Saturday, November 22, 2008

Christianity Today: Reference Rainbow

What it looks like to graph the Bible's cross-references. (Click image for full size.)

When Christoph Römhild, a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, Germany, sent Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. student Chris Harrison a list of 63,779 cross-references between the Bible's 1,189 chapters, the two became enthralled with elegantly showing the interconnected nature of Scripture. Each bar along the horizontal axis represents a chapter, with the length determined by the number of verses. (Books alternate in color between white and light gray.) Colors represent the distance between references.

The graph won an honorable mention in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science journal.

There are many more fantastic images at the above NSF site.

2 comments:

philpartin said...

Cool! Just goes to show you how art and science often go together. Math and music, for example. Also, this happens when scientists have too much time on their hands.

Dr. Bill said...

A lot of beautiful things can result from too much time on your hands.