Visualizing the Gospels
Presentation at the 2005 Society for Biblical Literature meeting, Computer Assisted Research Group.
This talk introduced the Composite Gospel Index (CGI), an XML data structure that aligns the four Gospels into a shared set of pericopes to support web presentation, hyperlinking, and automated text processing. It used the CGI as the data source for a series of treemaps — a space-constrained visualization technique for hierarchical data developed by Ben Shneiderman's HCI lab — comparing the Synoptics to John, examining whether single-source pericopes tend to be shorter, and looking for novel vocabulary within an individual Gospel.
The talk's case was that treemaps could surface patterns across the Gospels — the interplay of shared sources, source-specific vocabulary, and passage length — that are difficult to see by reading the text alone, and that producing and sharing structured biblical data like the CGI was a fruitful direction for research collaboration. The CGI work continued on and was later published commercially as "Composite Gospel: Parallel Passages" (Faithlife, 2017).