Many Eyes has been having some resource problems today, so we’ve taken it down temporarily while we investigate. Apologies for the unplanned outage; we hope to have things back up and running by 3:00pm EST.

We strive to create visualizations that help people see and exchange information in novel ways. Our designs aim to transform visualization from a solitary activity into a collaborative one.

We are looking for a PhD-level researcher who is excited by data, visualization, and communication. To find out more, see our job posting.

This isn’t directly related to Many Eyes, but we’d like to share some news about our latest project. Today, we are launching the public beta of Many Bills, a web-based visualization of US Congressional legislation. This tool provides a peek into the internals of Federal bills, making it easier to understand and navigate these dense texts. Its interface offers users an overview of this complex dataset while still allowing for full access to the original text.

This project is located at http://manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com, and we would love for you to try it out and tell us what you think. Many Bills has its own blog at http://manybills.researchlabs.ibm.com/blog and its own Twitter account.

We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing your discoveries!

We apologize for recent unplanned site outage – sometimes we are hit by circumstances outside of our control. This was one of those times.

Unfortunately, in addition to the unplanned downtime, we have a scheduled maintenance window coming up.

From Friday, September 4th at 1pm EDT until Tuesday, September 8th at 12pm EDT, Many Eyes will be down due to physical site maintenance.

There are currently no maintenance windows scheduled for the remainder of the year. Thanks for your patience.

From Tuesday, August 18 at 6pm EST until Wednesday, August 19th at 9am EST, Many Eyes will be down for scheduled maintenance. We’re making some changes to our login system and doing some data migration. It may be back up before then, so feel free to check back early.

Photo credit: Flickr user billaday

As we work to improve Many Eyes, we’d like to hear your opinions on what’s important.

We’ve put together a short survey that includes questions about your use of Many Eyes, the importance of possible future features, and your use of other tools for exploration and analysis.

If you’d like to help drive the future direction of Many Eyes, please take our survey!

If you’ve had trouble logging in, you’re not alone. This is due to a connectivity problem on our end that will, we hope, be fixed soon. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and please try again soon.

When you read a book it can feel as if you’re encountering a series of hidden networks–characters who talk to each other, ideas that relate to each other. Our new visualization, the Phrase Net, is designed to bring some of these networks to light.

The image below shows a phrase net for Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice. To create this network, we start by choosing a connecting word: “and” The visualization then searches the entire novel for “linking phrases” of the form “word1 and word2″. Each of these phrases defines a connection between two words. The resulting graph shows clusters of related concepts and people.

The size of each word shows how many times it occurred in a linking phrase. The arrows show the order of the occurrences. Darker blue words occurred typically as the first word in the linking phrase, while light blue words occurred in the second position.
Other connectors give different views. The word “at” provides a network of places in the the book.

In addition to a standard menu of phrases, we let you type in your own phrase patterns. Use an asterisk to stand for a word–any pattern with exactly two asterisks will give rise to phrase network. (Advanced users can type in full “regular expressions” as well.). You can read more about the Phrase Net on its description page here.

Since the Many Eyes phrase net is based on simple pattern matching, it certainly doesn’t tell you everything about the underlying network of concepts in a piece of text. But we’ve found it to be a surprisingly interesting tool for viewing books, speeches, and other unstructured documents. We’re curious to hear your comments on this visualization technique–and to see what networks you come up with!

Back in October, we invited the readers of our blog to try out the private beta of a new side-project, Many Eyes Wikified. We’re happy to announce that the Wikified beta is now open to the public!

Some background
We use wikis a lot here at IBM: to track projects, gather links, and draft documents. They can be very useful for casually organizing information.

Meanwhile, we’ve been thinking about reporting and dashboard systems lately. These are specialized business tools that feature several screens with multiple views into a big dataset. They can be extremely powerful, but also complicated to set up and use.

We decided to build a tool that combines the informal appeal of a wiki with some of the visualization capabilities of a dashboard-like system. And so Wikified was born!

What it does

Many Eyes Wikified is a “remix” of Many Eyes, using a wiki markup syntax to enable you to easily edit datasets and lay out visualizations side-by-side.

It also functions just like a normal wiki: you can collaboratively edit pages, add explanations or documentation to your visuals, see a page’s edit history, and revert changes.

Unlike a normal wiki, you can embed content from your blog or other data source within Wikified and visualize it. You can also embed the content you make in Wikified elsewhere, just like you can in Many Eyes:

Feel free to give it a try! You can log in with your existing Many Eyes username and password (although the login process might be a bit different from what you’re used to). Wikified is very much a work-in-progress, so we’re eager to hear your feedback!

In a departure from our usual posts, we’ve got some news about the hidden workhorse of Many Eyes: the server side application. If you’re interested in the technology behind Many Eyes, read on. If not, feel free to skip to the last paragraph to see what this means for the future of the site.

Since November 8th, you’ve been using the new Ruby on Rails version of Many Eyes! You may have used it already if you’ve used the New York Times’ Visualization Lab.

Doing a full rewrite of an application is not something to be taken lightly, but we’re confident that the move to Rails has been well worth it. It’s been a joy to develop, and the site is running faster than ever.

“Faster?” We can almost hear you say. “I heard Ruby was slow!”

While it’s true that Ruby isn’t the fastest executing language around, Ruby is faster in a few important ways. It’s taken less time and fewer lines of code to produce equivalent functionality in Ruby, and it’s been easier to optimize the application. In the end, this means our application actually runs faster.

Last but not least, there have been a few small changes to the site, such as the new dataset tag cloud and the ability to change your display name and profile under “my stuff.”

So what does this mean? It means that Many Eyes is now running on a system that is more flexible and easier to maintain, which will allow us to add new features more quickly. With that in mind, we would love to hear your feedback! What would you like to see on the site next?