Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Bible as One Book

National Geographic gave this picture an honorable mention in its list of "Best Science Images of 2008."

Here's the explanatory text:

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. [Meaning, I believe, places where one book quotes or cites another. mks].

"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.

(Image courtesy Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University; Christoph Romhild, North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church/Science)

Source here. First saw this on Matt's blog, here.

1 comment:

Scot Becker said...

This is a very appealing visualization. Thanks for pointing me to it. I'd love to find out just how the cross-reference set was derived.