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New Feature: Bible Translation Googleshare

November 30th, 2008

New from the OpenBible Labs: a chart that tracks the popularity of English Bible translations (click for a larger version):

Google generates this chart.

The goal is to see how well this kind of data tracks official marketshare figures. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any publicly available marketshare figures. (If anyone knows of any, feel free to leave a link in the comments.) In principle, this chart should provide a leading indicator of sales—if you accept the idea that mindshare precedes sales.

The result more-or-less tracks the CBA Bible Bestseller List (pdf), with a couple of exceptions. The chart appears to undercount the NKJV and the HCSB, which means that either (1) there’s a data problem—for example, some NKJV results may appear as part of the KJV data; or (2) these translations’ sales in CBA bookstores overstate their prominence as translations—in other words, they sell well in CBA bookstores, but people tend not to search for them much in Google. I lean toward the first answer: it’s likely that my methodology is flawed somehow.

Technical Background

The chart blends data from Google Trends and the Google Keyword Tool to see how many searches people conduct for various English Bible translations. Data before July 2008 is from Google Trends exclusively, while more recent months include data using the methodology described in Bible Translation Mindshare.

Originally, I wanted to use only this latter methodology. However, the data is chaotic; the figures jump around quite a bit, and the Google Keyword Tool sometimes gives inconsistent results even for the same search in the same month. For this reason, I decided to smooth the data a bit with Google Trends, which provides more consistent data from month to month.

Finally, I should mention that I have lots of potential conflicts of interest in producing this data.

Posted in Collective Intelligence | Comments Off on New Feature: Bible Translation Googleshare

Google Static Maps API

September 11th, 2008

Google just updated their Static Maps API to include satellite imagery, and the atlas now uses this API to display thumbnail maps.

The atlas previously used pregenerated images that looked like this:

A custom satellite map of Jerusalem shows about two degrees of latitude and longitude as context. Jerusalem appears near the top of the map.

Now the image for Jerusalem looks like this:

A Google Map of Jerusalem also shows two degrees of latitude and two degrees of longitude, but Jerusalem appears centered in the map.

The Google Static Maps API is a way to get all the nice imagery of Google Maps without incurring the interactive overhead. It’s useful in situations where, like an atlas, you just want to show a static image. Until yesterday, you could only get street maps in the Static Maps API.

This change benefits you—you always see up-to-date imagery—and it’s easier for me, since I don’t need to regenerate images if the locations change.

Posted in Geo | 1 Comment »

Bible Translation Mindshare in Google

July 12th, 2008

Google recently updated its AdWords Keyword Tool, showing you, for the first time, the approximate number of searches for a keyword in a given month.

I thought I’d see how many people search for various Bible translations. The results:

See below results.

Version Queries Percent
KJV 591,684 42.0%
NIV 436,000 30.9%
NLT 159,100 11.3%
NKJV 87,880 6.2%
NASB 54,540 3.9%
ESV 34,569 2.5%
MSG 30,900 2.2%
TNIV 10,500 0.7%
HCSB 4,425 0.3%

Translations

The translations come from the CBA Bible Translation Bestseller List. (CBA is the Christian Booksellers Association, a Christian-retailing industry group.) This list counts Bible sales through most Christian bookstores in the US. However, it’s an imperfect measure of a translation’s popularity since sales through non-CBA stores are becoming more important to Bible publishers.

The imperfection of the CBA list (and the desire to quantify its rankings) was the inspiration for this (also-imperfect) project.

Methodology

Bible version abbreviations that also have other meanings were a little tricky. “HCSB” is also the name of a bank and a school board in Florida. “ESV” is also a Cadillac and the stock symbol for an oil-drilling company. To compensate for these other uses, I took the top three non-Bible keyword phrases and compared the numbers for the top-three Bible related keyword phrases.

For example, there were 90,500 searches for “esv” in June. The keywords “escalade esv,” “cadillac esv,” and “cadillac escalade esv” had 57,300 searches, while “esv bible,” “esv online,” and “esv study bible” had 13,300 searches. Multiplying 90,500 by 19% (the proportion of the top three Bible-related searches to the top three non-Bible-related searches) leads to the conclusion that about 17,049 of those 90,500 searches for “esv” were Bible-related. It’s definitely an approximation, but the alternative was to count acronym-only searches for some translations and not for others.

