Similar Diversity, Information Design and Art

"Similar Diversity is an information graphic which opens up a new perspective at the topics religion and faith by visualizing the Holy Books of five world religions. Communalities and differences of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are shown up in this datavisualization." similardiversity

When I see projects like this, it makes me wish my Graphic Design course had gon into more depth with regard Information Design. Theres are SO many brilliant ways to express simple information, and this is a prime example.

"The visual's basis is an objective text analysis of the Holy Scriptures, and works without any interpretations from the creators' side. Despite - or even because of this abstraction, the artworks are not only working on an informal but also on an emotional level. The viewers should be inspired to think about own prejudices and current religious conflicts."

In Similar Diversity, all characters are aligned alphabetically on the x-axis. their name & arc size is calculated from their total word count in all scriptures. The colored arc segments show the frequency of the word or the character in the particular Holy Books. Bar charts below the names break down the activities of the characters in detail. The arcs connecting the names symbolize similarities of the activities assigned to a character pair.

Realised with Processing and VVVV.
Similar Diversity was exhibited at the Hangar-7, Salzburg: Is it possible to touch someone's heart with design? by Multimediaart and Stefan Sagmeister. via infosthetics.