Mapping New Testament Social Networks
The recent launch of Many Eyes, a data visualization site, lets us make a start toward mapping New Testament social networks:
The live visualization at Many Eyes lets you pan and zoom around to your heart’s content. (You need the Java plugin for your browser to be able to interact with the visualization.)
The data set behind the visualization isn’t perfect. While it disambiguates people with the same name (John the apostle and John the Baptist, for example), it only tracks occurrences in the same chapter. In other words, just because two people appear in the text near each other, that doesn’t mean they have a relationship. So you have Joseph the Old Testament patriarch linked to Jesus even though they obviously weren’t contemporaries. You’d need an ontology about New Testament names to map deeper relationships.*
But it’s a start and may help you make some useful insights. This data set only includes three or more co-occurrences. We also uploaded a complete list of co-occurrences in the New Testament, but the data set breaks the visualization software at the moment. And there are so many nodes that it isn’t that useful. But feel free to play with our data sets and come up with interesting visualizations of your own.
We’ll leave you with a treemap diagram of similar data:
In treemaps, each section has a label (e.g., “Jesus”), and the size and color of the enclosed boxes show the relationships. For example, Peter, Moses, and Paul are the most common names linked with Jesus. Why Paul? Well, Paul has a habit of introducing himself and greeting people in the name of Jesus when he begins his letters. The association of the two is either a feature or a bug of the data set, depending on your perspective.
Via O’Reilly Radar.
* Also see the post at Blogos for a way of using Many Eyes to look at parallel Gospel passages.
January 25th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
The folks at Crossway use Many Eyes, a site dedicated to visualization of data, to create a visual social network of the New Testament. Check it out. You might need to install the latest Java plugin.
January 26th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Who said that Web 2.0 and social networking was only for MySpace-using teenagers and web-savvy geeks? The clever folks at Crossway Books have put together a “social map” of the New Testament, using IBM’s recently-released Many Eyes data-visualization tool:…
January 27th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Visualizing the New Testament as a social network. Jesus is the original Ozzie.
January 27th, 2007 at 7:32 am
One thing that the folks responsible for the English Standard Version are good at is playing around with new technologies in order to establish curious tools and databases and the like. They have used the data visualization site Many Eyes to create the beginnings of a Social Network Map of New Testament Characters. It is interesting and has pedagogical potential.
January 27th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Social networking of NT names. Bonus: check the links to Semantic Bible.
January 27th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Bringing together two things I’m passionate about (the Bible, and to a far-less-but-still-meaningful level, social networking and data mining), here’s a site where I’ll be spending some time thinking and analyzing over the weekend…
January 27th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Learned about an interesting application of IBM’s newly unveiled ManyEyes data visualization site: mapping New Testament social networks. via BoingBoing.
January 27th, 2007 at 7:33 am
courtesy of esv blog via boing boing this ManyEyes hairball map of the New Testament. hopefully the point is obvious. now for them to do the OT…
January 27th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Cory Doctorow: When you feed the names and connections in the King James Version of the New Testament into the ManyEyes social visualization tool, you get this incredible hairball map of the social relationships between the characters in that novel…
January 27th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Fun, interesting AND useful!
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks…
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Okay, what is wrong with the world? A blog from a bible translation makes the front page on del.icio.us?? And it’s about mapping New Testament social networks??? Oh I am IN!
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Since our topic this week is social networks, the link Mapping New Testament Social Networks seems appropriate. Never thought I’d say this, but Jesus was definitely a supernode. :)
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Here’s social interconnectedness in the New Testament, as visualized at ESV.org:. Via BoingBoing. Here, Jesus is obviously the guy to know.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
“Mapping New Testament Social Networks” [English Standard Version Bible].
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks. While it disambiguates people with the same name (John the apostle and John the Baptist), it only tracks occurrences in the same chapter. So, just because two people appear in the text near each other, that doesn’t mean they have a relationship. A WIP.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Recently over at the ESV Bible blog they reviewed Many Eyes A really interesting product but in the words of the ESV team:… Interesting tool, but is it truly useful?
