Have you ever wondered what the parting of the Red Sea would have looked like from a satellite? Probably something like this:
An Australian group produced four fake aerial views of Bible events (Adam and Eve in Eden, Noah’s Ark on Ararat, Jesus’ crucifixion, and crossing the Red Sea) for the recent Miami art fair. The group is working on producing satellite images of other historical and mythological events.
Mark at Biblical Studies and Technological Tools has been preparing for his BibleTech08 talk on Biblical mapping by asking his readers for their thoughts on Bible maps. Here are my responses to some of his questions.
First, I can see Bible software moving in two directions as it relates to mapping:
Mapping has never been a strength of Bible software (with the possible exception of Accordance). But that’s not necessarily a problem.
Why should Bible software try to reproduce Google Earth’s features, with 3D terrain, zooming, rotating, layers, etc.? It’ll inevitably pale in comparison to Google Earth. In other words, no Bible software company is going to out-feature Google.
Rather, Bible software companies should build on existing software and innovate where they can.
Here’s what a Bible software company that wants to take this approach should do:
Maybe a Bible software company really wants to add a Google Earth-style application to their program (perhaps to make sure their data stays proprietary, which I can understand). How should they do it?
They should integrate World Wind, an open-source earth viewer developed by NASA. It comes in both .NET and Java flavors. The i-cubed layer has 15-meter full-color resolution for most of the earth, which is sufficient for most purposes. It can also use Microsoft’s Virtual Earth imagery.
I think you could create a lot of interesting maps and geographic applications if you were willing to customize the World Wind interface for Bible mapping and integrate this data deeply into your software.
The following image, for example, from a post about Herod the Great’s tomb, uses the i-cubed imagery in World Wind:
I’m only answering for myself here, but I tend to judge a map on its aesthetics—in other words, I prefer a nice-looking map even when it’s otherwise inferior to an ugly map. A lot of Bible maps on the web just aren’t very attractive.
If two maps are equally attractive, I’ll use the one that gives me more flexibility to accomplish what I want or to increase my understanding—enabling layers or places, for example.
Finally, I don’t find static 3D cutaways (like the above image of Herod the Great’s tomb) very useful—they’re cool to look at, but the distortion in perspective makes it hard to measure distances or see how places relate to each other. However, I do find it useful to pan down in Google Earth. So I like standard overhead views for static maps but prefer dynamic maps to give me maximum flexibility.
Judging from their search keywords on Google, people are looking for three main things when they come to OpenBible.info. Of course I don’t know what their ultimate aim is, but here are their immediate goals:
Here are some things I’d like to see in Bible maps in the future:
Thanks to Mark for his recent roundup of the latest goings-on at OpenBible.info and for his explanation of how to find all the mentions of a place in the Bible.
I hope Mark will make the slides from his BibleTech talk available online. I look forward to seeing what he has to say.
The Wall Street Journal yesterday had an article about 3D printers turning web creations into physical models (the link may or may not work for you). Here’s the paragraph that got my attention:
In Redmond, Wash., a start-up called 3D Outlook Corp. this month will begin using software from NASA to sell 3-D models of mountains and other terrain priced at under $100, says Tom Gaskins, the company’s chief executive officer. Mr. Gaskins says hikers, resorts and real-estate firms are likely customers for 3-D maps and models that show the topographic contours of ski slopes, golf courses and other landscapes.
So you could, in theory, take Google Earth satellite and elevation data, combine it with the Bible geocoding data, and produce a custom 3D physical model of the Holy Land with key places labeled—or you could focus on one area, like Jerusalem, and show how it changed over time.
Or you could take a 3D model of Herod’s Temple and turn it into a 3D “printout.”
Anything you can represent in three dimensions—for example, the Ark of the Covenant or an ancient synagogue—can become a 3D model. In the future, I imagine technically minded Bible students producing a 3D model of something in the Bible, backed by research, as a final project in a class.
