Danyel Fisher January 2026
I love the idea of being able to lay out an entire text as an interactive surface. Brad Paley's "TextArc" was an early inspiration for me; so were Alexander's "Serendip", McCurdy's "Poemage", and Keim and Oelke's "Literature Fingerprinting" (VAST '07).
The Tanakh -- the Jewish Bible -- is a rich and deep text, with years of study around it. This project visualizes the Tanakh across a number of different dimensions.
The map is at torahmap.org. It opens on a short story that walks you through it; fold the story away and the whole map is yours to explore.
Search — every verse holding the word you type, in the Hebrew or in the English. A Hebrew word is looked up as a dictionary word by default, so every form it takes is found. It sits beside the overlays: search with one on, and each match rings the overlay's colour.
Overlays, in the order the map offers them:
- Commentary — how much has been written about each verse, counted from Sefaria's links, either in total or by kind of commentary.
- Trop — the cantillation marks that say how the Hebrew is chanted. Pick one to see which verses carry it, and how often.
- Haftarah — each weekly Torah portion and the passage from the Prophets read after it, in Ashkenazi or Sephardi custom.
- Verse Length — how many Hebrew words each verse has.