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
kottke coined: Jesus Christ, supernode.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Hey, look at this:. (Diagram showing co-occurrences of names in the New Testament). This is from a site called ‘Many eyes‘, which enables you to look at data in interesting ways. Your computer might need a special widgetty-thingummy, I don’t know. Here are some interesting ones I found done by Crossway, who are Bible-related people. I don’t really understand them, but they look lovely and look like they should be interesting. You can zoom and click and all sorts of things.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
New Testament geekawesome.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
This is a graphical representation on the relationships between the figures in the New Testament Bible. I stole this post fair and square from BoingBoing.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Speaking of light reading, how about a map of the relationships in the New Testament?…
January 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Many Eyes is een door IBM Research’s Visual Communication Lab ontwikkelde visualisatietechnologie waarmee je complexe datasets visueel inzichtelijk kunt maken. Dat klinkt complex, en dat is het ook - maar het mooie is dat het resultaat…
January 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Yesterday I saw this Semantic Bible diagram, where you can use a funky visualizaton tool, Many Eyes to provide a graph-view of a particular dataset. I think Many Eyes is really cool and I just saw also a diagram of how RDF namespaces…
January 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Social networks, and specifically social networking tools, are an ongoing fascination for me. Most of what I do for a living is project management, so understanding the dynamics of social interactions on a cross functional project team…
January 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am
From boingboing. When you feed the names and connections in the King James Version ofthe New Testament into the ManyEyes social visualization tool, you get this incredible hairball map of the social relationships between…
January 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Check this out - it’s a web applet that takes a text and constructs the social relationships between the names mentioned in the text…
January 28th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Here’s one using data visualization software to map social relationships in the New Testament (via kottke).
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Mapping New Testament Social Networks from the guys who did the Mechanical Turk bible quote database. read more at Waxy.org
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Jesus Christ, supernode.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
An interesting article on the ESV Blog about using Social Network diagramming tools to show the relationships between the writers and persons in the Bible. They even offer access to their datasets to let you do your own visualization.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Mapping New Testament Social Networks.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
But there are other areas of math — and in particular, applied math — which can be very useful to the study of religion. The
ESV’s project is a great example…. Now that’s not so say that math will allow us to prove anything definitively. I mean, really, we’re dealing with real people, real groups, real ideas… how can you prove that? But it’s a tool that really ought to be added to the toolbox when we’re looking at religions. Part of the difficulty is that most religious studies scholars gave up on math in grade school, and that most mathemeticians couldn’t give a whit about the academic study of religion. And you can’t just fake one aspect if you’re good at the other, or else you end up just making a big mess out of things. But regardless… good on you, ESV. Let’s hope there are more people out there who will follow in your footsteps.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Mapping New Testament Social Networks heh… social networks of the bible.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Someone made a social network map of everyone in the New Testemant…
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Here is a fascinating look at all the social connections in the New Testament. Surprisingly Jesus is right in the middle of it all…Interestingly some Old Testament characters also are featured quite prominently in this map. Click here for more analysis and information. (HT: boing boing)
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
The folks at Crossway used Many Eyes, a site dedicated to visualization of data, to create a visual social network of the New Testament. Check it out. You might need to install the latest Java plugin…
January 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
The ESV blog (did anyone know they had one??) has posted a visual map of NT social networks as generated by IBM’s new ManyEyes software. As a Hebrew bible person the data itself doesn’t mean much to me but Jesus seems to be a pretty popular guy (a bit like Tom on MySpace). The visualisation of data is always an incredibly useful tool though as it can make associations and spring up ideas that your brain would never do just looking at a numeric data print-out.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Mapping New Testament Social Networks (from the guys who did the Mechanical Turk bible quote database)
January 28th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
When you feed the names and connections in the King James Version of the New Testament into the ManyEyes social visualization tool…
January 28th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
ESV Bible Blog - Mapping New Testament Social Networks
January 28th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I can always see things better when they’re drawn out. I find myself using the white-board all the time at work for that very reason. Things just become clearer. Today I saw that the folks over at the ESV seem to feel the same way…
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Yeap Religion and the web2.0 can go together - who is the son of who in a nutshell :).
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Ever wondered how all the characters in the Bible’s New Testament are connected? Here’s a visualization. Your wish is the site’s command.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
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,…
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Everybody knows Jesus. I’m sure this is somehow important, but I’m floored at the amount of time this took someone.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Ever wondered who mentioned who without digging though all figure heads? Well, Many Eyes apparently is working on something that might help you there. Next plan, quotes from several religions to each other?
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
HT i forgot….sorry, but thanks to the ESV blog.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Another site that may be of interest to religious history buffs is the article Mapping New Testament Networks over at the ESV Bible site. The ubergeeks over at ESV compiled data sets of the many figures in the New Testament and mapped their relationships visually using IBM’s data visualization tool Many Eyes. There’s also a link in the article to a (free) ontology of New Testament names that’s worth checking out…
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks, neato.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
The English Standard Version Bible Blog has a link to a visual chart for displaying the connections between people in the Bible. The information is interesting, but not necessarily helpful. It is based off of what names are in the vicinity of other names in the Bible rather than on an intelligent understanding of the actual relationships between individuals. For example, Paul didn’t spend much time with Jesus during his physical incarnation (not that we know of, anyway) yet there is a strong connection due to how often Paul uses his name near Jesus’ name (”Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus . . . ” 1 Cor. 1:1). Consider it an early example of Google Bombing type behavior.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am
[link]
January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am
La Bibbia in forma di social network.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am
The folks at ESV Bible have mapped the relationships between characters in the New Testament. Someone ought to do this for the Tanakh!