Besides the ESV and HCSB, other Bible-translation acronyms have a few other meanings, but they don’t suffer from nearly the level of acronym confusion as those two translations. The HCSB also goes by the name “CSB,” which makes things even harder. Nothing Bible-related showed up when I entered CSB into the keyword tool, so I didn’t count it.

A similar problem occurs for the phrase “king james”—with 301,000 searches in June, it was the single most-popular translation-related query. But are the searches for the Bible translation or for, say, King James I of England? Based on the popularity of the related keywords, it looks like 97% of “king james” searches are for the Bible. This query puts the KJV well ahead of the NIV in popularity.

The Message also probably suffers from undercounting, since it’s impossible to know how many people searching for “message” are looking for the Bible (not too many, based on the Keyword Tool’s data—but definitely some).

Here are the words and phrases I started with. I included other clearly relevant synonyms in the total.

  • christian standard bible
  • english standard version
  • esv bible
  • esv bibles
  • esv translation
  • hcsb bible
  • hcsb bibles
  • hcsb translation
  • kjv
  • kjv bible
  • kjv bibles
  • kjv translation
  • message bible
  • message bibles
  • message translation
  • msg bible
  • msg bibles
  • nasb
  • nasb bible
  • nasb bibles
  • nasb translation
  • new american standard
  • new international version
  • new king james
  • new living translation
  • niv
  • niv bible
  • niv bibles
  • niv translation
  • nkjv
  • nkjv bible
  • nkjv bibles
  • nkjv translation
  • nlt
  • nlt bible
  • nlt bibles
  • nlt translation
  • tniv
  • tniv bible
  • tniv bibles
  • tniv translation

Posted in Collective Intelligence | 2 Comments »

Practical Biblical Collective Intelligence

May 20th, 2008

Sean at Blogos recently wrote about applying collective intelligence to biblical studies. His post leads me to write about an experiment I’ve been running even though the experiment isn’t quite fully baked yet.

Collective intelligence (sometimes called “the wisdom of crowds”) is something that I think will become more important in biblical studies as it becomes more important in other disciplines. The vast scope of the Internet makes possible explorations of questions that have been impractical until now.

So, what’s a practical application of collective intelligence to biblical studies? Paragraph and section identification to help people study the Bible.

I paid 40 people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk two cents each to add paragraphs to the book of Philemon in both the ESV and NLT translations. Total cost (including commission): $1.00.

Results

The thickness of the bar in the below table indicates how many people would start a paragraph at the given sentence. The ¶ symbols (not sent to the Turkers) indicate where the Bible translators themselves started paragraphs.

The table shows similarities between the two translations (except for some variation near the beginning) and also reveals some divergence with the translators’ paragraph ideas.

(If you’re reading this post in a feed reader, the below table won’t make much sense to you. You should click through to the original post if you want to see the styles.)

