People share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share graphs, charts and other illustrations they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.
At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, users can upload the more technical data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays.
These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barrack Obama.
The site was created in January 2007 by scientists at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.
Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, says Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford University whose research includes scientific visualization. “When analyzing information, no single person knows it all,” he said. “When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions.”
The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, two IBM researchers at the Cambridge lab. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government.
“We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience,” he said – to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data. The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database.”
The Many Eyes site offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs…