Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My!
New York Times, Aug. 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin
Many Eyes is a web service much like YouTube and Flickr, only instead of being able to share and tag photos, users can create, share, and tag visualizations of data. The tools used to generate graphical displays of data organization range from text clouds highlighting words most frequently used in a document or speech to creating more traditional circle and bar graphs, but the coolest part is how users are able to discuss the data and representation of the data in comments and how they can post their data representations to their own blogs or websites.
The part that struck me most in the article was the example of how a discussion in the comments lead to the data in question being represented in a different way, thereby leading to a slightly different conclusion.
Relevant lectures: Classification; Documents and Data Models… and Modeling; Social/Distributed Categorization
And as a bonus link incorporating cool data visualization: Debunking myths about the “Third World”
Michael Manoochehri Said,
September 3, 2008 @ 2:54 am
Hi Joyce, great post: I also like the site swivel.com, which offers other possibilities for socially networked graphing. I think we should run the lecture notes of all of our classes through the “Wordle” visualizer to see which words the professors use… and overuse… the most!