The New York Times ran a story over the weekend on new ways of visualizing data. One of the two images that accompany the article is our visualization of New Testament social networks.
The article talks about how the emergence of open data on the Internet—and sites like Many Eyes that let you visualize the data—help “democratize the tools of visualization.” The article quotes University of Maryland, College Park, professor Ben Schneiderman: “The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools can be brought to a much wider audience…. The great fun of information visualization, is that it gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.”
Over the centuries, scholars have produced vast quantities of data about the Bible. Making available these data in both raw and visualized form presents, we believe, a big (and cross-disciplinary) opportunity for biblical scholarship in the twenty-first century.
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