Many Eyes is an outstanding initiative by IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group. Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Its main goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis, by allowing anyone to submit their own data set or visualize any other from their growing database.One of hundreds of interesting visualizations in Many Eyes is the Map of social relationships in the New Testament. "The data set behind the visualization isn't perfect. While it disambiguates people with the same name (John the apostle and John the Baptist, for example), it only tracks occurrences in the same chapter. In other words, just because two people appear in the text near each other, that doesn't mean they have a relationship. So you have Joseph the Old Testament patriarch linked to Jesus even though they obviously weren't contemporaries".
To better understand the complex relationships in the New Testament you can go to the NTN Semantic Knowledge Base. You might also be interested in a treemap diagram of similar data.
