[Yr7-10it] www.many-eyes.com

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Data can be organized many ways on Many Eyes.

By ANNE EISENBERG Published: August 30, 2008 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?em

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. 

Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and 
other visuals they create  to help them analyze data buried in 
spreadsheets, tables or text.

At an experimental web site, Many-Eyes, (http://www.many-eyes.com), users 
can upload the data they want to visualize,  then try sophisticated tools 
to generate interactive displays. (may need patience; up-grading servers).

These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a 
display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators 
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. 

(EG: www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/31/business/31novelCA02ready.html)

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. 
in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a 
group. 

Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps 
visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering 
unexpected patterns in the data.


Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat 
Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research 
includes scientific visualization. 

“When analyzing information, no single person knows it all,” he 
said. “When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You 
get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions.” 

The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, 
two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. 

Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated 
visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals 
in academia, business and government. 

“We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience,” he said — to 
people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of 
data. 

“The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from 
the database,” he said.

The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, 
from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map 
relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are 
among the popular tools. 

Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for 
visualizing numerical data. 

“The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload 
blog posts, and entire books,” Dr. Viégas said, so the site added 
techniques for unstructured text. 

One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side 
the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, 
President Bush’s State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.

Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, 
zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an 
image, Dr. Wattenberg said.

Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web 
sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. 

"It’s great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats on their 
blogs", Dr. Viégas said. "So why not a visual that gives you some insight 
into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone 
else, something completely different, and that’s where the conversation 
starts."

Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a 
blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for 
group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of 
his series called “NorthStar Nerd Tutorials.” 

“Many Eyes is unusual, because it takes advantage of the collective 
intelligence of a group to get more out of a data set,” he said. 

For the tutorial, Mr. Hoeg exported enrollment data for graduate 
engineering students to the site, then used one of the tools there to 
display the information in various ways. 

“I wanted people to understand that you can take the same data and have it 
tell lots of different stories,” he said. 

Dr. Wattenberg noted an example from the site. In charting a particular 
topic — deaths resulting from human violence in the 20th century — one 
user originally presented a bubble graph in which the size of the circles 
represented the number of casualties tied to an event — for instance, 
World War I or World War II. 

After discussion on the site about the substantial growth in population 
during the 20th century, the originator offered two new time-based 
visualizations of the data, one a line graph and the other a stack graph — 
plotting the number of casualties against this growing population. 

“You could see a new downward trend emerge,” Dr. Wattenberg said. “Violent 
deaths declined in the latter decades of the century. It’s a slightly more 
optimistic view.”

Ben Shneiderman, a professor in the computer science department at the 
University of Maryland, College Park, and a pioneer in information 
visualization, says sites like Many Eyes are helping to democratize the 
tools of visualization. 

“The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools 
can be brought to a much wider audience,” he said.

Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. 

“But sometimes it’s like driving with your eyes closed,” he said. “With 
visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something 
that will help you” — for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers 
in the data. 

“The great fun of information visualization,” he said, “is that it gives 
you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.” 

A version of this article appeared in print on August 31, 2008, on page 
BU4 of the New York edition. 
--

:) Many-Eyes
Stephen Loosley
Member, Victorian
Institute of Teaching 

Stephen at MelbPC.org.au
Stephen at McMedia.com.au

Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and clarity.
 - The Prince and the Pauper

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.
 - Mark Twain

:)


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