Making Your Data Sing

Today I had a won­der­ful dis­cus­sion with Fernanda Vié­gas and Mar­tin Wat­ten­berg of IBM’s Visual Com­mu­nic­a­tions Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes web­site that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launch­ing their site, they have been hard at work bring­ing us new means of visu­al­iz­ing data­sets and provid­ing a social net­work for data­heads. My earlier art­icle I spoke glow­ingly of the atten­tion to detail that the site exhib­ited and wealth of chart­ing oppor­tun­it­ies offered. I also prom­ised I would play more with the site.
In the last few months I have had an oppor­tun­ity to just that. I have also been pleased to see some of the addi­tions to the tools avail­able on the site. Most recently I was thrilled to dis­cover that Mar­tin had been play­ing with some of the data that I had uploaded and in con­junc­tion with one of their interns Lee Byron. They came up with a won­der­ful flash-based tool to pro­duce inter­act­ive mat­rix charts allow­ing sim­ul­tan­eous rep­res­ent­a­tion of three vec­tors of data. In their blog art­icle on the new tool, Mar­tin demon­strates the res­ults that can be achieved using my data on the 17th Par­lia­ment of Canada.
They have also imple­men­ted a fea­ture called Topic Hubs that allow for loose asso­ci­ations of related data­sets and visu­al­iz­a­tion to encour­age dis­cus­sion. I was grat­i­fied to hear that they have some more excit­ing addi­tions up their sleeves and that they will be rolling these out shortly.
I have benefited from the Many Eyes tools in my own work by gain­ing access to some innov­at­ive chart­ing tools such as bubble charts an tree charts that have helped me to gain insights into my own data that remain hid­den to me in numer­ical tables. I used the Many Eyes tools extens­ively in the pro­duc­tion of the blog entries on MPs Occu­pa­tions. To cre­ate these visu­al­iz­a­tions, I went to the Gov­ern­ment of Canada web­site and screen scraped data on indi­vidual MPs from a set of spe­cific ses­sions of Cana­dian Par­lia­ment. I entered this data into Excel for tidy­ing and manip­u­la­tion and then uploaded these tables to Many Eyes. Their tools pro­duced superb tree charts with lim­ited input. Although their tools pro­duced very pretty charts, I needed to do fur­ther graph­ical manip­u­la­tion, so I did screen cap­tures and fur­ther pol­ished the charts in Adobe illus­trator before embed­ding the res­ults in the blog posts. I am told that export is an area where we will see some enhance­ment on the Many Eyes kit­bag.
The chart below is an example of the new Mat­rix chart that Many Eyes can pro­duce. I uploaded a slightly enhanced data­set of occu­pa­tions of the mem­bers of the first Cana­dian par­lia­ment with mem­bers delin­eated by party, con­stitu­ency, occu­pa­tion and province. I then chose Mat­rix­chart and played around with data place­ment using the handy new popup choice fields in the tool. The res­ults are shown below. Click­ing on the chart will take you to the many Eyes site where you can try play­ing with this data­set of any of the other ones con­trib­uted by members.

Many Eyes is a won­der­ful tool for those that find data fas­cin­at­ing or bet­ter appre­ci­ate data when it is presen­ted visu­ally. Keep tuned to their blog for excit­ing enhance­ments and thanks to all involved at the Visual Com­mu­nic­a­tions lab for all the hard work and vis­ion behind these tools.