Outline

• History and Inspirations
• Information Visualization and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs)
• Principles for a Bible ZUI
• Prototypes and Issues
• Conclusions

A Brief History of Bible Visualization

• The scroll
  • Not very portable
  • Difficult to navigate (Luke 4:17)
  • Fundamentally linear in presentation
• The book:
  • More portable (eventually)
  • No fundamental changes in navigation or visibility

A Brief History, Part 2: Bible Software

• Storage, access, portability, search, integration are all vastly improved
• Visual context still limited by screen and font size
  Mobile devices make this painfully clear
• Navigation devices:
  • Direct reference
  • Scrolling
  • Search
  • Indexes and hyperlinks
  • But only limited use of visual navigation.
• Search is now ubiquitous and powerful
  • Search selection is contextual and immediate
  • But results are typically still a separate index.
• Still hard to see the big picture

Inspirations 1: Manuscript Study

• IVCF approach to inductive Bible study: getting a bigger picture by
  • Directly annotating the text in a colorful and highly visual fashion
  • Never "turning the page"
  • Using a bigger desk
  You don't have to turn the page and lose the context

Inspirations 2: Treemaps

• Hierarchical, space-filling representations for quantifiable data
  Direct, visual representation of hierarchy and quantity (size or other attributes)
  See references slide for links
• Newsmap (Google News)
• Map of the market (stock performance by industry)
• My 2005 SBL talk on Visualizing the Gospels using Treemaps

Inspirations 3: Zoomable Interfaces

• Background: Eames' Powers of Ten movie (1977)
• Google Earth: smooth, animated zooming and panning
  Animated navigation helps provide context
• iPhone
• Human-Computer Interaction Lab at University of Maryland

Information Visualization 101

• Information visualization: the use of interactive visual representation of abstract, non-physically based data to amplify cognition
  • Tufte: "we envision information in order to reason about, communicate, document, and preserve that knowledge"
  • Shirkey: "the overall pattern of data often exhibits patterns that emerge from the individual pieces of data, patterns that can be impossible to discern by merely re-sorting the data in spreadsheet format"

Information Visualization 102

• The power of visualization
  • Very high bandwidth for presenting information
  • Visual memory in navigation: the memory palace
  • Multi-variate presentation through spatial orientation, size, color, typography, and other visual attributes
• Shneiderman's Mantra (Shneiderman 1996):
  • Overview first
  • Zoom and filter
  • Then details on demand

Bible Information

• The text itself, but also ...
• Structural relationships:
  • Hierarchy: book > chapter, pericope > verse > word
  • Concordances, topical or thematic indices
  • Alternate organizations: chronological, authorship, etc.
• The traditional reference scheme has no informational content
• Historically, biblical study has been "zoomed in" on words

Bible Visualization is Different

• Fundamentally textual rather than quantitative
  • But there are quantitative aspects
• Read-only: no text entry or editing
  • But annotation for social collaboration can be useful: "tagging", rating, linking, textual annotations
• Relationships between textual elements: concordances, topical indices, etc.
  traditionally these are links (referential or hyperlinks): they don't have to be

Traditional Bible Navigation

• At the book level: either memorize the order, or use the table of contents
  • Size relationships are inherent in page counts, but far from intuitive
• Chapter+verse references are semantically opaque
  Can you imagine using page numbers this way?
  Hezekiah chapter 12: not everybody gets the joke
• Associations between references and content are learned over time
  Okay for cogniscenti, but hard for novices
• Moving to a new text loses the context of the previous one
• Not easy to browse for information

The Dimensionality of Bible Visualization

• Nielsen: optimize for 1024x768
  • 60% of all monitors, as of 2006
  • 786432 pixels (0.75 megapixels) are available
• ESV text has
  • 1189 chapters
  • 2403 pericopes (headings)
  • 31103 verses
  • 0.75M words (about one pixel each)
• So we're close to being able to show it all (especially on larger monitors).

A Different Approach to Bible Visualization

• Visually represent the entire text
• Direct navigation through selection, zooming, and panning
• Visualize search results directly on the text
• Represent the full text hierarchy, without impeding navigation
• Support alternative higher-level organizations

Related Applications

• OpenBible.info's Bible Word Locator
  • Visual display of word distribution
  • Shows Bible and Book context
  • Not navigable

Related Applications (2)

• Logos' Graph Bible Search (demo)
  • Thematic grouping of books
  • Interactive display supports navigation
  • Hyperlinked to text
• Difficult to position the mouse at this scale
• No details to aid navigation
• Following a hyperlink leaves the visualization behind

Related Applications (3)

• OpenBible.info's Bible Book Browser (demo)
  • Thematic grouping of books
  • Spatial orientation shows both Bible and book context
  • Chapter+heading navigation supports browsing
  • Hyperlinked to text
• Spatial representation is not to scale
  • Jude is the same size as Revelation
  • Mouse sensitivity is therefore highly variable
• Chapter and heading displays are transient, and only chapters can be selected
• Following a hyperlink leaves the visualization behind

Zoomable Bible: Key Concepts

• Spatially-oriented view of the entire text
  • Supports visual navigation and memory
  • Has spatial and structural fidelity
  • Provides a canvas for visualizing search results, annotation, and other meta-data
• Use zooming and panning for navigation
• Provide as much context as scale allows
  • Macro view: high-level structure and relevant meta-data
  • Micro view: lower-level structure and text

Zoomable Bible Layout

• Using the Piccolo 2D toolkit from UMd HCIL
• Strip treemaps: hierarchical, spatially-oriented, ordered, with decent aspect ratio
• Groups and books have horizontal layout
• Pericopes have vertical layout for readability
• All the text is there, though not always visible

(demo)

Further Development

• Need better scaling of fonts, margins, etc. to match zoom level
• Search should highlight hits so you can zoom in on them
  • Highlight the verse or pericope if the text is too small
• Better text layout and wrapping
  • Word count is a poor approximation for pericope size
  • Vertical orientation of pericopes tends to truncate pericope headings
• Zoom out to different higher-level organization
• Encode chapter divisions with shading?

Alternate Layouts

• Overview on one side, text (and other) details on the other side
  • Pro:
    • Easier, more familiar reading format, including cleaner text layout
    • Still provides the big picture
  • Con:
    • Less integrated view

Further Thoughts

• Is text magnitude really a critical attribute for browsing the Bible?
• Higher-level organization is critical for navigation and understanding
• Visualizing search results: dealing with small scale
• Is dynamic layout important? (probably)
• ZUIs and accessibility

Conclusions

• Our print traditions have limited our view of how we can represent and navigate the Biblical text
• Visual approaches can give us a different view, and help us get the big picture