Imagine a 3D recreation of Nineveh in the time of Jonah. Or a complete reconstruction of a partially uncovered artifact uncovered on an archaeological dig. Or a way to recreate a variety of pottery vessels based on location and period (to help archaeology students familiarize themselves with identifying pottery from sherds—maybe you could “print” several vessels, then break them, mix up the remains, and have to identify the location and period of several sherds; it sounds like an interesting exam to me). Or a way for museums to share exact replicas of items in their collections with universities, so students can examine the items more closely than they can the originals. And if you break one? Just print another copy.
Obviously the possibilities extend beyond the realm of biblical studies, but affordable 3D printing opens a lot of intriguing doors. Hopefully it’ll get cheaper and more widespread soon.
Browse 9,500 photos taken near 580 biblical locations. For example: Beersheba, Capernaum, and Ur.
More examples:
Aqueduct at Caesarea by hoyasmeg
Gates at Dan by callmetim
Rooftops at Babylon by labanex
Photo-sharing site Flickr has an API that lets you find photographs by latitude and longitude. The Bible Geocoding section of this site has lots of data arranged by latitude and longitude. Why not use the Flickr API to find photos that people have taken near places in the Bible?
The resulting photos are of varying quality for getting an idea of what a place looks like. Remember, people didn’t necessarily take these photos with the intent of giving you an overview of the landscape. The photos reflect personal interests—maybe someone saw an interesting flower that just happens to be near a biblical landmark. So don’t expect every photo to be relevant or every place to have lots of photos.
Every night, a program on this server queries the Flickr API to find any new photos taken near the biblical locations. Then it saves these photos to a database, indexed by location for easy retrieval.
The program treats copyrighted and Creative-Commons-licensed photos the same way— thumbnails are OK for copyrighted photos. In the future, I may feature CC-licensed photos more prominently. Only about 2,000 of the 9,500 photos are CC-licensed.
Right now, you can only get to the photos by browsing them by place. I hope to integrate the photos into the Bible atlas somehow.
I’d also like to let people vote on helpful or unhelpful photos to better prioritize the photos.
It may be possible to use Flickr tags to find non-geocoded photos of Bible places, but I’m not sure how to perform such a task automatically. I’m certainly open to suggestions.
I don’t own the photos; the photographers do. If you want to use a photo for something, click on it to go to its Flickr page. Then check its licensing terms. If it’s copyrighted, you need to secure permission from the photographer before you use it. If it has a Creative Commons license, you have more freedom to use the photos, depending on the terms of the license.
I recommend Todd Bolen’s BiblePlaces.com for professional-quality, affordable photos of places in the Holy Land, especially Israel. His photos give you lots of perspectives and work especially well for presentations. Compare Todd’s photos of Engedi to OpenBible’s photos of Engedi, for example, to see how his photos help connect you to the biblical narrative.
Somewhat related to the long zoom and new ways of viewing the Bible, here’s a 3D program for viewing relationships among documents:
This image comes from Xanadu.com (where there are more pictures). It shows transclusions, or (to oversimplify things) places where documents quote each other.
The Bible and biblical reference works do this kind of quoting and referencing all the time—for example, commentaries cite passages and external sources to support their interpretations. Current-generation Bible software makes it easy to work your way through different citations, but it’s hard to see the extended context of multiple citations at one time. A more visual interface might let you make connections you otherwise wouldn’t.
Via if:book.
Sean at Blogos (finally) reveals the topics of his presentations at the BibleTech08 conference.
One of his talks is about the “long zoom” (which, shockingly, lacks a Wikipedia entry) as it relates to studying the Bible. Over the past year, I’ve become convinced that the long zoom is a fundamental metaphor for how people deal with complexity (especially now, in the early 21st century) and that the Bible software company that successfully applies the long zoom to its products will redefine Bible study.
The long zoom refers to the idea of showing objects or data at different scales. Think of zooming in and out on Google Earth, for example—one second you see the whole earth, the next you’re looking at the nonexistent logo at the bottom of Google’s swimming pool. As Sean mentions, the film Powers of Ten (1977) was the first project to express the idea in an accessible way.
