When My Fathers house meets MySpace… New Testament Social Networking
Link to Many Eyes : Co-Occurrences of Names in the New Testament
Some of you know, I have a soft spot for data visualization. I love interesting ways that people come up with to show data connections. I've mentioned this love before, and have been meaning to talk about digg swarm and digg stack for a while now. But this latest find is even cooler… all the people of the New Testament, organized into social networks. Guess who has the most "friends"?
So there's a new web app called "Many Eyes" which lets you upload your own data set for visualization or poke around other people's data. Someone got the bright idea to upload a list of all names that appear in the New Testament, cross referenced with all other names and how often they appear in the same paragraph. Then a data map shows all connections and forms a social network. You'll need Java to see the plug-in, or you can see ESV.org's article on it here which includes both a snapshot of the network diagram as well as a treemap view. The uses are spreading as the ESV article also references the Blogos blog, where the same ManyEyes tool is being used to show treemaping of the pericopes of the New Testament as well. (A pericope, in this case, is a thought or idea expressed in the gospels usually demonstrating the parallel nature. Example: Jesus feeds the five thousand, which exists in all four canonical gospels.)
Lastly, in an interesting circle of life, both ESV and Blogos trackback to O'Reilly Radar as the source of discovery for Many Eyes… clicking over ther tonight reveals the most recent entry (as of now) is about WeFeelFine.org… oddly enough WeFeelFine was the first data visualization tool I blogged about back in October, and the first one I mentioned in this posting. Cue Elton John and the cast of Disney's The Lion King.
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