The Zoomable Bible: Getting the Big Picture
"The Zoomable Bible: Getting the Big Picture" was presented at BibleTech:2008. It's a critique of how centuries of print conventions — scrolls, then books, then digital Bible software — have shaped Bible navigation into something fundamentally linear and "zoomed in": you either memorize a semantically opaque chapter-and-verse scheme or rely on search, but you rarely see the whole text or its structure at once.
Drawing on the information-visualization literature — Shneiderman's "overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand" mantra, Tufte, and prior work on treemaps (see also my 2005 talk on visualizing the Gospels) and zoomable interfaces like Google Earth — the talk proposed a "Zoomable Bible" prototype built on the Piccolo2D toolkit. It used strip treemaps to lay out the entire Bible as one navigable, spatially-oriented canvas that could be panned and zoomed rather than paged through, and closed candidly with a list of open problems (font/text scaling, search-result highlighting, alternate groupings) rather than claiming a finished product.