Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

All of us in CUE's Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.

A bit of history

In 2003, Fernanda created a program to visualize an individual's email archives. Given the personal nature of email, when she ran a study on the visualization she took great pains to ensure that each person's visualization would be completely private. But to her surprise, many of the study participants immediately sought out ways to share the images, mailing screenshots around or just calling friends over to see the program in action. This experiment revealed the intensely social side of visualizations, where discussion and storytelling are just as important as data analysis.

The next year, Martin wrote a program to visualize historical baby name popularity. It became a minor internet fad, but what was most interesting was the discussions that it sparked. In venues ranging from blogs to a forum on a well-known political magazine, thousands of people used the visualization as a starting point for conversations that were sometimes playful, sometimes intensely analytical. Each brought a distinctive perspective to the data, from a knowledge of political history to a simple search for their own name.

Inspired by these experiences, the Visual Communication Lab embarked on a project to encourage sharing and conversation around visualizations. We believe that visualizations gain power when multiple people use them to communicate, and that communication gains power when multiple people can visualize and explore information together. We want to democratize visualization, enabling anyone on the internet to publish powerful interactive visualizations and start their own data conversations. Many Eyes is designed to bring that power to you.

About Us

As part of IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group, we explore information visualizations that help people collectively make sense of data.

Our lab was created in 2004 by Martin Wattenberg, whose life goal is to turn numbers into pictures. Since then the lab has grown to include an eclectic group of researchers and developers. Jesse Kriss is not only a developer but a musician and DJ known for his visualizations of sampling and scratching. Fernanda Viégas visualization virtuoso and graphic designer, came to IBM from the MIT Media Lab. Frank van Ham, massive dataset master and graph drawing guru, as well as the only Dutchman on the team, came from the Eindhoven University of Technology. And developer Matt McKeon, the only one from our team to have experienced the power of visualization in a war zone, came from Georgia Tech.

Thanks

Many Eyes has roots that go beyond our own research group. This site is, in part, the outcome of many inspiring collaborations and conversations.

We are fortunate to be part of the Collaborative User Experience group, a long-standing research lab at IBM that investigates computer-supported cooperative work. We are indebted to our CUE colleagues for having challenged and helped focus our ideas for Many Eyes before a single line of code ever existed.

Many thanks to Jonathan Feinberg for boundless good advice, Jeff Heer for many insights into collaborative visualization technology, Doug Fritz for his help with the first version of the site, and Guilherme Boettcher for last-minute assistance. We also thank Irene Greif, Alex Morrow, Bob Zurek, and Roger Magoulas for important comments.

Finally, we thank the whole alphaWorks Services team for hosting this site!