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!