The past eighteen months, I’ve participated in several life changing Bible studies produced by Jeff Cavins.
The point of this blog, however, is not to share the impact they’ve had on me. The objective is to share intriguing learnings about visual thinking and the value of organizing content and infographics the courses have taught me.
Visual Thinking and Organizing Content
At the heart of Jeff Cavins’ “Bible Timeline” series is a visual thinking and teaching method.
He organizes the books of the Bible based on the type of literature each represents. To help readers understand the “story” the Bible contains, Cavins focuses on fourteen narrative books. These books span twelve specific historical periods. Other books are slotted to fill in details or expand understanding of what happened during each period.
To visually communicate this multi-faceted content, Jeff Cavins developed a color-coded infographic. The Bible Time infographic illustrates multiple patterns within the Bible’s content.
Cavins creates additional insights into the content by highlighting and organizing content in multiple ways. These include the following organizing concepts:
- Sequential – A beginning to end arrangement of selected content to create a story
- Chronological – An earliest to latest historical timeline of broader events
- Thematic – Specific related message and content grouped together
- Purpose / Function-Based – Arranging pre-existing content in new ways to highlight more subtle patterns (i.e., geographic movement within the Bible)
I had an opportunity to see Jeff Cavins present in November 2013 and videoed part of his talk where he discussed the strategic thinking behind developing the Bible Timeline infographic.
If you’re interested in creating visual thinking insights from complex content, it’s worthwhile to view Cavins’ discussion about organizing content and using an infographic to communicate his message.
While you may think this is far afield, if your organization has a wealth of content that’s been created by multiple people at various times for different purposes that would benefit from SOME type of organization to make it easier to use, there’s a lot to learn here.
As a blogger with more than a half million words written (vs. the Bibe’s nearly 800,000 words), I definitely think about the lessons learned in creating the Bible Timeline and how they apply to adding value to our Brainzooming content.
What about your organization? What lessons are there here for organizing your content to better tell your story? – Mike Brown
