* Many Eyes is a fascinating experiment in social networking and advanced data visualization
Even when you are trying to understand what you think is a simple set of data, the challenge of making sense out of it can be daunting unless you can visualize it.
But how to visualize it? Sure, you can haul it into Excel, but Excel’s visualization features are pretty limited. Alternatively you might use something like Tableau, but you’re talking about a serious investment to get the full product for more than a few people.
An interesting alternative is IBM’s Many Eyes, part of IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group.
Many Eyes is a Java-based service that allows you to upload a data set and then graph it in an incredible range of styles. First, you will need to register (for free) with IBM’s Alphaworks and then you can upload your data.
The format for data uploading is a simple comma separated variable file where the values in each row are separated by tabs, and the first row contains the column headers (maximum table size: 5 MB). The data can only be either text or numeric and the first row, the header row, must contain the units in parentheses.
Once uploaded, you can select which type of visualization should be applied to the data. The types include Bar Chart, Block Histogram, Bubble Chart, Network Diagram, Scatterplot, Pie Chart, Treemap, Treemap for Comparisons, U.S. State Map shaded based on state-by-state values, World Map View with each country shaded according to data values, Line Graph, Stack Graph, and Stack Graph for Categories.
Where Many Eyes becomes even more interesting is that you can make your data available to the world so that other people can comment and provide alternative analyses.
Many Eyes is a fascinating experiment in social networking and advanced data visualization that is definitely worth taking a look at.
