basic things about that individual which provide some background for understanding his life and how his experiences relate to the story we’re reading. MetaV provides that context with family relationships, some basic biographical information, and explicit identification of the person named. As an example of the latter, consider that there are 26 unique individuals in the Bible named Zechariah. MetaV makes it clear whether that passage is talking about the well-known prophet or one of the other 25. Or, the opposite problem may occur in which one person goes by more than one name such as Paul (originally Saul) or God himself who goes by many names.
To that end, some work remains in identifying names which are not always easy to process programmatically. These may include possessive forms (like “Aaron’s”) or in many cases where the name of a person is also used to describe a place (like Israel). Even more ambiguous are personal pronouns (him, hers, we, they, ours). We know they describe a person and can usually identify that person through normal exegesis. It is time we recorded that knowledge in order to build upon it.
By including that level of detail in MetaV, we will be able to find verses which refer to a group of people but never mention them by name. A good example would be Jesus’ disciples. Any place which references the “disciples”, “apostles”, “the twelve”, etc. would be a reference to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, etc. even though they are not discussed by name. Unless and until this is defined at word-level detail many of these verses would not appear in search results for “Matthew” (or another disciple for this example) meaning the search would not return some pertinent references.
Other things we’d like to know about people in a “quick reference” context window which are not yet defined in MetaV are: official title, occupation, name meanings, or even a brief summary of the person’s life. We would also like to know what books of the Bible that person may have written. Again in the case of Zechariah: are you reading about the person who wrote the book of Zechariah, or a different person with the same name? We also know the birth and death places for some people. Future revisions to MetaV will link these places to the “Places” table for more context.
The relationships defined in MetaV today are limited to family relationships. But, we interact with others outside our family in the context of work, school, and play. People of the Bible are no different. A set of data defining these relationships for people in the New Testament already exists as part of the Semantic Bible project. This data can be integrated into MetaV and then expanded upon to include Old Testament figures.
People also form groups. The disciples are a group. The Israelites are a group. Much like today’s social networks which readily find a person’s group membership, MetaV currently has identified members of the 12 tribes of Israel and the people listed in Jesus’ genealogy. Clearly many more groups must be defined, but this is a good start.
The Bible is God’s communication to man. Within that, we see God talking to prophets, people talking to each other, and writers speaking to readers. Wouldn’t it be nice to clearly identify who is the sender of a message and who is the intended recipient? Well, the folks at Crossway have tackled the first part of that using Mechanical Turk. They produced a dataset identifying all the speakers of the Bible and, thankfully, released it publicly. Once it is “translated” to work with MetaV, I can begin the process to show recipients of what is being spoken (or written).
That’s all for now. Keep an eye out here to learn how we can improve upon data describing places and periods of time, or find out about the applications being developed to explore this data.
This update is primarily for the tables defining People and their relationships. I have made the following changes for this version:
These files are now available on the downloads page and on GitHub.
I have recently made a few updates to MetaV. In the near future I will begin posting a detailed roadmap to lay out what improvements are planned in the short-term and long-term future. Here are the updates in this version 2.1.1:
Special thanks to Nathan Smith for providing a script to convert the Strong’s XML files to an SQL-friendly structure.
That’s all for now. Many more improvements are planned and updates will appear here as they are completed.
Just watch this video, read Google’s write-up, and imagine a similar search tool designed to explore Bible knowledge. Then, you’ll understand the idea behind MetaV. But please remember…I’m not Google, so it’s going to take a while to get this far.
The Gospels tell the story of Jesus Christ, each one emphasizing different aspects of his time and teachings. A typical harmony of the Gospels lays out all the events and references the passages that describe them in each book. This chart takes a different approach by comparing the broader topics illuminated by those verses.
The sides of each cross are scaled according to how often a topic is dealt with in the corresponding book (as a percentage of the total number of verses in that book). The right side represents Matthew, the top is Luke, left for Mark, and the bottom line goes with John. The topics and verse references are from the topical index in MetaV which has a mashup of Nave’s Topical Bible Concordance and Torrey’s New Topical Textbook.
A Valid Approach?
It is common to hear a pastor tell how often a certain word appears in the Bible or in a particular book to support his point. But, is this an accurate representation? One can discuss the topic of faith, for instance, without ever mentioning the word directly. I could envision many ways in which the word-count approach would leave a false impression.
It may be more accurate to look at topics and to compare them against each other to see their relative prominence. But, even this approach can have its distortions. It relies on indexes produced by people in a particular culture and historical period. That could introduce some bias in assigning topics to each verse, thereby skewing the whole thing – consciously or not. Overall, however, the comparisons here line up well with what you would conclude after reading it all for yourself (by far the best approach).
About that one in the middle…
It should be no surprise that the lines representing Jesus Christ would be the longest. If it had turned out any other way, I would have begun looking for errors in my data. What is surprising, however, is that the lines form a nicely proportioned cross. According to the topical indexes I chose, John focuses more on Jesus, Mark slightly less, and the others hit close to the average. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if this is a convenient coincidence or a divine design.
Due to space and readability limitations, only the highest-ranking topics (based on total verse count) made the list. Are you surprised to see any of them in the top 48? Which ones would you expect to be more prominent that aren’t shown on this chart? What stands out in terms of what different writers emphasize? Please leave your comments below – I’d love to hear some insights.