But the term “long zoom” comes (I think) from an article in the New York Times Magazine by Steven Johnson called The Long Zoom. The article is about the (still ongoing) development of the computer game Spore by Will Wright, who created SimCity. Jason Oke summarizes the article if you don’t want to read all 5,000 words of it. (I recommend reading the whole thing, however. It’s one of the most interesting articles I’ve read, though it probably helps to have enjoyed playing SimCity at some point in your life.)
Johnson writes:
“One of the things that’s obviously been happening for the past 100 or 200 years,” [musician Brian] Eno told me, “is that the range of our experience has greatly expanded: we can see much smaller things and much bigger things than we ever could before. But we can also start thinking about much longer futures and much deeper pasts as well. That really makes a big difference to us as humans, because on the one hand it makes us realize that we’re very powerful in that we’re able to comprehend and see all of this universe. But it also makes us seem so much less significant. We’re a tiny blip on a tiny radar screen. I think this is a feeling that people are trying to come to terms with, the feeling of where do we fit in all of this.”
And arguably the best way to come to terms with that feeling is to explore those different scales of experience directly, to move from the near-invisible realm of microbes to the vast distances of galaxies. Of all the forms of culture available to us today, games may well be the most effective at conveying that elusive perspective, precisely because they are so immersive and participatory and because their design can be so open-ended. “I wanted to make a game that would recreate a drug induced epiphany,” Wright told me. “I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it.”
(Wright is, of course, describing the effects of not just drug trips but also how great works of art—music, literature, visual arts, and now, apparently, video games—have always affected people: art catches people by surprise and gives them a glimpse of their humanity or perhaps even a longing for something more than is possible in our limited existence on earth. But I don’t need to get into a theology of art here.)
Both Eno and Wright frame their comments from a long-zoom perspective, a perspective that, as Eno notes, only recently became possible to visualize concretely. Any medium that allows interactivity or animation has the potential to express itself in long-zoom terms—in other words, film and computers are the ideal media to explore the long zoom.
In his summary of the article, Oke writes:
the long zoom helps us see how things at different scales, from the littlest things to the biggest, are interconnected…. This idea of seeing relationships across different scales is an immensely useful and important idea… But more specifically, what the long zoom visually demonstrates is what you could call the verticality of interconnectedness—not just connections between peers or similar things, but the connections between things at different scales, between the small and the huge. Scale can seem to impose its own limits— it’s easy to assume that small things should have small effects, big things should have big effects. But the long zoom helps us see that small things can have big effects.
Because seeing patterns across scales is so new, and only possible with technology, it presents novel ways of studying the Bible.
The main way I imagine long zoom working is textually—showing relationships at different levels: words, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, sections, books, the whole Bible, historical and contemporaneous literature, and future literature. In other words, it makes explicit the implicit context at each scope and between scopes, showing how parts relate to the whole and how seemingly independent ideas actually couldn’t exist without each other. (It sounds a lot like a semantic dataset, I know.) I don’t realistically think we can identify all the links between ideas at every level—we’re not omniscient—but we should be able to identify some of the important ones. I also think that as people and scholars become more adept at finding links at different scopes, as they think more explicitly in long-zoom terms, they’ll start to see entirely new patterns emerge.
I realize that paragraph is pretty abstract. Sorry.
Think of the Bible Word Locator as one component in a long-zoom system. It lets you see the distribution of multiple words at a time across the whole Bible. Adding scoping would let you zoom in to see occurrences at the book or verse level, for example, and zoom out to see occurrences across Bible translations, perhaps, or other ancient books, or other religions. Current Bible software lets you search this way to some extent, but it doesn’t let you do it with the fluidity of a long-zoom interface—an interface that allows you to see all these different levels and move between them with ease.
