We are very pleased to announce that Wordle–the world’s most popular word cloud application–is debuting on Many Eyes! The brainchild of computer virtuoso and esteemed colleague Jonathan Feinberg, Wordle launched last month and has taken the Web by storm. Over 100,000 word clouds have been created so far.

Wordle marks a departure from the more analytical visualizations on Many Eyes. Why bring a self-described “toy” to a site for social data analysis? People have reported finding value beyond entertainment in creating these word clouds. Teachers have used Wordles in classrooms as conversation catalysts; others have created them to express their identities, and scholars have used them to visualize the output of statistical explorations of texts.

And Wordle brings serious typographical considerations into a realm where usually the
biggest choice is “serif vs sans-serif.” Part of the appeal of Wordle lies in a number of clever layout and editing capabilities. First off, it breaks the grid of regular tag clouds by treating all white space available (both in-between words and even inside a single word) as fair game for layout. For instance, a small word could end up appearing inside the “O” of a bigger word. Second, it allows words to be written in any given direction: horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. Third, there are choices of fonts, layouts, and colors. And, if all this weren’t enough, it also allows the creator to remove any word she doesn’t want to have on the cloud (right-click a word and say “remove”). Pretty sweet!

So come play with Wordle! We hope this toy brings you some pleasure and, perhaps, some new insights.

Today we’re featuring two fun tutorials that explain how you can go from finding a data set on the web to uploading it to Many Eyes and creating your own visualizations:

1) The classic “FMUV” (Find, Massage, Upload, Visualize) tutorial by our colleague, Jonathan Feinberg.

2) The brand new “Northstar Nerd Tutorial: Data Visualization via IBM’s Many Eyes” by our user Richard Hoeg.

We are grateful to both of them for putting together such cool presentations–thanks for the help!!

If you happen to have your own tutorial, let us know. We’d love to feature more of these.

Speeches by Obama versus speeches by Clinton. Blogs by men versus blogs by women. Song lyrics from the 80s versus lyrics from the 50s. The list of tag clouds on Many Eyes is a study in contrasts.

There’s no question that our users like visualizing the differences between related texts, but making comparisons by looking at one text a time is difficult. Today we’re launching a new version of our tag cloud, which we hope will allow for easier and clearer analyses.

If you want to compare two texts directly, you can merge them (see the instructions for details) and then see a special “interleaved” tag cloud, which will let you compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in the two texts. You can see an example here:

which shows the US presidential State of the Union address from 2002 and 2003. The 2002 speech is in orange and the 2003 speech is in blue. You can see a number of differences directly: “Afghanistan” shrinks dramatically from 2002 to 2003, and “Saddam” seems to grow in proportion.

Give the new tag cloud a spin! We’re looking forward to seeing what comparisons our users draw next.

We are happy to announce that members of the VCL have two visualizations featured in Design and the Elastic Mind, the new exhibit at the MoMA in New York, which runs from February 24 to May 12, 2008.

History Flow, our visualization of Wikipedia editing history is making an appearance with “chocolate” and “abortion.” Thinking Machine, a visualization of the complex decisions that underlie strategic thinking, reveals the machine’s thought process as it tries to beat you in a game of chess.

The exhibit explores the relationship between science and design in the contemporary world. With over 200 pieces, it spans a variety of fields: from nanodevices to vehicle constructions, from appliances and interfaces to furniture design. Visualization commands one of the six rooms of the exhibit.

If you happen to be in New York City, it’s worth a visit!

Many Eyes will be down for some New Year’s maintenance tomorrow (Jan 5th) from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern time. Sorry for the inconvenience — we’ll be back on Sunday.

You’ve asked for it and we listened! Until recently, interactive visualizations on Many Eyes could only be viewed on the site itself. Today we’re launching the ability to embed an interactive visualization from Many Eyes into your own blog, personal webpage or any other page you think makes sense. For example, if I wanted to show beer consumption per capita in the US in an interactive map, I can do so right here in this blog (click the visualization to load the live version).

You can now use visualizations on Many Eyes in much the same way as you use videos from You Tube or images from Flickr. Visualizations can be embedded by clicking the ’share this’ link and copying an html snippet into your site’s HTML code. We provide two preset sizes, but you can set any custom size by modifying width and height parameters in the embedding code.

