IBM's "Many Eyes"

I was at an IBM data center today and like with any center such as that were plenty of blinking lights, maps and charts and TV shows. And a screen which showed Many Eyes "a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns"

MIT Technology Research writes "Many Eyes teaches people how to build their own visualizations so that they can dive into complex, multidimensional data. Since its launch in January, the site has amassed nearly 2,000 visualizations that illustrate, for example, the carbon emission of cars and the nutritional information of food on a McDonald's menu."

The IBM site provides some 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."

Comments

[Deepak]

Tools like ManyEyes, Swivel and Gapminder (my favorite) are a wonderful new addition to the pantheon of online tools. The ability to pull in data and graph it is only step one in open data sharing and mining, which, hopefully will only pick up in the years to come.