Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

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PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

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 was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., 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, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford 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 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 conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database,” he said.

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.

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Tags: experimental web, Innovation, interactive displays, scientific visualization, sophisticated tools, sophisticated visualization, unexpected patterns, visualization tools, youtube

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 10:18 am and is filed under Innovation, NY Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.