Philemon (ESV) Philemon (NLT)
¶ Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, ¶ This letter is from Paul, a prisoner for preaching the Good News about Christ Jesus, and from our brother Timothy.
¶ To Philemon our beloved fellow worker and Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church in your house: ¶ I am writing to Philemon, our beloved co-worker, and to our sister Apphia, and to our fellow soldier Archippus, and to the church that meets in your house.
¶ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. ¶ May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.
¶ I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. ¶ I always thank my God when I pray for you, Philemon, because I keep hearing about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all of God’s people.
And I am praying that you will put into action the generosity that comes from your faith as you understand and experience all the good things we have in Christ.
For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love…, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you. Your love has given me much joy and comfort…, for your kindness has often refreshed the hearts of God’s people.
¶ Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you—I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus—I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment. ¶ That is why I am boldly asking a favor of you.
I could demand it in the name of Christ because it is the right thing for you to do.
But because of our love, I prefer simply to ask you.
Consider this as a request from me—Paul, an old man and now also a prisoner for the sake of Christ Jesus.
¶ I appeal to you to show kindness to my child, Onesimus.
I became his father in the faith while here in prison.
(Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.) Onesimus hasn’t been of much use to you in the past, but now he is very useful to both of us.
I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. I am sending him back to you, and with him comes my own heart.
I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel, but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own accord. ¶ I wanted to keep him here with me while I am in these chains for preaching the Good News, and he would have helped me on your behalf.
But I didn’t want to do anything without your consent.
I wanted you to help because you were willing, not because you were forced.
For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. It seems you lost Onesimus for a little while so that you could have him back forever.
He is no longer like a slave to you.
He is more than a slave, for he is a beloved brother, especially to me.
Now he will mean much more to you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord.
¶ So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. ¶ So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me.
If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge it to me.
I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it—to say nothing of your owing me even your own self. I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it.
And I won’t mention that you owe me your very soul!
Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord. ¶ Yes, my brother, please do me this favor for the Lord’s sake.
Refresh my heart in Christ. Give me this encouragement in Christ.
¶ Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say. ¶ I am confident as I write this letter that you will do what I ask and even more!
At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you. One more thing—please prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that God will answer your prayers and let me return to you soon.
¶ Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers. ¶ Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends you his greetings.
So do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my co-workers.
¶ The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. ¶ May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Let’s take this approach one step further, asking people to group the paragraphs into sections (pericopes), titling those sections, and then having other people vote on which section titles are best. Unfortunately, this part of the experiment is still in-process, so I don’t have anything interesting to show you.

Practical Implications for Bible Software

Purveyors of Bible software are in a unique position to benefit from this kind of collective intelligence. Although they don’t have the massive volume of users found on the Internet, they data they compile from Bible software users will be of higher quality than data compiled from the Internet. (For one, Bible software users probably aren’t out to attack Christianity, unlike a good number of people on the Internet.)

Further, Bible software publishers can create tools to implicitly shape collective intelligence to their users’ benefit. For example, they could create a tool that allows people to add their own paragraphs and sections to Bible texts. This tool could let you share this data you create anonymously with other users of the software. The goal isn’t to create the “one true paragraph and section divisions” for a passage, but merely to inform people of the choices others have made, indicating (if someone desires) how other people organize biblical texts.

Similarly, Bible software could help people anonymously share outlines of Bible books. I think you could also rank relevant resources (commentaries, say) for certain passages based on the resources people consult after reading those passages and the length of time they spend looking at the resources.

The idea behind this kind of collective intelligence is to collect implicit data—data based on things people are already doing—to improve the software. The more people who use the software, the better it becomes. You could try to come up with a slick algorithm to predict, say, the most relevant resources for a passage. But the beauty of a collective-intelligence approach is that the abundance of data means that even a simple ranking algorithm produces good results. Or, as Anand Rajaraman puts it, “more data usually beats better algorithms.”

I’m excited about applying collective intelligence to biblical studies. Implicit-data aggregation provides the most promising short-term possibilities, since a lot of data regarding user behavior in Bible software already exists. Pragmatically, I think Bible software publishers can get a lot of mileage just by analyzing this data and allowing it to inform their interface in limited ways.

But explicit collective-intelligence projects, such as the parable finder that Sean discusses in his post, could bear fruit in the long run. The key is to get lots of data—even noisy data will do—that can serve as the basis for analysis.

Posted in Collective Intelligence | 1 Comment »

New Feature: Bible Sentence Paths

April 22nd, 2008

Try Bible Sentence Paths. This project maps all the words and sentences in the Bible and even sprinkles in some metadata.

Here’s what the Bible looks like when mapped in this way:
Try Sentence Paths

Background

Here’s the idea:

  1. Start facing right with the first sentence in the Bible.
  2. Count the number of words in the sentence.
  3. Get metadata for each word—is it part of a quotation? Is it a proper name?
  4. Draw a line in the current direction, one pixel per word. Color-code each pixel based on the metadata.
  5. Turn 90 degrees clockwise—if you’re facing right, face down. If you’re facing down, face left. (Etc.)
  6. Move to the next sentence.
  7. Repeat steps 2-6 until you reach the end of the Bible.

You end up with a “map” showing sentence length and metadata.

Here’s a detailed image of Job showing speeches by God sandwiching speeches by Job and others. Speeches by God are in red; everyone else’s speeches are in blue. The book starts in the lower left and ends in the upper right.

