Many Eyes: A Site for Social Data Analysis

While visualization is traditionally viewed as an efficient way of transferring a large amount of information from a database into an individual’s head, we believe that visualizations become far more powerful when multiple people access them for collaborative sense-making. To test this hypothesis, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab recently launched Many Eyes, a website devoted to a new social style of data analysis and visualization. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg will discuss the design goals behind the site and provide a preliminary report on the usage patterns we have seen. Viegas is a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab where her work focuses on social and collaborative aspects of data visualization. Previous projects explored e-mail archives, newsgroup conversations, chat-room interactions, and the editing history of wiki pages. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Wattenberg, also a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab, focuses on information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, and art. Wattenberg’s visualization artwork has been exhibited in venues ranging from Ars Electronica to the Whitney Museum of American Art.