I thought I’d see how many people search for various Bible translations. The results:

Translations

The translations come from the CBA Bible Translation Bestseller List. (CBA is the Christian Booksellers Association, a Christian-retailing industry group.) This list counts Bible sales through most Christian bookstores in the US. However, it’s an imperfect measure of a translation’s popularity since sales through non-CBA stores are becoming more important to Bible publishers.

The imperfection of the CBA list (and the desire to quantify its rankings) was the inspiration for this (also-imperfect) project.

Methodology

Bible version abbreviations that also have other meanings were a little tricky. “HCSB” is also the name of a bank and a school board in Florida. “ESV” is also a Cadillac and the stock symbol for an oil-drilling company. To compensate for these other uses, I took the top three non-Bible keyword phrases and compared the numbers for the top-three Bible related keyword phrases.

For example, there were 90,500 searches for “esv” in June. The keywords “escalade esv,” “cadillac esv,” and “cadillac escalade esv” had 57,300 searches, while “esv bible,” “esv online,” and “esv study bible” had 13,300 searches. Multiplying 90,500 by 19% (the proportion of the top three Bible-related searches to the top three non-Bible-related searches) leads to the conclusion that about 17,049 of those 90,500 searches for “esv” were Bible-related. It’s definitely an approximation, but the alternative was to count acronym-only searches for some translations and not for others.

Besides the ESV and HCSB, other Bible-translation acronyms have a few other meanings, but they don’t suffer from nearly the level of acronym confusion as those two translations. The HCSB also goes by the name “CSB,” which makes things even harder. Nothing Bible-related showed up when I entered CSB into the keyword tool, so I didn’t count it.

A similar problem occurs for the phrase “king james”—with 301,000 searches in June, it was the single most-popular translation-related query. But are the searches for the Bible translation or for, say, King James I of England? Based on the popularity of the related keywords, it looks like 97% of “king james” searches are for the Bible. This query puts the KJV well ahead of the NIV in popularity.

The Message also probably suffers from undercounting, since it’s impossible to know how many people searching for “message” are looking for the Bible (not too many, based on the Keyword Tool’s data—but definitely some).

Here are the words and phrases I started with. I included other clearly relevant synonyms in the total.

• christian standard bible
• english standard version
• esv bible
• esv bibles
• esv translation
• hcsb bible
• hcsb bibles
• hcsb translation
• kjv
• kjv bible
• kjv bibles
• kjv translation
• message bible
• message bibles
• message translation
• msg bible
• msg bibles
• nasb
• nasb bible
• nasb bibles
• nasb translation
• new american standard
• new international version
• new king james
• new living translation
• niv
• niv bible
• niv bibles
• niv translation
• nkjv
• nkjv bible
• nkjv bibles
• nkjv translation
• nlt
• nlt bible
• nlt bibles
• nlt translation
• tniv
• tniv bible
• tniv bibles
• tniv translation

Collective intelligence (sometimes called “the wisdom of crowds”) is something that I think will become more important in biblical studies as it becomes more important in other disciplines. The vast scope of the Internet makes possible explorations of questions that have been impractical until now.

So, what’s a practical application of collective intelligence to biblical studies? Paragraph and section identification to help people study the Bible.

I paid 40 people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk two cents each to add paragraphs to the book of Philemon in both the ESV and NLT translations. Total cost (including commission): $1.00.

Results

The thickness of the bar in the below table indicates how many people would start a paragraph at the given sentence. The ¶ symbols (not sent to the Turkers) indicate where the Bible translators themselves started paragraphs.

The table shows similarities between the two translations (except for some variation near the beginning) and also reveals some divergence with the translators’ paragraph ideas.

(If you’re reading this post in a feed reader, the below table won’t make much sense to you. You should click through to the original post if you want to see the styles.)

Let’s take this approach one step further, asking people to group the paragraphs into sections (pericopes), titling those sections, and then having other people vote on which section titles are best. Unfortunately, this part of the experiment is still in-process, so I don’t have anything interesting to show you.

