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.

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Now this is very cool. Was over at the Airbus site after the news came out that they lost the FEDEx order for A380s. Apparently the folks at Airbus have been busy with their virtual cabin tour. If they could channel that productivity…

This is a very well executed virtual world. The transitions between your navigation choices are supremely well executed. The appropriate eye movement to simulate actually walking down the gangway. Well done. I really like this.

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Building a little index of some of my maps over time today reminded me of one of my longest projects. Back in the mid 90s, I started designing a map (a moving map, oohhhh) of the changing boundaries of Habsburg territorial domains. I started with a series of HTML pages with maps generated by Adobe Illustrator. I then got the bright idea to actually turn it into something interactive by using Authorware. Turning it into a flash-based map was the eventual goal. To be honest, it never quite made it into a fully functioning flash map. The HTML was good, Authorware even better, but it has sat unrefined as I got distracted by other things.

Today when I was browing about I came across Maps of War. They are featuring a map called ‘Imperial — History’ which is a beautiful work. There are a number of other wonderful maps, all of which are the moving map of my machinations. A small timeline scrolls across the bottom of the screen as the large, colourful map is panned about to show ‘who has controlled the Middle East’ from 3000 BCE to today. It is wonderfully executed, even letting you jump from date to date on the timeline. The changes in imperial territories are gradual and smooth. Brilliant execution.

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I don’t normally click thru for adverts and the like, but after wtching an episode of zeFrank today the producer sof the movie The Last Kiss had cleverly bought some space. Why did I click? Well, lately zeFrank’s been pretty entertaining and I figured why not support the site. I am glad I did. The site for the movie is quite a nice piece of flash. Nicely open page, lots of white space and a very smooth and, in my mind, thoughtful navigation widget. Small popup from the bottom tied to the movie’s theme, but very user-centric. Works for me. Try it yourself. The incentive was to hear the soundtrack and it happens to strike me as appealing and is running as a loop in the background as I write this. All in all I was struck by the value of this click thru and similarly by the path from a podCast I subscribe to to this movie which presumably has some thought given to demographic tastes in just such a clickthru.

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