We are looking forward to seeing how you, our users, use this capability! So go ahead, upload your favorite data, create a visualization and show it on your site or blog. Here are a couple of inspirational samples to get you started:

Many Eyes users have made maps of statistics ranging from beer consumption to teen births to the regional slang for those odd little bugs that curl into balls. But until now, users have been limited to maps of U.S. states and world countries.

Today we’re launching a revised set of maps. Using data provided by ESRI, Many Eyes now has state and province data for 14 countries, as well as a more detailed world map.

The maps also feature new ways to explore data. In addition to using color, you can set the map to show data values as overlaid circles or “bubbles”. The bubble view has the advantage that it gives each region equal attention, regardless of land area. You can also compare different columns of a data set directly, either with two side-by-side maps or through “small multiple” maps, showing every column of data at once in a grid of thumbnails.

It is also possible to show categorical data on the maps–such as the map showing the Brazilian regions below.

Finally, you’ll notice that regions are now labeled within maps. Some of you had asked for this feature and we agree that it’s long due.

So give the new maps a spin! We’ll be working on more country maps in the next few weeks. As always, we’re interested in your comments and feedback–and maybe even we’ll get to see a map of what those little curly bugs are called in Brazil.

Social data analysis–the kind of analysis supported by social interaction that happens on Many Eyes–is a new and exciting online phenomenon. In fact, a growing community is working to make data public and open up visualization technologies to everyone.

In the spirit of bringing together this emergent community, we joined forces with Maneesh Agrawala and Jeff Heer from Berkeley and are organizing a workshop at the CHI conference next year in Italy. The idea is to examine the design of social data analysis sites today, discuss the role of visualizations in these sites, and explore the different ways users are performing social data analysis.

If you are a researcher or practitioner whose work explores social data analysis and/or social uses of visualizations, consider submitting a position paper to the workshop.

The deadline for submissions is October 31 and directions on submitting a position paper are available on our workshop page.

Come join us in Italy!

Until now, data on Many Eyes was “frozen,” without any possibility of change. If you wanted to correct a mistake or add new data points, you had to upload a new, separate data set to the site and re-create all your visualizations.

Not anymore! Now you can edit any tabular data set you upload to Many Eyes, using a data editor created by intern Eric Gilbert. Any visualizations based on that data will use the most recent version of your data - ensuring that any changes are automatically reflected.

To edit a data set you’ve uploaded, go to the data set’s page and click on the “edit data set” button. There’s a variety of operations you can perform in edit mode, ranging from basic cell edits to more complicated transformations such as deleting entire rows and columns and applying functions to numeric columns.

Here’s an overview of the editing capabilities now available on the site:
- Change a cell value
- Add and delete rows and columns
- Change the sort order of the rows
- Look for possible problems by highlighting outliers and missing values
- Apply functions (like a logarithm) to a column, or divide one column by another

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For now you can only edit tabular data sets; free text data editing is not currently supported. And you can only edit your own data sets, though this may change in the future. Read our editing guide for a full description. And happy editing!

One of the most popular visualizations on Many Eyes is the tag cloud. It’s easy to see the appeal: a tag cloud gives a quick, strong sense of the gist of a text. A good example is the image below, which shows Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech.

But a tag cloud scrambles the flow of the text, reducing it to a collection of disconnected words. What if you want to see more structure, such as the poetic repetition of King’s oratory? What if you want to find recurrent themes, or explore the context in which terms are used? Our new Word Tree visualization is designed to let you analyze text in its original context, seeing the ways that words and phrases are used and repeated throughout
the work. Here’s an example (click for the fully interactive version):

A word tree starts by finding all the occurrences of a search term (in this case, “I”), along with the phrases that follow that term (”have a dream,” “must say,” etc.) It then groups these phrases so that, for instance, all the “have a dream” phrases are placed together. These groups form a tree that shows you some of the structure of the text, with thematic strains emerging. You can choose to view the tree of phrases that follow your search term, or the phrases that lead up to it.

In addition to typing into the search field, you can navigate the word tree by clicking on its branches. A click will narrow the view to an individual branch. Control-clicking a word is like following a hyperlink and will re-center the tree. This is a fast way to navigate a text - and our favorite way of using the visualization!

The word tree is a new visualization technique still in the experimental stage, and we’re curious to hear your feedback.