Fulfilled: A Collaboration with Kevin Flerlage

‘Once you venture down the road of crafting visualizations from things that truly pique your curiousity and captivate you...nearly everything becomes a possible data visualization…nearly everything.”
-Me

Kevin pinged me back in May after church one day and said he had a great idea…a truly promising candidate for a possible data viz and wanted to know if I was interested in collaborating.

His idea in a crude (but really quite effective sketch)…

The idea: Viz the Old Testament prophecies about Christ and their New Testament fulfillment, and appropriately enough call the piece ‘Fulfilled’ — The idea: Viz the Old Testament prophecies about Christ and their New Testament fulfillment, and appropriately enough call the piece **‘Fulfilled’**

My response to the idea: “I love it. It sounds awesome, and let’s do it!”

I started working with Justin Davis at the end of last year on a viz collaboration that never quite made it over the line, but he introduced me to using Notion as a collaborative project workspace. I loved it, and have used it a couple of times since (Thanks Justin). I stood up a workspace for Kevin and I which allowed us to share docs., ideas, info. about our progress and bounce some things off one another all in a consolidated space.

We then did some manual work to create a dataset from this pdf, and we were off.

One of my goals for this was to have something I would want to hang in my new home workspace when we were done. I also really liked the idea of somehow grouping the prophecy types into broad categories, like what was accomplished here in this Types of Influenza visualization.

Visualization by Natalie Cormier and sourced from https://www.behance.net/gallery/25354537/Types-of-Influenza

Based loosely on that idea, and after some data prep work, here was a very rough conceptual first pass:

The prophecies are laid out by chapter/verse locations in the Bible, and are categorized and connected by the circles in the right side of the viz.

I really wanted something that rendered vertically, and I really loved the dark background with the color selections, but even understanding that it was still very much a work-in-progress at this point, there was still A LOT OF BLACK SPACE that somehow needed to be filled.

Kevin was able to find and touch up some really nice pieces of iconography to add to the circles:

The icons add a subtle artistic touch to the viz!

Perhaps the biggest liberty we took with the viz in order to make better use of the space was to apportion the length of the New Testament to align with the Old Testament. In reality, the books that make up the Old Testament canon are significantly longer in terms of chapters, verses and pages than the New Testament. Thus for this visual, the New Testament verses were evenly spread out by a consistent, uniform factor to ensure that the visual representation of the two testaments lengths appeared to be similar. Additionally, because there are a few books that are relatively small and close together, in terms of canonical proximity, the labels for some of the books were omitted for the sake of visual simplicity. The output is shown below:

I decided to add a very subtle ‘brush-stroked’ cross to the center of the viz, which served both as a visual metaphor to capture the means of fulfillment, and also to add some additional nuance and background variation to the visual: