Daniel Taylor's interactive visualization of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible
Criticism of God’s word is nothing new. It was there in the beginning (Gen 3:1) and it lives on today. The ideas are always the same, just repackaged and recopied from someone else. Sometimes the tactic is simple mockery – taking a beautiful work created by someone else and flipping it onto its unbiblical head. It requires some dedication but little imagination. Case-in-point: the most popular visualization of “contradictions” from Project Reason is not much more than a re-hash of Chris Harrison’s original award-winning visualization of cross references.
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.
Today, the shortlist for the Information is Beautiful Awards was announced – and one of my graphics made the list! This is the first-ever open contest to find the best information visualizations around the world. I am quite honored to be among the top 25 finalists in the data visualization category with my entry “A Visual Harmony of the Gospels” (further explanation here). This and “Mapping God’s Bloodline” made the long list. I was surprised to see the less popular one advance to the next round. Winners in each category will be announced at the end of September. One special category is the Community Award which will be open for voting until September 24th (click here to vote). So, this post is to explain more of my perspective on these awards and why you should vote for my entry (and tell your friends, too!).
Data visualization, broadly defined, is an attempt to make complex sets of facts more understandable though the use of visual design elements. As the amount of data we create each year continues to rise, so does the popularity of its illustrations. The likely places to find such graphics are in scientific studies, journalism, political propaganda, and special interest blogs. However, it is unlikely to find much in religious pursuits. For this reason, few of the websites which curate the best visualizations have a “Religion” category (my work always ends up in the “Lifestyle” section).
I’m attempting to change that.
The Bible is more than just a story book or a manual for morality. It is a record of history that spans thousands of years, mentioning over 3,000 people and 1,200 places using 790,685 words to document the details. Scholars have catalogued 400,000 cross-references and grouped passages into 125,000 topics. How are all these things connected? Which ones are mentioned most often (or least often)? What can this tell me about God’s design of history? Data visualization offers another way to answer these questions by piecing together the massive volume of information and condensing it to visually comprehensible designs.
These awards offer an opportunity to display a different approach that uses modern techniques to portray timeless truths. It is another chance to bring Christianity to the worldwide marketplace of ideas. While I’m confident that God’s truth will ultimately prevail, I know I am an imperfect ambassador of the knowledge he has given us. That, and we live in a sinful world where truth is not clearly seen. So, I need God’s help and I need your help. Please pray for my ongoing efforts and particularly for this award. Share this post with others and ask them to take a moment to vote for “A Visual Harmony of the Gospels.”
Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, there is a monetary component to the award. The Community Award winner will get $1,000. Other award categories range from $250 to $5,000. If I do win in one or more categories, the proceeds will likely go toward furthering my efforts in this area.
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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.
What makes this visualization much more interesting than previous graphics is the way each grid cell is colored. Red is a link from a New Testament book, blue for the Old Testament, green for major divisions of the Bible, gray indicates a cross-reference from a verse in one chapter to another verse in the same chapter, and purple indicates references between chapters in the same book.
As soon as you start getting “interactive” with it, you discover how the color intensity is produced, forming the heat map effect in the grid above. For instance, if you choose to show references from John to Isaiah, you see details of how the passages in those books connect to one another. More lines between them result in more color displayed in the larger grid.
Cross References between John and Isaiah
Such an interactive visualization makes it far simpler to navigate and understand Torrey’s massive dataset. Even if you are not especially interested in exploring these details, everyone should be able to appreciate the message that this and earlier cross-reference visualizations share in common: that the words given to us by God are deeply woven together throughout all the times and cultures in which they were transcribed.
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. Its 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.
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.
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. 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!
I happened to come across a project today that maps the links between various Wikipedia articles to help understand the categories and topics that users find to be related. Normally I wouldn’t share such a project on this blog, but since they used the Tower of Babel as an example, I thought it would be fitting. The project is from Sepans, called Mapped Wiki, and you can see their results below:
Follow the genealogy of Jesus from the creation of Adam and Eve through Noah, the tribes of Israel, King David, and finally Joseph and Mary. Zoom out for a broader perspective or zoom in to examine finer details.
With the recent uprising in Egypt, I thought it would be worthwhile to get a little historical context. What better place to go than the Bible? Take a look at this interactive map to see all the places in modern-day Egypt that are mentioned in the Bible.
There are numerous claims about the readability of various English Bible translations. The chart below is the result of my own calculations using the standard Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula. Many other readability calculations do not specify whether sentence lengths are based on punctuation or verse divisions. This tool allows you to see it either way. In some sections, the results are wildly different.
This tool also makes it easy to find readability levels for each author, book and chapter (on the advanced tab), unlike the more general readability comparisons you may have seen already. Due to copyright restrictions, it is difficult to obtain electronic versions of the entire text of translations other than the KJV, so at the moment we do not have a simple tool available for comparing readability accross different versions.
A lot of bloggers are using word clouds for various features now, mainly to make common post tags stand out. I happen to think it’s a fad. Like Microsoft’s WordArt, it can do some nifty things but doesn’t really rise to the level of artwork that would be required for a valuable design aesthetic.
That said, it can be fun to play around with these ideas to see just how far you can go or perhaps lead to a better idea later. In that spirit, I present to you my word cloud made using Wordle and the text of the KJV (with words like thee, thou, ye, etc. removed).
The Christian scriptures are interconnected in deep and meaningful ways which can sometimes be hard to discover. Scholars have compiled hundreds of thousands of cross-references over time, and modern computer whizzes have charted these references in beautiful and engaging displays. I have taken a new approach, which you can see below. It displays three measures: the number of verses in each chapter, the number of cross references in each chapter, and the ratio between the two.
In a moment I will share a few examples of the insights this visualization affords, but first I’ll explain how I arrived at the idea for making this particular interactive tool. I began working several months ago to compile available data into what I call MetaV. The eventual goal is to link descriptive information to every word in the Bible and to help users interact with it in such a way that they can see the “big picture” of any passage, including people, places, things, and even cross-references. Naturally, this led me to google “bible cross reference data.” Hit #1: Chris Harrison’s visual showing over 63,000 references with colors indicating the canonical distance between the chapters and bars showing the length of each chapter.
Immediately, I was hooked on it. I’ll confess: it still graces the background of my computer desktop. The reason I was so mesmerized is that he has packed a lot of information into a display that is simple at first glance then grows more complex and informative as you zoom in. It conveys the fact that the Bible is an interconnected whole. The density in some areas gives a general sense of which books may be interesting to us because they were meaningful enough for many other books to refer to it. And that nice, long, thin line towards the middle representing Psalm 119 just begs for attention while happily providing an axis of symmetry. It is art that fulfills it designer’s stated goal:
…we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honored and revealed the complexity of the data at every level –- as one leans in, smaller details should become visible.
Mr. Harrison was kind enough to get me in touch with his collaborator, Christoph, who in turn provided the data behind the graphic (which had been updated to include over 80,000 records). Yet, I was also aware that this many cross references might not be enough for me. Further searching brought me to two more visualizations of a much larger data set – over 340,000 cross references. The first is from OpenBible.info, the same site which is the source for my Bible Places explorer. The second is found on the ESV Blog. Both of these are interesting in their complexity and verse-level detail, which adds a degree of information not contained in Chris Harrison’s work. However, they both have a lot of redundancy – one could easily cut the visuals in half and get just as much information.
All of these are more useful in terms of artwork than for visual analysis and in-depth exploration. My expertise is in crunching numbers, not so much in making beautiful displays of them. I wanted to modify the idea of graphing hundreds of thousands of pieces of information in a way that makes certain aspects of it stand out. Just to make it a challenge, I combined the two data sets I found into one massive table containing 412,100 references once I filtered out duplicate records. The outliers you see above are chapters of the Bible which stand out here but would be lost in the haystack within the visualizations I’ve mentioned. While mine is nothing more than an interactive version of common graphical displays, it makes it easy for our eyes and minds to identify interesting points.
Right away, you can see that Psalm 119 lies lonely at the top-right because it is by far the longest chapter of the Bible and consequently has the most cross-references related to it. The orange circles stand in contrast because they have proportionately fewer cross references than other chapters. We might expect those to be the ones which are nothing more than long, detailed genealogical records. Two of the noticeable outliers fits that expectation (1 Chronicles 7&8) , but the others do not.
1 Chronicles 3, the brightest orange circle, is the chapter which details the construction of Solomon’s Temple. Exodus 36&37, two other orange marks, give specifics about making the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant. The dimensions and construction materials of these things are rife with metaphors. Perhaps their symbolism is linked to other portions of scripture in ways we do not yet know an have not catalogued, or maybe they should continue to stand alone due to their uniqueness. On the other end of the spectrum, Romans 12 has more cross references for each verse than any other chapter. When you read it, you’ll understand why. On average, every single verse has more then one reference associated with it. In all, 77 chapters of the Bible fir in that same category.
These are just some of the things that can lead a student of the Lord to discover more about him. We can search out the things we may normally pass over but which stand out in an analysis such as this. What can you find by searching through, selecting, and zooming in on these plots? What might you learn that you would otherwise overlook? Please leave a comment if you happen upon something interesting or the Lord blesses you in some way as a result of your studying these visuals.
