I wasn’t quite sure what talk I was going to attend for the fourth session, but then I read a bit more of the summary of the talk in room 2 and was quite excited to hear about the Zoomable User Interface Bible. Mr. Sean Boisen from Logos Bible Software has developed a prototype unique way to interact with the Bible that I thought was fantastic. It reminds me a bit of applying something like MindManager to the Bible as the tool uses a visual representation to interact with the Bible.
Sean’s inspirations included his past manuscript study methods, treemaps (I found these fascinating and plan to check them out more), and zoomable interfaces (such as Google Earth and the iPhone).
The Zoomable Bible is a spatially-oriented view of the entire text of the Bible. You can then zoom down into it several times to interact with the text. There is also the possibility of embedding images, links, and more into this Bible so that if you zoom in far enough you can access this data. The Zoomable Bible uses zooming and panning for navigation rather than the old ways of interacting such as scrolling and moving your mouse all over the place.
The presentation should be posted on the internet in the near future and I’ll post a link to it here so you can check it out yourself. Here are a few photos of the prototype Sean created.
Almost full view of the Bible
Zooming in on the Book of Job
Zoomed in to read Job by verse
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palmsolo's Mobile Life 
#1 by Antoine of MMM on January 26, 2008 - 08:56
This is something that woud be great on large screen devices or even in presentations. On smaller devices, doing this like a ‘tag cloud’ might be a better way to start the zooming. Making thar cloud/view editable with user generated comments and a simple search utility makes this a very slick bible. Neat!