Looking at the Bible Through a Word Cloud
What can we learn from using a state-of-the-art data analysis tool, like a word cloud, with the text in the Bible? A word cloud is a visual representation of word frequency. The more often a word occurs within a body of text, the larger it appears in the word cloud. This allows you to see immediately which words are most prominent and maybe most important.
One Bible teacher used word clouds of the Pentateuch to illustrate the important themes in each book. Watch this video of John Greenlee at Ten Mile Christian Church (Meridian, ID):
Rather than explaining it using verbose words, let’s look at some other word clouds of Bible passages.
From Brandon Vogt’s post, The Bible in Word Clouds, here’s a word cloud of the entire Bible, generated by wordle.net:
Blue Letter Bible has an image gallery of Bible word clouds, provided with a note: “The images should not be worshipped or used in the practice of worship in any way.”
Sixty-Six Clouds [cached] has produced aesthetically-pleasing art pieces, described this way: “Each book of the Old Testament, New Testament, and the entire Bible have been beautifully visualized as individual word clouds, presenting viewers with the gist of the Bible at a glance.”
And there are two e-books available with the Bible’s text displayed as word clouds:
The Word Cloud Bible was produced by FindingGod.co.uk and used the English Standard Version Bible as the source text. Each book of the Bible has been analysed and formed into sixty six clouds along with the entire Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament allowing an at-a-glance overview.
The Bible: Word Clouds (by Craig Ross) is an Amazon Kindle e-book with a “series of 69 Clouds represents each passage in the Old and New testament (King James Version).”
Word clouds are just one of many possible ways to visualize the BIble. There’s also a great project at VIZ.BIBLE (what a great domain name!) where a visual dashboard allows you to explore the Bible through visualizations of its passages, people, places, periods.
Have you seen other data visualization of the Bible that you’d like to share? Please add a comment.
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This article is part of the blog series, 66 Ideas for .BIBLE Domain Names, with practical ideas for using .BIBLE domain names. Individuals and organizations can now register .BIBLE domain names that are more shareable, memorable, and meaningful at any accredited registrar.