Limitations

Being able to zoom in and see the color-coded words would be a huge improvement and make this visualization more useful. I’d like to be able to hover over a specific line and read the color-coded Bible text.

Being able to browse and search the text (“Show me John 3:16”), highlighting just the relevant sections, would also be an improvement.

The drawing has lots of overlap, making it hard to draw conclusions. It’s pretty, but not too useful.

The drawing uses the ESV text as the base, since that’s what I have available; other Bible versions would probably show different patterns. It would be interesting to compare Bible versions.

Inspiration

Stefanie Posavec recently created a number of visualizations of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, one of which inspired this project. Stefanie color-coded each sentence from the book and mapped them out a formula similar to the one I used. Needless to say, Stefanie’s visualizations are much more impressive than mine.

Posted in Labs | 3 Comments »

Yahoo!, Bibleref, and RDFa

March 15th, 2008

Yahoo! last week announced that it’s going to start indexing semantic data, including support for certain microformats.

Bibleref isn’t one of those microformats. Should Bibleref proponents lobby Yahoo! to index Bibleref, or should Bibleref change its syntax to be compatible with RDFa or another semantic web standard?

Background

Earlier, Sim.plified.com noted a Yahoo! semantic-web announcement and mused about the possibility of using the Yahoo! engine for Bibleref.

Then David Peterson, author of a Sitepoint article about the earlier Yahoo! announcement, wrote a comment that encapsulates the chicken/egg problem inherent in getting a new microformat off the ground:

Currently the search engine only indexes 3 microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview). So if you started indexing your hBible [i.e., Bibleref] it wouldn’t pick it up.

The problem with microformats is that each time a new one is created the search indexer needs to develop a custom extractor to make sense of your microformat. That is why Yahoo microsearch is only indexing 3 of the most popular format.

So what should Bibleref’s proponents do? It’s possible we could convince Yahoo! to index Bibleref, giving it the traction it needs to take off. However, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Yahoo! to do a good job understanding the data, in part because of the looseness of the standard (which I see as a good thing). And if Yahoo! doesn’t understand it well, then search results based on Bibleref won’t be very high quality. But a lot depends on how Yahoo! exposes the data. (And they may not even want to index Bibleref.)

RDFa

Another possibility is to change Bibleref to be compatible with RDFa, an emerging standard that Yahoo! does understand. The RDFa syntax fits Bibleref well:

  1. <a property="br:ref" href="#">John 3:16-17</a>
  2. <span property="br:ref" content="John 3:16-17">God loves us</span>

Compare to standard Bibleref markup:

  1. <a class="bibleref" href="#">John 3:16-17</a>
  2. <cite class="bibleref" title="John 3:16-17">God loves us</cite>

As you can see, the markup is similar. However, it still has some problems: neither example provides an unambiguous machine-readable representation that would allow an unspecialized search engine like Yahoo! to extract meaning.

I’m not entirely sure whether that’s a problem in either the current or RDFa flavors of Bibleref. Yahoo! plans to release tools to let developers build on semantic search data, so Yahoo!’s inability to understand something may not necessarily matter. (Without enforcing a formal representation, such as an OSIS identifier, one Bible passage can have any number of representations—the “John 3:16” vs. “Jn 3.16” problem.) It’s too early to tell.

The second example, with an explicit content attribute, can provide a formal, machine-readable representation of a Bible reference (like an OSIS identifier). But providing one is a lot more work for software that lets people write documents using Bibleref—it needs to understand references and create such identifiers. But would retaining the looseness of the current Bibleref standard defeat the purpose of using RDF, which thrives on strict interoperability?

Again, I don’t know. A lot depends on the tools and API that Yahoo! is making available.

But the central question is whether Bibleref syntax should move to be compatible with RDFa. The advantage is automatic pickup by new semantic search engines. The disadvantages are the syntax change and increased complexity (including DOCTYPE and namespace changes that I haven’t discussed here). It may be too early to tell.

Posted in Microformats | 4 Comments »

New Feature: Bible Verse Photo Composites

February 4th, 2008

Try Bible Verse Photo Composites. Move your mouse over the image to see a photo composite for a particular verse, and click to see composites for the words in that verse.

