More on Visualization of Data - IBM's Many Eyes

From acm technews

IBM's Many Eyes App After One Month

Read/Write Web (03/05/07) Wattenberg, Martin; Viegas, Fernanda B.

The motivation behind the creation of IBM's Many Eyes project was to create societal-scale software by setting up a participatory Web site that was available to the whole of the Internet to test the hypothesis that visualizations have a strong social aspect, according to Many Eyes developers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viegas. Scaling in terms of the audience rather than the data is Wattenberg and Viegas' goal, and in the month since Many Eyes' launch several interesting visualizations have been generated. In one instance, a user of the Many Eyes site employed graph visualization to generate a network schematic of certain New
Testament figures who were mentioned together, and other users were in turn inspired by this visualization to establish visualizations of their own.Another notable visualization facilitated by Many Eyes was a bubble chart listing the top 50 books on LibraryThing, with a highlighting feature that indicated what books a person had or had not read. Wattenberg and Viegas comment that their Web site is one of three notable sites that share "a belief that the Web enables a new, social kind of data analysis; a type of statistical thinking that is both playful and serious."

Click Here to View Full Article

---