More data visualizations

[Tom Johnson (via Google Docs)]

Pardon the expression, but there seems to be a real "surge" in infographics
and visual statistics news in recent days.  This post on Tim O'Reilly
blog<http://radar.oreilly.com>(an increasingly informative site, I
find) points us to some interesting
tools out of the IBM shop.  Be sure to check out the site for "Many Eyes."
Impressive, and highly informative visualization of useful data.
 IBM Wants Many Eyes on
Visualization<http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/oreilly/radar/atom/%7E3/80299451/ibm_wants_many.html>
Posted: 23 Jan 2007 11:25 AM CST
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/01/ibm_wants_many.html

By Tim O'Reilly

IBM today announced Many
Eyes<http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home>,
a site for sharing and commenting on visualizations. Martin
Wattenberg<http://www.bewitched.com/research.html>,
who developed the original version of the
treemap<http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/>we use for our book
market visualizations as well as the awesome baby
name voyager <http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html>, and Fernanda
Viegas <http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/fernanda.html>, who worked with
him on the equally awesome history flow visualizations of
Wikipedia<http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/>,
are the geniuses behind this project.

[image: Many Eyes home page]
<http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/ManyEyeshome_page.html>

As with swivel <http://www.swivel.com/>, users can upload any data set, but
the tools for visualizing and graphing the data are much richer. The
visualization
options<https://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Visualization_Options.html>include
US and World maps, line graphs, stack graphs, bar charts, block
histograms, bubble diagrams, scatter plots, network diagrams, pie charts,
and treemaps. The site isn't yet live, but should be very shortly.
Meanwhile, you can get a good sense of the types of graphs available by
checking out the visualization
gallery<http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/browse/visualizations>
.

I asked Martin and Fernanda how they compared themselves to swivel, and
Fernanda replied:

You also asked if we see our site as "Swivel for visualization". That phrase
isn't quite accurate (any more than Swivel is "Many Eyes for data" ;-). Both
our site and Swivel are examples of a broader phenomenon, which we call
"social data analysis," where playful, social exploration of data leads to
serious analysis. At the same time the two sites fall on different ends of a
spectrum. Swivel seems to have some neat data mining technology that finds
correlations automatically. By contrast, we've placed our emphasis on the
power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. My guess is that both
approaches will be successful because social data analysis is a powerful
idea.

Martin added:

In Many Eyes our goal is to "democratize" visualization by offering it as a
simple service. We also think that there's something special about
visualizations that gets people talking, so we placed a big emphasis in
design and technology to let people have conversations around the
visualizations.

Personally, I'd love to see swivel and manyeyes working together, as swivel
already has some great data sets, but has only a limited number of graphing
tools. But that's an exercise for the future. For now, data wonks can just
rejoice that both sites exist, and should start exploring, and as Martin
says, conversing about what they find. I love both of these sites.

-- tj

==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                                 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com                 tom at jtjohnson.us

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
                                                   -- Buckminster Fuller
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