January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Arguably not fiction, but wrt my previous post, here is a site with some social network visualizations of the New Testament…
January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am
These are a sampling of some of the sites I’ve hit this past week… Mapping New Testament Social Networks
January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am
I came across a site that shows a social map of the New Testament at [link]. It’s very interesting, though I defer to a Bible scholar concerning its accuracy.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Inspired by the folks over at the ESV and at Blogos, I submitted a data set to the Many Eyes repository showing the percentage of the New Testament written by each author. I got my data from Tischendorf’s 8th edition Greek New Testament because it was free and publicly available…
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
ESV Bible Blog » Mapping New Testament Social Networks.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
The ever-interesting ESV Blog lit up the blogosphere with their visualization of New Testament social networks based on proximity within the text…
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Social network map of the New Testament…
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
ESV Bible Blog ｻ Mapping New Testament Social Networks Christster? GodSpace?
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
If you love the ESV and computer geeky stuff then you have to check this out. It is a social map of New Testament Relationships using a new data visualization tool from IBM…
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Found a great article and ESNA map of the bible characters on Boing Boing. The post originated form the English Standard Version of the Bible and it seems to me that it covers only the New Testament…
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
It’s either really cool or social statistics run amok (or both), but here is a social network map of the relationships in the New Testament…
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Both via kotte.org: ESV’s map of New Testament social networks and Google: Books Mapped.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Here is an interesting post for the more “geeky” readers of your blog: Mapping New Testament Social Networks
January 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am
[link]
January 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Now, this is cool: 21st Century data mapping meets 1st Century Judea as the folks at the ESV Bible Blog use new technology to create an maps of the social networks in the New Testament…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am
Quién dijo que estas cosas del Web 2.0 eran solamente para la generación de MySpace, iPhone y juegos de Sony PlayStation? Los amigos de Crossway Books han construido un mapa de la red social del Nuevo Testamento…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am
I stumbled upon a neat visualizing tool called Many Eyes. [Hat Tip: Deinde & ESV Blog] I had some data at my fingertips so I thought I’d try it out. Here are two visualizations that I created…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:05 am
The ESV Bible people are leveraging some really cool technologies for Bible exploration. You can read about how to use this particular technology here…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Por algum motivo um certo Jesus aparece de forma predominante nessa rede. O link direto para o mapa interativo em Java é este…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:05 am
It’s either really cool or social statistics run amok (or both), but here is a social network map of the relationships in the New Testament. It’s done by the folks at the English Standard Version Bible, who use a new data imaging site called Many Eyes. Obviously the New Testament is not a sociometric survey, so what we learn here is the Bible’s description of relationships…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:05 am
in the bible with glazed over eyes and a strong desire to find a Starbucks? I have and this cool site allows us to track the social networks of the bible in a graphical format and explore biographies. Check it out maybe you’ll learn something new!…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:05 am
ESV Bible Blog » Mapping New Testament Social Networks
January 31st, 2007 at 7:32 am
ESV Bible Blog » Mapping New Testament Social Networks…
January 31st, 2007 at 7:33 am
Mapping New Testament social networks. Data visualization goes holy on us.
January 31st, 2007 at 7:33 am
No idea what this is supposed to mean, other than it shows the network that surrounded Jesus. I’m sure this should mean more to me but… I must confess, this thing confuses me a bit. But the idea is pretty cool!
February 1st, 2007 at 7:38 am
A social network map of biblical charaters. See it here.
February 1st, 2007 at 7:38 am
Last week’s post on New Testament social networks…
February 1st, 2007 at 7:38 am
The producers of the ESV translation used Many Eyes to map the relationships between biblical characters as described in the Bible. I think this is a promising integration of technology with biblical studies…
February 1st, 2007 at 10:43 am
February 1st, 2007 at 10:43 am
Mapping new testament social networks
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:33 am
English Standard Version Bible: New Testament social network map.
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:33 am
Some pretty smart people made a tool to help visualize relationships between data, and then applied it to (among other things) the New Testament. Check it out!…
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:34 am
Joe Weaks of the Macintosh Biblioblog notes that the makers of the ESV (English Standard Version) have used a data visualization technology (Many Eyes) to create a social networking map of new testament characters. I don’t know much about data visualization, but it appears to be a technology that is being used more and more outside the hard sciences…
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:34 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks…
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Here’s an interesting link mapping NT social networks.
