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?
February 1st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Looks fantastic. Would love to keep up on the blog–is there an RSS feed?
February 1st, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Yes! Just put the regular http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/blog url into your favorite feed reader, and it will automatically detect the feed. (We’ll add a more obvious link, too.)
February 10th, 2007 at 3:50 am
Very promising site - very good overall look and feel, well done!
Are you very keen to develop new visual and tool from blog comments, or are you mainly looking for good business apps/data sets to deploy the existing suite against?
one of my current areas of interest is in considering ways of displaying business risk assessment scores in an intuative way for managers (maybe based on business org, process, action type). specifically looking for approaches to make a suggested area of interest / direction jump off the screen. Tree diagrams are good, but you have to investigate them, which apparently is a little bit of a bore. Any ideas?
February 12th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
This is a terrific project and resource. I’m thinking of sending my graduate research methods students here as a tool for sharing and giving peer feedback on their pilot research coursework.
While I’m an enormous fan of the shared, collaborative leanings of the tool, I hope this will eventually be developed into a resource for private data storage and graphing as well. Also, it would be swell to have options for drilling down to more specific areas on the US map. (Global too, but I suspect the US would be easier to have standardized w/prexisting FIPS codes.)
February 12th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Great stuff! IBM is amazing. Just one thing, is there a way that we can download the data sets as a csv file?
Would there be any problem uploading a 100MB data?
February 14th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Hi Philip,
Unfortunately, you currently can’t upload 100MB data sets to Many Eyes. The limit per data set is 5 MB.
There is no way you can download the data sets ss csv files either. However, you can view each data set in its entirety as a text file.