Some time ago, the ESV Bible Blog pointed to the website of Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, who had incorporated the data given to him by Christoph Römhild, a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, Germany, into a complex visualization. The "data" was a list of 63,779 cross-references between the Bible's 1,189 chapters, and the image above was the result.
Harrison explains some of the details at his site:
The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.
Pretty nifty, eh? Click on the picture above, or here for an even larger version. Note how Psalm 119, the single longest chapter in the Bible, stands almost like a fulcrum in the middle of the bottom line. Look for other interesting details, like the "fountain" that comes out of Hebrews 11 back to the Old Testament.
Most importantly, this entire visual illustrates the real unity of the Bible, as the end is connected to the beginning, and the new is built upon the old. The National Science Foundation, in giving Harrison an "Honorable Mention" in its 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, quoted him as saying, "It almost looks like one monolithic volume." I'd say so.
No comments:
Post a Comment