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Archive for the ‘Visualizations’ Category

Visualization: Genesis Word Trees

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

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.

Visualization: Character Relationships across Religions

Friday, August 31st, 2007

From SimilarDiversity.net:

A list of characters (‘Lord,’ ‘God’, and ‘You,’ are the most prominent) runs along the bottom, with arcs connecting them.

This visualization, by Philipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller, comes from the textual analysis of different religions’ holy books (red = Hinduism, yellow = Buddhism, green = Islam, blue = Judaism, purple = Christianity). Below each character is a list of verbs associated with him or her in each religion.

Their intent is (presumably) to show the commonalities among the different religions; I’m more interested in the technique behind the visualization itself. You could, for example, apply the technique to just the Bible and end up with a similar visualization. You could even do a similar color-coding, except with the Old and New Testaments.

Via Infosthetics, which has a few more examples of biblical visualizations in the comments. Tim Regan of Microsoft notes, “The whole area of abstract visualizations of books seems to be growing, and the bible seems to be a good testbed for these projects.”