Of Lines, Bubbles and Bars
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html
This article talks about Many Eyes which is a site that teaches people to build new visualizations of their own data. It is IBM’s attempt at showing the online community that there is more to the social internet than just sharing pictures and video clips. The site allows the users to upload any data they would like to visualize and generate interactive displays. These might range from data on fast food to maps of relationships in the New Testament to tag clouds of the McCain Obama Presidential debate transcript. Besides this, users can also download raw data from the site and capture snapshots of the visualizations for comments.
With such a massive increase in people’s information needs, such tools are likely to be useful not just for data analysts or researchers but for everyone. By adding new dimensions to traditional information visualization concepts, they will undoubtedly shape the way people work and collaborate in future. I quote Ben Shneiderman from the NYTimes article – “The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools can be brought to a much wider audience. Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. But sometimes, it’s like driving with your eyes closed. With visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something that will help you — for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers in the data. The great fun of information visualization is that it gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.”
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18516/