Practical Implications for Bible Software

Purveyors of Bible software are in a unique position to benefit from this kind of collective intelligence. Although they don’t have the massive volume of users found on the Internet, they data they compile from Bible software users will be of higher quality than data compiled from the Internet. (For one, Bible software users probably aren’t out to attack Christianity, unlike a good number of people on the Internet.)

Further, Bible software publishers can create tools to implicitly shape collective intelligence to their users’ benefit. For example, they could create a tool that allows people to add their own paragraphs and sections to Bible texts. This tool could let you share this data you create anonymously with other users of the software. The goal isn’t to create the “one true paragraph and section divisions” for a passage, but merely to inform people of the choices others have made, indicating (if someone desires) how other people organize biblical texts.

Similarly, Bible software could help people anonymously share outlines of Bible books. I think you could also rank relevant resources (commentaries, say) for certain passages based on the resources people consult after reading those passages and the length of time they spend looking at the resources.

The idea behind this kind of collective intelligence is to collect implicit data—data based on things people are already doing—to improve the software. The more people who use the software, the better it becomes. You could try to come up with a slick algorithm to predict, say, the most relevant resources for a passage. But the beauty of a collective-intelligence approach is that the abundance of data means that even a simple ranking algorithm produces good results. Or, as Anand Rajaraman puts it, “more data usually beats better algorithms.”

I’m excited about applying collective intelligence to biblical studies. Implicit-data aggregation provides the most promising short-term possibilities, since a lot of data regarding user behavior in Bible software already exists. Pragmatically, I think Bible software publishers can get a lot of mileage just by analyzing this data and allowing it to inform their interface in limited ways.

But explicit collective-intelligence projects, such as the parable finder that Sean discusses in his post, could bear fruit in the long run. The key is to get lots of data—even noisy data will do—that can serve as the basis for analysis.

Here’s what the Bible looks like when mapped in this way:

Background

Here’s the idea:

1. Start facing right with the first sentence in the Bible.
2. Count the number of words in the sentence.
3. Get metadata for each word—is it part of a quotation? Is it a proper name?
4. Draw a line in the current direction, one pixel per word. Color-code each pixel based on the metadata.
5. Turn 90 degrees clockwise—if you’re facing right, face down. If you’re facing down, face left. (Etc.)
6. Move to the next sentence.
7. Repeat steps 2-6 until you reach the end of the Bible.

You end up with a “map” showing sentence length and metadata.

Here’s a detailed image of Job showing speeches by God sandwiching speeches by Job and others. Speeches by God are in red; everyone else’s speeches are in blue. The book starts in the lower left and ends in the upper right.

Limitations

Being able to zoom in and see the color-coded words would be a huge improvement and make this visualization more useful. I’d like to be able to hover over a specific line and read the color-coded Bible text.

Being able to browse and search the text (“Show me John 3:16”), highlighting just the relevant sections, would also be an improvement.

The drawing has lots of overlap, making it hard to draw conclusions. It’s pretty, but not too useful.

The drawing uses the ESV text as the base, since that’s what I have available; other Bible versions would probably show different patterns. It would be interesting to compare Bible versions.

Inspiration

Stefanie Posavec recently created a number of visualizations of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, one of which inspired this project. Stefanie color-coded each sentence from the book and mapped them out a formula similar to the one I used. Needless to say, Stefanie’s visualizations are much more impressive than mine.

Bibleref isn’t one of those microformats. Should Bibleref proponents lobby Yahoo! to index Bibleref, or should Bibleref change its syntax to be compatible with RDFa or another semantic web standard?

Background

Earlier, Sim.plified.com noted a Yahoo! semantic-web announcement and mused about the possibility of using the Yahoo! engine for Bibleref.

Then David Peterson, author of a Sitepoint article about the earlier Yahoo! announcement, wrote a comment that encapsulates the chicken/egg problem inherent in getting a new microformat off the ground:

Currently the search engine only indexes 3 microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview). So if you started indexing your hBible [i.e., Bibleref] it wouldn’t pick it up.

The problem with microformats is that each time a new one is created the search indexer needs to develop a custom extractor to make sense of your microformat. That is why Yahoo microsearch is only indexing 3 of the most popular format.

So what should Bibleref’s proponents do? It’s possible we could convince Yahoo! to index Bibleref, giving it the traction it needs to take off. However, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Yahoo! to do a good job understanding the data, in part because of the looseness of the standard (which I see as a good thing). And if Yahoo! doesn’t understand it well, then search results based on Bibleref won’t be very high quality. But a lot depends on how Yahoo! exposes the data. (And they may not even want to index Bibleref.)

RDFa

Another possibility is to change Bibleref to be compatible with RDFa, an emerging standard that Yahoo! does understand. The RDFa syntax fits Bibleref well:

1. <a property="br:ref" href="#">John 3:16-17</a>
2. <span property="br:ref" content="John 3:16-17">God loves us</span>

Compare to standard Bibleref markup:

1. <a class="bibleref" href="#">John 3:16-17</a>
2. <cite class="bibleref" title="John 3:16-17">God loves us</cite>

As you can see, the markup is similar. However, it still has some problems: neither example provides an unambiguous machine-readable representation that would allow an unspecialized search engine like Yahoo! to extract meaning.

I’m not entirely sure whether that’s a problem in either the current or RDFa flavors of Bibleref. Yahoo! plans to release tools to let developers build on semantic search data, so Yahoo!’s inability to understand something may not necessarily matter. (Without enforcing a formal representation, such as an OSIS identifier, one Bible passage can have any number of representations—the “John 3:16” vs. “Jn 3.16” problem.) It’s too early to tell.

The second example, with an explicit content attribute, can provide a formal, machine-readable representation of a Bible reference (like an OSIS identifier). But providing one is a lot more work for software that lets people write documents using Bibleref—it needs to understand references and create such identifiers. But would retaining the looseness of the current Bibleref standard defeat the purpose of using RDF, which thrives on strict interoperability?

Again, I don’t know. A lot depends on the tools and API that Yahoo! is making available.

But the central question is whether Bibleref syntax should move to be compatible with RDFa. The advantage is automatic pickup by new semantic search engines. The disadvantages are the syntax change and increased complexity (including DOCTYPE and namespace changes that I haven’t discussed here). It may be too early to tell.

An example:

Here’s the idea: Use the Flickr API to find photos matching each of the words in the Bible. Then download the photos for each word and layer them on top of each other to produce a composite image for word. Once you do that, layer the important words from each verse on top of each other to produce a composite image for each verse.

Then put all the verses together in sequence to create the orangeish image you see above. About 300,000 images comprising 13,000 words make up the image. Each verse occupies about six pixels.

Technical Background

For layering the photos, I wanted the brightest (most-saturated) colors possible; I used a simple formula. It finds the difference between the brightest and darkest channels in a particular pixel. The brighter colors will tend have bigger differences.

function weight_pixel($pixel)
{
$rgb = array(( $pixel >> 16 ) & 0xFF, ( $pixel >> 8 ) & 0xFF, $pixel & 0xFF);
sort($rgb, SORT_NUMERIC);
return $rgb[2] - $rgb[0];
}

This formula differs from the usual conversion formula from RGB to HSL. I didn’t like the results of the RGB-HSL formula as much; the images were slightly darker.

Then I placed the darkest pixels on the bottom layer of the composite image, layering brighter (but about 50% transparent) pixels on top. The results for each word resemble abstract art:

(11) (begrudge) (liquid) (sharp) (waterfalls)

I did a similar procedure to produce verse composites, layering the important words from each verse on top of each other. The results are generally less spectacular (in my opinion) than the word composites, as many of the verses look like each other. I’d like to explore other compositing algorithms to try to differentiate the verses more. (Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions for an algorithm!)

(Gen 1:2) (Josh 3:10) (Matt 5:4)

The hardest part was the waiting. It took a long time to download the 300,000 images, and nearly as long to process them all. Plus, it takes a while to upload half a gigabyte of data after processing the images.

The verses composites omit images for about 200 common words (as listed in the Crossway Comprehensive Concordance of the ESV). I didn’t want common words to overwhelm the important ones.

From a coding standpoint, this project let me try out the jQuery Javascript library, which I’ve been wanting to do for some time.

Future Directions

Well, the result is awfully orange. As I said above, I would’ve liked to see some more differentiation. (I tried a few different formulas but didn’t come up with anything that works much better.) You can see some bands that are more orange than others, but I’m not sure how significant they are.

It would be interesting to try to calculate cross-references based on the similarity of the verse composites—are verses that look alike actually similar?

Any work of literature would lend itself to this kind of project. Project Gutenberg has lots of public-domain e-texts available. It would be interesting to compare the composite footprint of, say, Moby Dick to the Bible’s.

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project comes from the 80 Million Tiny Images project by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus, and William T. Freeman at MIT. They created a map of nouns in the English language by downloading images from search engines, combining the images, and then arranging them into a graphic based on the words’ semantic distance from each other. Fascinating stuff. Via ReadWriteWeb.

Below are searches for a few events in the Bible. Obviously the timelines reflect divergent opinions on when the events occurred.

Jesus’ Birth

The current consensus seems to be sometime in 2 B.C.

Jesus’ Crucifixion

The year A.D. 30 is the clear leader here. Notice how most of the bars in the first few months of the year, which you’d expect if the Crucifixion coincided with Passover.

The Exodus

Here you see the two main datings of the Exodus: the 15th century and the 13th century B.C.

Via Searchblog.

An Australian group produced four fake aerial views of Bible events (Adam and Eve in Eden, Noah’s Ark on Ararat, Jesus’ crucifixion, and crossing the Red Sea) for the recent Miami art fair. The group is working on producing satellite images of other historical and mythological events.

First, I can see Bible software moving in two directions as it relates to mapping:

Outsource It: Mapping in Bible Software, Approach #1

Mapping has never been a strength of Bible software (with the possible exception of Accordance). But that’s not necessarily a problem.

Why should Bible software try to reproduce Google Earth’s features, with 3D terrain, zooming, rotating, layers, etc.? It’ll inevitably pale in comparison to Google Earth. In other words, no Bible software company is going to out-feature Google.

Rather, Bible software companies should build on existing software and innovate where they can.

Here’s what a Bible software company that wants to take this approach should do:

1. License or commission attractive maps that allow minimal interactivity. I imagine that a lot of people simply want a map to print or to use in a class. Google Earth doesn’t support this task well.
2. Identify place names in Bibles and reference works in their software and link these places to geocoded data. People will be able to see quickly where a location is without disrupting their immediate tasks. This kind of deep integration among resources is invaluable.
3. Allow the export of this data into KML or other open formats so people who want a particular view can use Google Earth (or a similar program) to create it. They can then share these views with others.
4. Release geocoding data under a Creative Commons license to allow people to reuse it. A lot of biblical regions don’t have any boundary data available on the web at the moment, for example, and it’s better to have people who know what they’re doing draw these boundaries instead of random people with lots of free time. (This last step may not be appropriate for every company.)

Integrate It: Mapping in Bible Software, Approach #2

Maybe a Bible software company really wants to add a Google Earth-style application to their program (perhaps to make sure their data stays proprietary, which I can understand). How should they do it?

They should integrate World Wind, an open-source earth viewer developed by NASA. It comes in both .NET and Java flavors. The i-cubed layer has 15-meter full-color resolution for most of the earth, which is sufficient for most purposes. It can also use Microsoft’s Virtual Earth imagery.