An example:
Genesis 1:1 shows images over the words “beginning,” “God,” “created,” “heavens,” and “earth.”

Here’s the idea: Use the Flickr API to find photos matching each of the words in the Bible. Then download the photos for each word and layer them on top of each other to produce a composite image for word. Once you do that, layer the important words from each verse on top of each other to produce a composite image for each verse.

Then put all the verses together in sequence to create the orangeish image you see above. About 300,000 images comprising 13,000 words make up the image. Each verse occupies about six pixels.

Technical Background

For layering the photos, I wanted the brightest (most-saturated) colors possible; I used a simple formula. It finds the difference between the brightest and darkest channels in a particular pixel. The brighter colors will tend have bigger differences.

function weight_pixel($pixel)
{
$rgb = array(( $pixel >> 16 ) & 0xFF, ( $pixel >> 8 ) & 0xFF, $pixel & 0xFF);
sort($rgb, SORT_NUMERIC);
return $rgb[2] - $rgb[0];
}

This formula differs from the usual conversion formula from RGB to HSL. I didn’t like the results of the RGB-HSL formula as much; the images were slightly darker.

Then I placed the darkest pixels on the bottom layer of the composite image, layering brighter (but about 50% transparent) pixels on top. The results for each word resemble abstract art:

11 (11) begrudge (begrudge) liquid (liquid) sharp (sharp) waterfalls (waterfalls)

I did a similar procedure to produce verse composites, layering the important words from each verse on top of each other. The results are generally less spectacular (in my opinion) than the word composites, as many of the verses look like each other. I’d like to explore other compositing algorithms to try to differentiate the verses more. (Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions for an algorithm!)

Gen 1:2 (Gen 1:2) Josh 3:10 (Josh 3:10) Matt 5:4 (Matt 5:4)

The hardest part was the waiting. It took a long time to download the 300,000 images, and nearly as long to process them all. Plus, it takes a while to upload half a gigabyte of data after processing the images.

The verses composites omit images for about 200 common words (as listed in the Crossway Comprehensive Concordance of the ESV). I didn’t want common words to overwhelm the important ones.

From a coding standpoint, this project let me try out the jQuery Javascript library, which I’ve been wanting to do for some time.

Future Directions

Well, the result is awfully orange. As I said above, I would’ve liked to see some more differentiation. (I tried a few different formulas but didn’t come up with anything that works much better.) You can see some bands that are more orange than others, but I’m not sure how significant they are.

It would be interesting to try to calculate cross-references based on the similarity of the verse composites—are verses that look alike actually similar?

Any work of literature would lend itself to this kind of project. Project Gutenberg has lots of public-domain e-texts available. It would be interesting to compare the composite footprint of, say, Moby Dick to the Bible’s.

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project comes from the 80 Million Tiny Images project by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus, and William T. Freeman at MIT. They created a map of nouns in the English language by downloading images from search engines, combining the images, and then arranging them into a graphic based on the words’ semantic distance from each other. Fascinating stuff. Via ReadWriteWeb.

Posted in Labs, Visualizations | 4 Comments »

Google Timeline View of Biblical Events

January 29th, 2008

Google just introduced an experimental view of search results that identifies dates embedded in webpages and shows you a timeline of when these pages say the relevant events occurred.

Below are searches for a few events in the Bible. Obviously the timelines reflect divergent opinions on when the events occurred.

Jesus’ Birth

See the results for Jesus’ birth on Google.
The current consensus seems to be sometime in 2 B.C.

Jesus’ Crucifixion

See the results for Jesus’ crucifixion on Google.
The year A.D. 30 is the clear leader here. Notice how most of the bars in the first few months of the year, which you’d expect if the Crucifixion coincided with Passover.

The Exodus

See the results for the Exodus on Google.
Here you see the two main datings of the Exodus: the 15th century and the 13th century B.C.

Via Searchblog.

Update February 2016: At some point, Google discontinued this offering, so the above links to Google no longer work.