Another example of a tool that lets you work on multiple scales simultaneously is Carnegie Mellon’s Bungee View, designed for navigating the vast photo collections of the Library of Congress and similar institutions. It doesn’t explicitly use the zooming metaphor, but its motto is: “See the forest AND the trees,” which sums up well the whole long-zoom idea:
Of course, textual study is only one way to apply the long zoom to the Bible. Other organizing principles are time, space, people, God’s redemptive plan for humanity, the Ten Commandments, echoes of Christ throughout the Bible—you can see pretty much anything through a long-zoom filter, which is both good and bad.
It’s easy (for me, anyway) to become enamored with the sheer novelty of seeing Bible data in different ways and to press the long-zoom metaphor too far. If I say that the long zoom is the interpretive key to the whole Bible, I’m no better than numerologists who find the secret of life in the 153 fish in a fishing net. The long zoom is a new way of seeing data, one that fits the current state-of-the-art well, but there many other ways of looking at the data, too.
You need raw data to produce any kind of visualization (long-zoom or otherwise). Part of what I’m doing here at OpenBible is providing reusable data that people can use to create really cool things like long-zoom interfaces. Similarly, Sean is working on organizing Bible data for Logos to enable the “zoomable user interface” for them.
I hope that Sean is planning to publish the slides from his talk—it sounds like a fascinating new approach to studying the Bible, and I’m eager to see what he’s come up with.
OpenBible.info is now running on a shiny new (virtual private) server somewhere in Texas. Hopefully you won’t notice any changes apart from speed improvements. Just leave a comment on this post if anything breaks for you, and I’ll look into it.
Sorry if you’re getting duplicate posts in your feed reader. I upgraded WordPress to the latest version since the blog was moving servers anyway.
Tantek Çelik has thoughts on how microformats invert conventional approaches to problem-solving. (He invented the term “microformat,” so you can call him an expert on the subject.)
I want to talk about how the proposed bibleref microformat follows each of the assumptions Tantek lists.
“Solve small specific problems rather than big problems…. By focusing on those rather than the big hard problems we get more done, and we learn important lessons (and perhaps even create a few building blocks) that make solving the harder problems easier.” An example of a big problem is the one posed by Axel about book-chapter-verse references not being unique identifiers because of different versification schemes. To my knowledge, only Logos has solved this problem, and they need a 57-MB data backend to support it. (57 MB != small problem.) It’s great that Axel brought up this problem; it’s an excellent one to solve, but it’s beyond the scope of a microformat solution—at least for now.
“Research existing data publishing behaviors and data formats, and then base designs directly on that research, rather than inventing new technologies for new spaces.” Online Bible-citing practices have pretty strong conventions, at least when they involve links to web Bibles: in general, either the reference itself is a link, or a word or phrase is a link. Bibleref handles both cases well. (The proposed specification doesn’t work as well when the title attribute of the <a> tag holds the text of the verse, as it sometimes does. I can’t think of an elegant way to handle this case; Chris Roberts’ WordPress plugin adds an empty <cite> tag. Would it be better to wrap the <cite> tag around the <a> tag or pursue an alternate solution? Hard to say.)
“Re-use existing vocabularies where possible, rather than inventing your own vocabulary/language (in contrast to XML culture).” HTML has a built-in tag for handling citations (<cite>), and using the class and title attributes as bibleref does falls both within the letter and even the spirit of those attributes. In contrast, an alternative way of specifying a Bible references is to invent a new protocol (<a href="bibleref:John.3.15">…</a>). This approach immediately breaks all browsers on the planet, rendering the links useless to the people who want to read the passages.
“Provide a solution to marking up data in existing web pages, rather than asking publishers to create machine-only side files in a new format.” Ah, external files. Recommendations that you not create a separate, “accessible” site for your content have a pragmatic underpinning: the flashy, inaccessible site will get all the developers’ attention and updates, while the accessible site gets updated occasionally or never. Similarly, even if you want to keep a running tally of all your Bible references, you’ll still need to indicate their existence in your primary content. Either you’ve just doubled your work, or you’re already using some sort of microformat to allow automated parsing.
