Selected text from a NYTimes article:
"At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the 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 Barack Obama.
...The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. 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 Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.
...Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. “The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books,” Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush’s State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003."
Full article text, NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin
1 comments:
One of the virtues of Many Eyes is that it keeps the users out of the business of graphic design — where they don’t want to be anyway. They’re freed up to do what they do best: gather good data.
I would love to hear what instructors have to say about using this tool in the classroom. Over at explorations in the ed tech world (http://homonym.wordpress.com/2007/12/07/more-visualisation-tools/#comments), there was a brief but enthusiastic thread pertaining to this tool.
Many Eyes has come up in this blog before, in connection with Christian Behrens' interative reference of information displays. Well worth a look. See http://www.bcitltc.com/2008/05/choosing-most-appropriate-information.html
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