Posted in Visualizations | 1 Comment »

“Satellite Images” of Bible Events

December 17th, 2007

Have you ever wondered what the parting of the Red Sea would have looked like from a satellite? Probably something like this:

A fake aerial view of Moses and the Israelites walking through the Red Sea.

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.

Posted in Geo | 1 Comment »

Digital Resources for Bible Mapping

December 16th, 2007

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:

Outsource It: Mapping in Bible Software, Approach #1

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:

  1. License or commission attractive maps that allow minimal interactivity. I imagine that a lot of people simply want a map to print or to use in a class. Google Earth doesn’t support this task well.
  2. Identify place names in Bibles and reference works in their software and link these places to geocoded data. People will be able to see quickly where a location is without disrupting their immediate tasks. This kind of deep integration among resources is invaluable.
  3. Allow the export of this data into KML or other open formats so people who want a particular view can use Google Earth (or a similar program) to create it. They can then share these views with others.
  4. Release geocoding data under a Creative Commons license to allow people to reuse it. A lot of biblical regions don’t have any boundary data available on the web at the moment, for example, and it’s better to have people who know what they’re doing draw these boundaries instead of random people with lots of free time. (This last step may not be appropriate for every company.)

Integrate It: Mapping in Bible Software, Approach #2

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:

View of Herodium showing the Dead Sea, Jericho, the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, Mount Hermon, and Jerusalem.

What Makes Maps Useful?

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.

How People Use the Maps Here

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:

  1. An overview of Bible geography.
  2. The location of a specific place that they probably encountered in their Bible reading.
  3. Integration of Bible places and Google Earth or Google Maps.

Map Features

Here are some things I’d like to see in Bible maps in the future:

  • Social integration. I don’t really know what it would involve, but a lot of mapping sites are moving to allow collaboration and sharing of maps created by users. I can imagine a lot of potential here to eliminate duplication of effort—how many people have had to create new maps just because the particular one they wanted didn’t exist? By sharing maps, the likelihood increases that someone has already created the map you want.
  • Reference material about each place. If I taught a graduate or undergraduate class on Bible geography, I’d have each student write a brief summary of several places in the Bible and then release these summaries under a Creative Commons license. Then I’d integrate them into the KML files available on this site, perhaps with some links to Wikipedia or other resources for more information. In other words, I’d like to see the KML files on OpenBible contain some up-to-date scholarship on each place, so people learn more than just a place’s coordinates when they come here. It’s similar to what BibleMap.org does by including articles from the ISBE (a public-domain Bible encyclopedia). Unfortunately, all the public-domain resources show their age in terms of language and scholarship. At the very least, I’d like to link Bible places that have Wikipedia entries to their corresponding articles.
  • City maps. I’d like to see city plans from various time periods. I find such maps helpful because satellite imagery can’t help you reconstruct the plans. Even better would be to geolocate the maps, so you can browse them in Google Earth and see their relation to modern cities. BibleMaps.com has about twenty biblical city maps available to buy. I’d like to see city maps implemented purely in KML as polygons, paths, and points. I’ve created a simple version of Nineveh in KML as a proof-of-concept.
  • Photos. I’ve worked on aggregating some photos of Bible places, but the potential exists for a lot more. HolyLandPhotos.org has a nice, free virtual tour of selected sites (Beersheba, for example). I’d like to see this kind of approach on a larger scale—or even integrated right into Google Earth.
  • Using the new terrain layer on Google maps. Satellite maps are great, but sometimes a terrain map shows things more clearly. For example:
    See a shaded-relief version of Israel’s topography at Google Maps
  • More Creative Commons-licensed data. Political boundary and road data are conspicuously absent from the OpenBible data set. I’ve said before that making a lot of Bible data available under open licensing will allow people to develop new views and understandings of the Bible, which in turn will let Bible software developers integrate refined versions of these advances into their products. But, again, no one should feel compelled to release work only under Creative Commons; people deserve compensation.
  • International resources. This site gets a lot of visitors from people outside the U.S. They simply may not have access to the biblical resources we have here—or the ability to spend a lot of money on Bible reference materials. In any case, international interest in Bible maps is probably extensive. Maps have some internationalization issues (with place names), but not nearly to the extent that, say, Bible commentaries do.

Conclusion

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.

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