Information visualization (infovis) has always been something that is done by experts for experts. Think scientists in white lab coats pouring over visualizations of complex data sets in order to further human knowledge. You might also be reminded of economists and financial gurus forever hypnotized by the glow of monitors showing esoteric visualizations of streaming financial data.

But in the last few years there have been a couple of occasions when infovis has dabbed into the public arena to help spark debate and insight in exciting ways. Take, for example, the series of maps of the US that circulated on the Internet and in the media showing “red” and “blue” states during the last presidential election:

As this page from the University of Michigan shows, the first map that circulated showed each state colored in either red or blue depending on whether a majority of voters voted Republican or Democratic. It was a fine representation of the country but one that gave the superficial impression that the “red states” dominated the picture, since they covered far more area than the blue ones. Quickly afterwards, another map came along showing voting patterns in counties instead of states and coloring each county based on percentage of votes in order to represent results more accurately. Finally, a third map distorted the size of counties based on population count (a technique also known as a cartogram), which better represented the high concentration of people in big cities.

In short, the election maps got progressively more sophisticated as people tried to understand voting results. They also illustrated the fact that there are multiple ways of telling the same story. The maps became an essential part of a national debate on politics, a divided country, and what it means to represent complex data.

We believe this kind of collective sensemaking is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather, an exciting example of social data analysis around visualization. This is precisely our intent in having created Many Eyes: to enable people to collectively reason about the trends and patterns they see on the vivid representations of data called visualizations.

We invite you to visit Many Eyes, play with the visualizations, upload data, share your perspective, and get conversations started. Already we are seeing users discuss a plethora of topics ranging from McDonalds nutrition data, to bioinformatics, to the bible.

What’s in your data set?

Welcome to the Many Eyes blog! This will be our home for talking about the site, announcing new features, and expanding on our vision for social uses of visualizations. We are very excited that you have decided to check out this experimental site!