Visualizing the CCEL
The Christian Classics Ethereal Library is an online repository that contains digital editions of texts covering the past two millenniums. I created an interactive visualization of these texts to try and answer how they relate to each other and their inspiration as well as how they change over time.
The Facts
What: An interactive visualization of the CCEL collection
When: Spring 2009
Who: Myself under the direction of the CCEL founder, Harry Plantinga
Where: SI649 – Information Visualization with Mick McQuaid
The Story
The Christian Classics Etheral Library consists of over 1000 documents from the history of the Christian church over the past 1800 years. Volunteers have painstakingly digitized and marked-up these documents in an XML dialect for theological texts (ThML) which includes textual metadata, cross-references, and scripture references.
I began the project by getting a sense of the users of the CCEL to understand what type of visualization might be useful for this audience. This task was aided by a survey that was recently conducted of the CCEL users. My next step was determining what questions this library might potentially answer. I decided the audience might find it useful and relevant to see how these scripture references created patterns for various types of texts and how these patterns changed over the chronological span of the collection.
Next, I began sketching various ideas I had as well as digging into the data to determine the rough structure and constraints. Once I settled on a promising concept, I created a lo-fi prototype sketch to fully realize my idea and begin implementation. In order to create a hi-fi prototype, I used Perl to parse the XML files and store the data in a SQLite database. I connected to this database using PHP and AMFPHP as a backend to a Flex 3 frontend.
Overall, I consider the visualization a success, as it revealed some intriguing and surprising findings in the data. Ideally, I would follow up with a round user verification before continuing to iterate of the design.