“Solutions accessible to millions of hypertext web authors are better than solutions just for programmers.” Or, put another way, a markup solution is better than a programming solution. Anyone who knows HTML can add bibleref markup to their pages; you don’t also need to know Javascript or PHP or Ruby or anything else.
The central theme behind these assumptions: Microformats aren’t (and don’t need to be) perfect; they’re good enough. If you didn’t have any real-world constraints, you might not take the microformat approach. But real-world constraints are why I think Sean’s bibleref proposal is so effective: it doesn’t solve everyone’s problems, but it solves one problem well.
The distributed (bottom-up) nature of microformats provides their strength but also points to their primary weakness: discoverability. How many people are using bibleref? I have no idea, and I can’t find a search engine that will tell me. (Technorati has a Microformats Search, but it looks like they only index a few known formats from microformats.org.)
A Google search for [class-bibleref] turns up discussions about the microformat, but not much actual usage. (And I know more people have used it than turn up in the search results.) I want a way to find and aggregate people who are using bibleref. Most of the value in the bibleref microformat (in my opinion) comes from seeing how others are citing the Bible. None of us is in the search-engine business, unfortunately (unless you are—in which case, how about making elements’ class attributes searchable?), yet we still need some way to unobtrusively find and catalog microformat occurrences. In other words, the presence of the microformat itself should suffice for a search index; it’s not realistic to ask people to add other tags to their page to work around search engines’ current limitations.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Or maybe Sean at Blogos has a grand plan that he’s going to unveil in January at the BibleTech08 conference.
Via ppk.
All the occurrences of the word said in the Bible. Note the narrative bands in Genesis, the Old Testament history books, and the gospels.
Occurrences of the words father and son. Clusters in Chronicles and a couple of places in the New Testament show where to find the genealogies.
Occurrences of the words Moses, David, and Jesus. It’s easy to tell where the main stories about each person are.
Part of the Similar Diversity work includes a visualization of the word you in various holy books. This visualization provided me the impetus to produce something more interactive for the Bible.
First, I counted the number of words in the ESV Bible (767,847, including headings but excluding footnotes, if you’re interested).
Next I assigned each word in the Bible a unique, incremented number. Then it was just a matter of going through the positions and grouping them by word. The result is a database table with two columns: word (varchar(18)) and positions (mediumtext). The positions column consists of a space-separated string of numbers.
When you enter a search query, the program finds the positions of words matching your query and then plots those positions on a chart. (The chart is 1/4 the size it would be if each word position got one pixel; it would have to be 1,083×709 pixels at a one-pixel-per-word ratio.)
The code is in PHP, using the GD library. I decided this project would be a good time to try out the SQLite database that comes with PHP instead of going with MySQL. I have no complaints, though Perl creates incompatible tables with current PHP versions (5.2.4) unless you use PDO in PHP to access the tables. It worked fine after a bit of Googling revealed the workaround.
Since the chart is 1/4 full-size, each pixel represents four words, and each dot occupies nine pixels. Given the coarse resolution, it’s best to use the locator to identify trends and then switch to the Bible text for further analysis.
It doesn’t do exact matches, only beginning-of-word matches. Only want to search for Eve, omitting results for evening? You’re out of luck.
It would be interesting to be able to click a dot and see the context of each occurrence.
Launching this tool gives me an excuse to launch the new Labs section of this site, which houses small, one-off experiments like this one and the Chapter Browser.
From Many Eyes (Java required), a word tree of “God said” from Genesis:
Many Eyes is a data-visualization site. They just introduced a word-tree visualization, which takes a body of text and lets you find phrases surrounding a word. One of the creators of the site uploaded this data set for Genesis (KJV). Create your own visualizations (like the one above) from this data at the site.
An interesting addition would be to let you enter more than one node. For example, entering “God” and “Abraham” would show you all the different words and phrases that connect those two words.
Unless otherwise indicated, all content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Contact me: openbibleinfo (at) gmail.com.