I think you could create a lot of interesting maps and geographic applications if you were willing to customize the World Wind interface for Bible mapping and integrate this data deeply into your software.

The following image, for example, from a post about Herod the Great’s tomb, uses the i-cubed imagery in World Wind:

What Makes Maps Useful?

I’m only answering for myself here, but I tend to judge a map on its aesthetics—in other words, I prefer a nice-looking map even when it’s otherwise inferior to an ugly map. A lot of Bible maps on the web just aren’t very attractive.

If two maps are equally attractive, I’ll use the one that gives me more flexibility to accomplish what I want or to increase my understanding—enabling layers or places, for example.

Finally, I don’t find static 3D cutaways (like the above image of Herod the Great’s tomb) very useful—they’re cool to look at, but the distortion in perspective makes it hard to measure distances or see how places relate to each other. However, I do find it useful to pan down in Google Earth. So I like standard overhead views for static maps but prefer dynamic maps to give me maximum flexibility.

How People Use the Maps Here

Judging from their search keywords on Google, people are looking for three main things when they come to OpenBible.info. Of course I don’t know what their ultimate aim is, but here are their immediate goals:

1. An overview of Bible geography.
2. The location of a specific place that they probably encountered in their Bible reading.
3. Integration of Bible places and Google Earth or Google Maps.

Map Features

Here are some things I’d like to see in Bible maps in the future:

• Social integration. I don’t really know what it would involve, but a lot of mapping sites are moving to allow collaboration and sharing of maps created by users. I can imagine a lot of potential here to eliminate duplication of effort—how many people have had to create new maps just because the particular one they wanted didn’t exist? By sharing maps, the likelihood increases that someone has already created the map you want.
• Reference material about each place. If I taught a graduate or undergraduate class on Bible geography, I’d have each student write a brief summary of several places in the Bible and then release these summaries under a Creative Commons license. Then I’d integrate them into the KML files available on this site, perhaps with some links to Wikipedia or other resources for more information. In other words, I’d like to see the KML files on OpenBible contain some up-to-date scholarship on each place, so people learn more than just a place’s coordinates when they come here. It’s similar to what BibleMap.org does by including articles from the ISBE (a public-domain Bible encyclopedia). Unfortunately, all the public-domain resources show their age in terms of language and scholarship. At the very least, I’d like to link Bible places that have Wikipedia entries to their corresponding articles.
• City maps. I’d like to see city plans from various time periods. I find such maps helpful because satellite imagery can’t help you reconstruct the plans. Even better would be to geolocate the maps, so you can browse them in Google Earth and see their relation to modern cities. BibleMaps.com has about twenty biblical city maps available to buy. I’d like to see city maps implemented purely in KML as polygons, paths, and points. I’ve created a simple version of Nineveh in KML as a proof-of-concept.
• Photos. I’ve worked on aggregating some photos of Bible places, but the potential exists for a lot more. HolyLandPhotos.org has a nice, free virtual tour of selected sites (Beersheba, for example). I’d like to see this kind of approach on a larger scale—or even integrated right into Google Earth.
• Using the new terrain layer on Google maps. Satellite maps are great, but sometimes a terrain map shows things more clearly. For example:
  
• More Creative Commons-licensed data. Political boundary and road data are conspicuously absent from the OpenBible data set. I’ve said before that making a lot of Bible data available under open licensing will allow people to develop new views and understandings of the Bible, which in turn will let Bible software developers integrate refined versions of these advances into their products. But, again, no one should feel compelled to release work only under Creative Commons; people deserve compensation.
• International resources. This site gets a lot of visitors from people outside the U.S. They simply may not have access to the biblical resources we have here—or the ability to spend a lot of money on Bible reference materials. In any case, international interest in Bible maps is probably extensive. Maps have some internationalization issues (with place names), but not nearly to the extent that, say, Bible commentaries do.

