Connections in the Bible

Holy infographics: the bible visualised

'God is in the detail' - the expression may have been overshadowed by the newer 'the devil is in the detail' but for some people the original idiom still holds true. Scholars have been visualizing the holy texts for years but recently, they've taken a turn towards data. Here are some of the most interesting biblical visualizations we've found.

This is about how the bible speaks to itself - or the textual cross-references within it. 

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. 

Books alternate between white and light gray and the length of each bar 

denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references 

found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance 

between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

This visualization covers includes holy texts from Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism as well as the Bible. The 41 most frequently cited characters are arranged alphabetically and scaled according to how many times they are mentioned. The colors above the names show where they appear e.g. 'Allah' appears only in the Qur'an and 'You' appears in all the holy books. Under each of these names is a bar chart that visualizes each character's "activities" (determined from adjacent verbs in the text).

Kushal Dave used Google to count how often Bible verses appears online and made these darker to show which parts of the Bible are being used the most. You can try the interactive version of his research here.

There are 340,000 cross-references between the Old and New Testament that are visualized here. It reveals a surprising asymmetry - if verse A cites verse B, verse B doesn't necessarily cite verse A.

Even the Bible has become the target of sentiment analysis enthusiasts. This visualisation claims to explore the "ups" and "downs" of the Bible narrative, using sentiment analysis to quantify when positive and negative events are happening. The results? "Things start off well with creation, turn negative with Job and the patriarchs, improve again with Moses, dip with the period of the judges, recover with David, and have a mixed record (especially negative when Samaria is around) during the monarchy." You can explore the book-by-book results here.