Many EyesA Site for Social Data Analysis

Fernanda Viégas & Martin WattenbergVisual Communication Lab / CUE / IBM

Information Visualization Uses

Scientific discovery

Personal expression

A conspiracy Playboy centerfolds

The Koran

Journalism and advocacy

The New York Times

Hans Rosling

As a social medium…

Social interaction?

NameVoyager

Not the audience we (or they) expected

“This rules, even though it’s about baby names.”blogger #1

“Cool… By the way, I don’t like babies or children.”

blogger #2

“No I’m not pregnant - one must have sex for that to be possible”

blogger #3

“For a challenge, try finding a name that was popular at the beginning of the sample

(around 1900), went out of style, then came back into vogue recently”

Some blog comments

Some blog comments

“For a challenge, try finding a name that was popular at the beginning of the sample

(around 1900), went out of style, then came back into vogue recently”

“Take a look at Grace, #18 in the 1900s, #13 in 2003, and down in the 200s and 300s

during mid-century”.

“1900’s comeback: Porter. Another one, with a mini-peak in trough: Caroline,”

“More challenges: which is the steadiest popular name? Victor?” and “Which letter has

gone down most consistently? W? Observation: Note the recent upsurge in Y; basically all

due to Hispanic (and some Middle Eastern) names”

Public discourse2004 US presidential election results

County-level election results

Public discourse2004 US presidential election results

Color-coding indicates percentages of voters

Public discourse2004 US presidential election results

Cartogram: counties rescaled according to population

Public discourse2004 US presidential election results

Research Agenda: Massive public visualization

Traditionally visualization researchers look at scaling the size of the data.

But what happens when the audience scales?

1. Massively collaborative

- internet scale: huge potential community

- tens of thousands of viewers, thousands of commentators

- easy for end users

2. Not just for analysis, but for communication, conversation

- discovery

- personal expression

- journalism

- public debate

3. Visual

- not simply collaboration around text

- use human visual intelligence, not data mining

Demohttp://www.many-eyes.com

a site where people:

- view and discuss visualizations

- view and discuss data

- create visualizations from existing data

- upload their own data to visualize

Blogs as community petri dish?

1 User “crossway” uploads co-occurrence

data for biblical figures to Many Eyes

2 Crossway uses the network diagram

tool to create a graph visualization

3 Crossway writes about the

visualization on ESV blog

4 Many blogs (almost 100 by Google’s count)

write about crossway’s blog entry.

5 One of these bloggers posts new data to

Many Eyes—and, of course, blogs about the results.

The long list of responses /

trackbacks on the ESV blog

entry: a discussion about

the visualization and analysis.

Visualization for advocacy (and solace)

1 An active user on Many Eyes 2 He writes about some of his visualizations

3 One of the visualizations shows MS frequency 4 This is reblogged by an MSer who knows Garry (“one my favorite uprights”)

Social data analysis: a growing area

WikiSky

Wikimapia

Google Earth community

Swivel

Data360

Scientific

discovery

Personal

expression

Journalism

and advocacy

Social

interaction

A new medium?

• Science

• Microarray data

• Chemistry

• single nucleotide polymorphisms

• Politics & War

• global CO2 vs. temperature vs. time

• Iraq

•Literature

• words in Swinburne’s poetry

• Pride and Prejudice

• Green Eggs and Ham

• Religion

• Bible

• Potential Converts

• Personal information

• Family trees

• Running, swimming, weight loss

• Nick and Betty’s gift-giving network

• Books read

• Countries visited

• Del.icio.us tags

visual communication lab / CUE / Cambridge

www.many-eyes.com