Conclusion

Thanks to Mark for his recent roundup of the latest goings-on at OpenBible.info and for his explanation of how to find all the mentions of a place in the Bible.

I hope Mark will make the slides from his BibleTech talk available online. I look forward to seeing what he has to say.

In Redmond, Wash., a start-up called 3D Outlook Corp. this month will begin using software from NASA to sell 3-D models of mountains and other terrain priced at under $100, says Tom Gaskins, the company’s chief executive officer. Mr. Gaskins says hikers, resorts and real-estate firms are likely customers for 3-D maps and models that show the topographic contours of ski slopes, golf courses and other landscapes.

So you could, in theory, take Google Earth satellite and elevation data, combine it with the Bible geocoding data, and produce a custom 3D physical model of the Holy Land with key places labeled—or you could focus on one area, like Jerusalem, and show how it changed over time.

Or you could take a 3D model of Herod’s Temple and turn it into a 3D “printout.”

Anything you can represent in three dimensions—for example, the Ark of the Covenant or an ancient synagogue—can become a 3D model. In the future, I imagine technically minded Bible students producing a 3D model of something in the Bible, backed by research, as a final project in a class.

Imagine a 3D recreation of Nineveh in the time of Jonah. Or a complete reconstruction of a partially uncovered artifact uncovered on an archaeological dig. Or a way to recreate a variety of pottery vessels based on location and period (to help archaeology students familiarize themselves with identifying pottery from sherds—maybe you could “print” several vessels, then break them, mix up the remains, and have to identify the location and period of several sherds; it sounds like an interesting exam to me). Or a way for museums to share exact replicas of items in their collections with universities, so students can examine the items more closely than they can the originals. And if you break one? Just print another copy.

Obviously the possibilities extend beyond the realm of biblical studies, but affordable 3D printing opens a lot of intriguing doors. Hopefully it’ll get cheaper and more widespread soon.

More examples:

Aqueduct at Caesarea by hoyasmeg

Gates at Dan by callmetim

Rooftops at Babylon by labanex

Background

Photo-sharing site Flickr has an API that lets you find photographs by latitude and longitude. The Bible Geocoding section of this site has lots of data arranged by latitude and longitude. Why not use the Flickr API to find photos that people have taken near places in the Bible?

The resulting photos are of varying quality for getting an idea of what a place looks like. Remember, people didn’t necessarily take these photos with the intent of giving you an overview of the landscape. The photos reflect personal interests—maybe someone saw an interesting flower that just happens to be near a biblical landmark. So don’t expect every photo to be relevant or every place to have lots of photos.

Technical Notes

Every night, a program on this server queries the Flickr API to find any new photos taken near the biblical locations. Then it saves these photos to a database, indexed by location for easy retrieval.

The program treats copyrighted and Creative-Commons-licensed photos the same way— thumbnails are OK for copyrighted photos. In the future, I may feature CC-licensed photos more prominently. Only about 2,000 of the 9,500 photos are CC-licensed.

Future Directions

Right now, you can only get to the photos by browsing them by place. I hope to integrate the photos into the Bible atlas somehow.

I’d also like to let people vote on helpful or unhelpful photos to better prioritize the photos.

It may be possible to use Flickr tags to find non-geocoded photos of Bible places, but I’m not sure how to perform such a task automatically. I’m certainly open to suggestions.

What You Can Do with the Photos

I don’t own the photos; the photographers do. If you want to use a photo for something, click on it to go to its Flickr page. Then check its licensing terms. If it’s copyrighted, you need to secure permission from the photographer before you use it. If it has a Creative Commons license, you have more freedom to use the photos, depending on the terms of the license.

I recommend Todd Bolen’s BiblePlaces.com for professional-quality, affordable photos of places in the Holy Land, especially Israel. His photos give you lots of perspectives and work especially well for presentations. Compare Todd’s photos of Engedi to OpenBible’s photos of Engedi, for example, to see how his photos help connect you to the biblical narrative.