Output details

Twitter Gospels. An artwork using the tweets about the Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham

Twitter Gospels was commissioned by CODEC (Christian Communication in a Digital Age) at St John's College University of Durham.

Inspired by the return of the Lindisfarne Gospels to Durham, the Twitter Gospels project is a contemporary digital response to the idea of illuminated lettering and typography. Using a live Twitter feed from a single day as a data source, the initial letter of each chapter is computationally constructed from the comments of individuals as they share their thoughts and responses to the text. The words of each tweet are drawn as a single line used to construct the shape of the initial letter. Data details, such as time the tweet was sent and the twitter picture of the user, generate other elements of the image, such as the position, angle and colour of each line. All text from each gospel is rendered according to the number of tweets each verse has received. The finished printed volume forms a visual documentation of contemporary responses to each of the gospels; a visual snapshot of a specific day, revealing a graphical visualisation of the online social engagement with the text.

The work was shown during the Northern Design Festival 2013, in the exhibition The Craft of Computational Design, Design Centre Gallery Sunderland and presented at the Christian New Media Conference, London 2013