My first goal was to reproduce the pencil drawing with reasonable fidelity.
But this project would have to use vectors to allow for the constant fiddling necessary to produce a decent result at multiple sizes. Most of my image work uses pixels Photoshop is my constant companion. I have a confession: I’d never used Adobe Illustrator before this project. Version 2: Drawing Freehand in Illustrator I did see that the right half of the chart (Friday to Sunday) was much denser than the left half-I’d need to space that out better when creating a digital version. Unfortunately, it also leads to a lopsided chart that progresses down and to the right, creating huge amounts of whitespace on a rectangular canvas. Using the vertical axis this way encodes more information into the chart, allowing you to see everything that happened in a single location simply by following an imaginary horizontal line across the chart. On a map of Holy Week events, this axis approximates a line running from east (Bethany) to west (Emmaus). The vertical axis in this version proceeded from Bethany at the top, through the Mount of Olives and various places in Jerusalem, and ended at Emmaus. Only the last of these changes wound up in the final product, however. I wanted to make four basic changes to the xkcd comic: use the vertical axis consistently to show spatial progression, provide close-ups for complex narrative sequences, include every character and event, and add the days of the week to orient the viewer in time. With data in hand, it was time to put pencil to paper. I also consulted a couple of other study Bibles and books I had readily available to me. Justin Taylor last year published a harmony of Holy Week based on the ESV Study Bible, which had a slightly different take on the timeline (one that made more sense to me in certain areas), so I moved a few things around on my spreadsheet. A few weeks ago, I finished itemizing the people, places, and times in Robertson. It lay dormant for a year (there’s not a lot of reason to publish something on Holy Week unless Holy Week is nigh). I plowed halfway through, but then other priorities arose, and I had to abandon hopes of completing it in time for Holy Week 2010. Robertson’s Harmony of the Gospels, so I started transcribing verse references from the pericopes listed there into a spreadsheet, identifying who’s in each one and when and where it takes place.
#Holy week timeline free
(Data is always the holdup in creating visualizations.) Fortunately, Gospel harmonies are prevalent, even free ones online. Holy Week then came to mind-it involves a limited amount of time and space, it doesn’t feature too many characters, and the Gospels recount it in a good bit of detail: one Gospel often fills in gaps in another’s account. My first thought was to plot the book of Acts this way, but Acts presented too broad a scope to manage in a reasonable timeframe. The format also forces you to consider what’s happening offstage-it’s not like the other characters cease to exist just because you’re not seeing them and hearing about them. Although the charts are really just setting up a joke for the last two panels in the comic, they’re also a fantastic way of visualizing narratives, providing a quick way to see what’s going on in a story at any point in time.
#Holy week timeline movie
The idea for this visualization started in November 2009 when xkcd published its movie narrative charts comic, which bubbled up through the Internet and shortly thereafter became a meme.
So please forgive me if you find this post self-indulgent I’m going to talk about the new Holy Week Timeline that’s on the Bible Gateway blog: It’s always fun for me to learn the process people use to create visualizations, and especially why they made the decisions they did.
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