This piece has been around for a while, but recently I have been very enthralled by the power and possibilities of processing. Some of the other pieces on the processing website, but this one stuck out to me because of it’s beautiful use and understanding of graphics, language and typography.

The piece was built using processing which is an open source, free software based on Java. I recently started coding in processing and have since fallen in love with it. They have wonderful examples on their site, and they have great access to reference and extension libraries, and is free to download. The software comes with tons of free examples to get you started working with it’s different capabilities. You should go check it out at processing.org. Read on!

The project takes all of the text for all the major religions of the world, uses a processing sketch to analyze the text and create relations between all of the holy texts based on how often a word appears and how each of those words relates to the other words in the texts. It sounds a bit confusing but head on over to the Similar Diversity website and they do a wonderful job documenting the journey of the piece and talking about the background behind the project and how it functions.

Here is a pretty interesting quote from the website:

“The analysed wordcount is in total 2.903.611 (15.625.764 characters).
English translations of the Holy Books, downloaded as digital versions from the internet, were used for textual analysis. The creators cannot grant absolute correctness of analysis for several reasons.

As in Christianity, Islam and Judaism only one book is building the religion’s base, Hinduism and Buddhism are referring to several scriptures. In addition to that some of the books, like the Buddhist Pali Canon, are not completely translated yet. We were not able to consider all scriptures, the most spreaded ones were chosen.”

What I find so wonderfully successful about this project is it’s deep awareness of so many different aspects of art; these include language, typography, color, programming, graphic design, and many more that i’m sure I am overlooking here.

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