Multimedia Gallery - Visualizing The Bible | NSF

A doctoral student visualized the Bible using a custom-built computer program

May 16, 2013

"Visualizing The Bible"

"Visualizing The Bible."

The first illuminated bibles were produced in the early Middle Ages by monks who painstakingly detailed illustrations for their sacred verse. Chris Harrison, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., and Christoph Römhild of the North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hamburg, Germany, present an illustrated Bible with a modern twist. Römhild started with a list of verses in different versions of both the Old and New Testaments that referred to figures or ideas from earlier passages, then combed through both books for additional examples. Using a custom-built computer program, Harrison translated the trove of data into "Visualizing the Bible." Each bar on the graph along the bottom represents a chapter of the Bible; the bar length corresponds to the number of verses in the passage. The rainbow-like arcs represent references from a chapter in one book to a chapter in another. "It almost looks like one monolithic volume," Harrison says.

This image was tied for Honorable Mention in the Illustration category of the 2008 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge (SciVis). The competition is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. To learn more about the competition, see the SciVis Special Report. (Date of Image: 2008)

Credit: Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University, and Christoph Römhild, North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church

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