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!

I returned recently from the OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy in Istanbul. It was invigorating to talk with such an impressive, globe-spanning group. Attendees–who ranged from academic statisticians, to medical researchers, to directors of government ministries–seemed genuinely excited by Many Eyes and its potential to aid policy decisions and educate citizens.

The OECD itself took the lead on using the Many Eyes technology: To coincide with the World Forum, they created an official OECD Topic Hub, with hundreds of datasets from the OECD Factbook 2007. As Enrico Giovannini, Director of Statistics and Chief Statistician of OECD, put it: “Global discussion based on solid statistics allows society to understand its current state and provides a base from which to make progress and innovate. Providing OECD’s 2007 Factbook data to the public offers citizens around the world an opportunity to collectively explore, discuss and tackle the societal challenges of our time.”

Today Many Eyes holds more than 100 visualizations of the OECD data, from oil prices to CO2 emissions. We encourage you to join the topic hub, create new visualizations, and contribute to the dialog around this trove of information. And we hope that other organizations will join the OECD in opening their data to the Many Eyes audience.

Jon Udell has an excellent post about social data analysis on his blog. He has a nice, quick description of some the issues around data, with a tip of the hat to the UN for recently opening its databases to the public.

Better yet, he has a simple concrete suggestion for data collectors: if you encounter a web site with public statistics, tag it as “publicdata” on del.icio.us. He has kindly offered to “curate” the collection under his own list of publicdata bookmarks. We’ll definitely be adding to the collection, and watching the feed for good sources for Many Eyes visualizations!