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OT/NT Refs: Development log, entry #1

July 3rd, 2011

I’m building a JavaScript-based graphic depicting references of Old Testament passages in the New Testament. I originally started with Circos (see earlier post: Old Testament/New Testament reference graphic), but didn’t like the lack of interactivity. Circos makes very pretty static graphics, but I’d like to be able to drill down and adjust the display based on user-input.

I recently discovered Paper.js (http://www.paperjs.org/), which looks very flexible and comprehensive. So, thinking I can build it with Paper.js, I began playing with the library, figuring out how to build something that at least looks like Circos, but without all the extra bells-and-whistles it has that I just don’t need. So far, I have completed three basic graphs…

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Posted in Christianity, Data Visualization, Design, Programming

Paper.js — SVG with JavaScript

June 29th, 2011

“Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.”

I think this is the perfect platform for building my interactive OT/NT reference map app. I’ve bounced between Java (Batik), Processing, static images, and even Flash (which I don’t know, so would have to learn), but none of them really gave me the simplicity and flexibility that Paper.js has.

More info to come… Stay tuned…

HT: CreativeApplications.net

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Posted in Christianity, Data Visualization, Graphic Design, Programming, Website

Old Testament/New Testament reference graphic

June 27th, 2011

Old Testament / New Testament Reference Map

I’ve struggled with a way to visually depict how often (and how) the New Testament writers used the Old Testament, whether explicitly (quotations) or implicitly (allusions). While trying to come up with something useful and visually appealing, I found two separate, yet very useful tools:

New Testament References to Old Testament Scriptures (http://mb-soft.com/believe/txh/ntot.htm) — a list of OT quotations. Thanks to Carl, at mb-soft, for permission to use their data in generating this graphic;
Circos (http://circos.ca) — a collection of perl scripts to generate radial convergence diagrams; originally designed for visualizing genomic data.

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Posted in Christianity, Data Visualization, Graphic Design, Software, Tools, Website

StatJump – Data Search Made Easy

July 11th, 2010

A few days ago, the great Revolutions blog posted (“Visualizing the census“) about a new utility called StatJump where you can visualize data from the 2010 US Census using, of course, R. Pretty impressive. The image here shows the percentage of students graduating High School, by county. There are tons of canned visualizations — just click one of the menu items (e.g. “Social Demographic Data”) on the home page. You can also run your own searches, though it only seems to return the data in a table — i.e. I haven’t figured out how to generate these maps from my own search. Very powerful tool, considering all those data being searched.