Thursday, July 8, 2010

Many Eyes - How the same data set can tell different stories

Lately a lot of websites have been talking about a Brazilian researcher called Fernanda B. Viegas (nyt, cnn); She’s a young specialist in Visual Communication and together with Martin Wattenberg she created the site ManyEyes where people can share data bases and try a variety of forms to visualize data.

You can see a little demonstration of the site in a special Brazilian TED Talk

or a more complete one in a seminar at Stanford University (download).

Some interesting things available at the site:

  • Word Tree for Text Analyses (10th minute at TED video)
  • Social networks visualizations
  • A lot of databases
  • All kinds of different ways to visualize data and check how others visualize them

As free samples:
US Population Projections by Age 2010-2050

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Surnames Scatterplot in the US 2000
*obs. Try to find typical Brazilian surnames

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