Visualizing the Bible

Image: Courtesy Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University; Christoph Romhild, North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church/Science



National Geographic News has published the best science images of 2008. Among them, an image that received the honorable mention in the category of “Illustration” was “Visualizing the Bible.”

This is how National Geographic News describes the visualization of the Bible:

A colorful rainbow brings to light the interconnected nature of one of the world’s most familiar books.

The Bible’s 1,189 chapters are plotted along the horizontal axis at the bottom of the image, with each bar's length determined by the number of verses.

The arcs above the graph show the 63,779 cross-references between each chapter.

“It almost looks like one monolithic volume,” said Carnegie Mellon's Chris Harrison, who--along with Christoph Romhild of North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hamburg, Germany--won an honorable mention for illustrations in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

I never though a visualization of the Bible would be as beautiful and as colorful.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Bible, News, Science