manyeyes.gifA few weeks ago I blogged about Swivel, a cool place for kids to play with data and com­ment on oth­ers data­sets and visu­al­isa­tions. Today Geof­frey blogged about an IBM Alphaworks site that takes this concept in a dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion.

At Many Eyes, the emphasis is on explor­ing visu­al­isa­tions and the ease with which you can take a data­set and try on a few dif­fer­ent ways of present­ing the data. You upload a data­set simply by copy­ing the data from Excel and past­ing it into a dia­logue on their site. The page then gives you a view of your data to con­firm that the engine has chosen the appro­pri­ate data types for your data columns and you are good to go. You can quickly and pain­lessly click on a type of chart and your res­ults are almost instantly vis­ible. Popup menus let you tweak with the dis­play and when you are com­fort­able with the res­ults you provide a title and descrip­tion and oth­ers can then wit­ness your handi­work. Of note is that there are trans­ition effects when you alter aspects of your visu­al­iz­a­tion. The charts do not simply redraw…they ‘magic­ally’ evolve to your requests. This is superb atten­tion to detail.

You can now even embed the res­ult into your blog:

With data­sets and visu­al­isa­tions uploaded and gen­er­ated users are invited to com­ment on these much like Swivel. There doesn’t seem to be an enorm­ous num­ber of com­ments on the IBM site rel­at­ive to Swivel. I sense that swivel is dir­ec­ted more towards those that have a spe­cific prob­lem they are wrest­ling with and are famil­iar with the swivel com­munity. The IBM site is prob­ably slicker tech­no­lo­gic­ally and offers a wider col­lec­tion of the latest visu­al­isa­tion trends, more indi­vidu­ally focussed towards giv­ing you the oppor­tun­ity to try out some new tech­niques to sat­isfy your own needs. Both sites are slick in gen­eral. I am going to have to play with this IBM one some more.

It raises a big ques­tion for me and that is: Do we actu­ally live in a numer­ate soci­ety? I am not sure I con­sider myself numer­ate at times and won­der whether people think numer­ic­ally in gen­eral. Moreover, do most people really care about the stat­ist­ical nuances that we are try­ing to play with here? Well, sites like this will cer­tainly begin to answer these questions.

If you like a good tutorial, try the video provided by Jonathan Fein­berg. Well done.