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Jesus’ Social Network – A visualization. OK, I’m still working through this one, but if you are interested in seeing how different persons in the New Testament were linked to Jesus, this site is worth a look. I can’t describe it in words, exactly. It is a very visual thing…
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Map of connections between characters in the New Testament (HT: BoingBoing)…
February 3rd, 2007 at 7:34 am
Speaking of visualizations, I came across an interactive diagram of what a social network of biblical names would like…
February 4th, 2007 at 7:32 am
It would be a neat teaching tool to have Jesus loaded onto a Facebook-like kind of social networking tool. Here’s a visualization of New Testament social networks for anyone who may be interested…
February 4th, 2007 at 7:32 am
An interesting and provocative social networking map of NT characters.
February 6th, 2007 at 7:33 am
mapping new testament social networks…
February 6th, 2007 at 7:34 am
ESV.org een ‘mapping’ gemaakt waarbij de onderlinge relaties tussen de hoofdpersonen uit het Nieuwe Testament met elkaar inzichtelijk zijn gemaakt…
February 8th, 2007 at 7:33 am
The ESV Blog recently had an article on mapping New Testament social networks, using a network from IBM’s Many Eyes site. Here is my visualisation of the same data, using techniques from…. Here the colours and areas of the circles indicate centrality, a key social network concept which indicates importance…
February 10th, 2007 at 7:33 am
The map of New Testament social networks appears on the ESV Bible Blog and enlarges so you can actually read it…
February 14th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Le réseau social entre les personnages du Nouveau Testament existe! Le site many eyes d’IBM fournit une vision graphique animée des premiers fidèles et acteurs de la vie de JC…
February 16th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Some guy made a social networking map of the New Testament. Jesus has the most Myspace friends…
February 16th, 2007 at 7:32 am
ESV Blog: The recent launch of Many Eyes, a data visualization site, lets us…
April 1st, 2007 at 7:34 am
It’s very rare that I find my different interests converging together, so perhaps that’s why I find this noteworthy. Via a blogpost on the Read/Write Web, I recently learned about Many Eyes, a 1.5 month old data visualization site. One of their more interesting bits of data visualization is a “New Testament Social Network” map, which renders a visual display of names that co-occur (i.e., mentioned in the same chapter) in the New Testament of the Bible…
April 1st, 2007 at 7:34 am
This is a guest post written by two of the researchers behind IBM’s Many Eyes app, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas. R/WW profiled Many Eyes, a “shared visualization and discovery” service, back in January…
April 1st, 2007 at 7:34 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks: ESV Bible Blog. This is blowing my mind.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:32 am
Earlier this month, we blogged about the process used to quantify the The Most Important Person in the Bible by computing factors such as frequency of mentions and the dispersion of those mentions across biblical books and chapters….
June 1st, 2007 at 7:32 am
Previous attempts at applying mathematics to the Bible resulted in things like the Bible Code. What if someone level-headed with good doctrine tried to apply some math and stats to the Scriptures? Here are a couple of good examples:…
June 1st, 2007 at 7:37 am
Related posts around the blogosphere: Blogos: Name Weights for Biblical Characters OpenBible.info - Name Weights for Biblical Characters ESV Bible Blog: Mapping New Testament Social Networks
June 1st, 2007 at 7:37 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks Saturday, 3 March 2007 by Paul Dubuc. The ESV Blog has an interesting visualization of the textual relationship between people mentioned in the same chapter of the New Testament. It was done using IBM’s Many Eyes data visualization tool. Check out those links for more information.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:41 am
Via rebecca’s pocket. Related: Mapping New Testament Social Networks. — M E-L See also: Information Mapping | Charts |
June 1st, 2007 at 7:41 am
Lots and lots of connection diagrams. Via rebecca’s pocket. Related: Mapping New Testament Social Networks. See also:Information Mapping |Charts |
June 1st, 2007 at 7:41 am
…http://www.esv.org/blog/2007/01/mapping…
July 1st, 2007 at 7:49 am
Okay, as a Communication major I was thrilled when I came across a social map of New Testament relationships. If you are at all interested in the social networking of Biblical characters and communication theory, you’ve got to check out this site…
December 1st, 2007 at 7:47 am
Mapping New Testament Social Networks : http://www.esv.org/blog/2007/01/mapping.nt.social.networks using data visualization tool Many Eyes to map New Testament social networks…
December 1st, 2007 at 7:47 am
What is the the social graph? Last week I wrote at the Future of Real Estate Marketing on the Impact of OpenSocial for Real Estate and this week, I am posting about the Social Graph. The first time I heard the phrase ‘Social Graph’ is…