It doesn’t take long to think of a Biblical example of an intractable negotiation between leaders of nations. Anyone could pick out the clash between Moses and Pharaoh as a prime illustration. Our repeated showdowns over the debt ceiling draw strong parallels which can lead us to wisdom and away from foolish political theater. Unfortunately, not many come to the invective war in internet comment sections armed with real facts. So let’s start there, shall we?
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.
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 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.