IBM's Many Eyes App After One Month
This is a guest post written by two of the researchers behind IBM's Many Eyes app, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas. R/WW profiled Many Eyes, a "shared visualization and discovery" service, back in January. Many Eyes has been running for a month now, so in this post Martin and Fernanda showcase some of the best visualizations, so far, and talk about the future of "social data analysis" on the Web.
Background: How Many Eyes Evolved
The idea for Many Eyes came from some
surprising behaviors that we each serendipitously observed.
Several years ago, Fernanda was working on an email visualization program. When it came time to run experiments, she was extremely careful to let her subjects know that visualizations of their email would be completely private - the assumption was that no one would ever want to reveal their personal mail. To her surprise, her subjects immediately began to ask for ways to share the visualizations with others! In fact, it turned out that the process of storytelling and reminiscing was one of the most valuable aspects of the visualizations.
Martin's serendipitous experience came two years later, when he created a baby name visualization to illustrate a book that his wife had written. After the site went live, he spent an embarrassingly long time doing Google searches to find out what people were saying about it. His self-centered surfing was rewarded with the discovery of many large, detailed blog conversations in which users - who often had no immediate interest in naming babies - speculated about various trends and patterns they'd found in the data. In aggregate, the analysis of the data was both deep and broad - uncovering a huge amount of information.
These two experiences were the motivation behind Many Eyes. We wanted to find out whether these experiences were flukes, or whether there really was a powerful social angle to visualizations. And we felt that the only way to find out was to create a participatory website available to the entire internet - to create not social software, but societal-scale software.
This represents a break from conventional visualization research. Traditionally, computer scientists concentrate on scaling in terms of data, making visualizations work for bigger and bigger databases. Our agenda is to scale the audience, not the data.
Many Eyes Visualizations homepage
Social use of visualizations - what's happened in the last month
Many Eyes was launched a little more than a month ago. By the way, the original Read/Write Web article listed "Fernanda and Martin" as the developers - in fact everyone in the IBM Visual Communication Lab has worked on the site, and probably the two of us did less of the actual development than anyone else!
So what has happened? Was our hypothesis about the social use of visualizations correct? It's too early for any scientific conclusions, but that won't stop us from giving some anecdotal evidence ;-) Here are three anecdotes:
1. One of the earliest users of the site uploaded a set of data that described which figures in the New Testament were mentioned together, and then used our graph visualization tool to create a network diagram of these figures. You can see this visualization here (screenshot below) and the blog post they wrote about it here. This network got picked up by a whole community of bloggers who were interested in the statistical analysis of the bible - we counted more than 100 trackbacks on the ESV blog where it was posted.
New Testament figures visualization
This in turn led other users to upload their own data to create visualizations, such as the proportions of New Testament authorship:
New Testament authorship visualization
2. Another user uploaded a set of data on global warming. In this case, most of the discussion occurred on the site itself - where there was a heated (if you'll pardon the pun!) debate over the meaning of CO2 and temperature trends in recent years.
Global warming visualization
3. A frivolous example, that nonetheless shows the social aspects of the site, can be seen in this visualization of books. Entitled "Harry Potter is Freaking Popular", the diagram is a bubble chart that shows the top 50 books on LibraryThing. In this case, the comments hold not much analysis. But we started a little game: we realized that we could use the highlighting feature of the chart to show which books a person had (or hadn't) read. As of this writing, a dozen people had participated in the "game" of showing what they had or hadn't read.
Library books visualization
What's Next?
A lot, we hope! We think that social data analysis is a lively area right now and we are not the only ones exploring this space - two other sites of note are Swivel and Data360. Each of the 3 sites has a different emphasis, but what we have in common is a belief that the web enables a new, social kind of data analysis; a type of statistical thinking that is both playful and serious. We'd argue that this is just one way in which visualization is becoming a new and important mass medium - but that's a blog entry for another day...
Swivel
Data 360
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I can see that such tools could be extremely useful in the area of prediction markets (such as NewsFutures and StrategyPage) -- i.e. marketplaces that tap into collective intelligence (see also Google's piece on this here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/putting-crowd-wisdom-to-work.html)
ke interesante
I love data visualization
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4237353244338529080
This looks like a fantastic application, congratulations..
Hi,
Interesting post, thanks a lot !
Visualization is one of the key trends on the Web right now.
Some thoughts that came to my mind:
- Visual search engines are on the rise (e.g., www.kartoo.com)
- Hans Rosling (one of the hottest speakers at events worldwide right now (Le Web 3, TED 2006 etc.) and his www.gapminder.org. Recommended stuff for advanced presentations with different dynamic visualizations.
- "Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me and I understand." Visualization is like showing and as a result more effective and efficient than raw data (especially relevant for the younger generations grown up in a multimedia culture and society). Involving in the cases you described is even more powerful. The latter might evolve in the visual wiki's for complex problem solving.
- Don Tapscott / Wikinomics (2006) is an interesting book in this respect as he shows different examples of collaborative research.
I wrote a fairly comprehensive (and critical) comparison of Swivel and Many-Eyes, in case anybody's interested
I think both services are great, and clearly deserve more publicity. Jeremy's link to the Hans Rosling talk above is also well worth checking out.
Many Eyes - Many Genes? IBM Life Sciences?
I created a similar tool for bioinformatic information.
This allowed collaboration between scientists.
Could this visualization tool be used to represent bioinformatics information? Could medical expert systems (Mycin) use the relationships shown as an aid to patient diagnosis? Watch disease travel through a hospital?
http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/healthcare/index.jsp
Evolutionary bacterial resistance + comparative genomics:
New studies by Rice University scientists suggest a possible answer; the speed of evolution has increased over time because bacteria and viruses constantly exchange transposable chunks of DNA between species, thus making it possible for life forms to evolve faster than they would if they relied only on sexual selection or random genetic mutations. Microarrays for disease and immune systems may be modelled graphically?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070129114638.htm
Could Many Eyes track transposons from the ocean to diseases and to immune systems? Visualizing evolution?
http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-06/cover/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20060323-16451600-bc-us-vesivirus.xml
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/304/5667/58
Cancers derived from viruses might also be revealed?
http://www.cshl.edu/public/releases/07_harmless_viruses.html
Could IBM develop a quantum computer based DNA/biochip visualization search engine based on Many Eyes?
How will R language for microarrays interface with Many Eyes?
http://www.bioconductor.org/
Quantum computers are now commercially available:
First Commercial Quantum Computer:
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/01/big-news-quantum-computer-demo-dates.html
http://www.dwavesys.com/
Quantum computing:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/quantum-computer.htm
http://www.qubit.org/
Quest for the Quantum Computer by Julian Brown
Grovers Algorithm-Quantum database search
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm
http://www.qubit.org/
Quantum Genetic Computing - QGC:
Use Grovers Algorithm to correlate genetic information.
Could IBM create a Quantum Genetic Computer (QGC) from D-wave system? Building a visual interface to complex data.
Could a lab-on-a-chip/QGC technology sample patient blood and draw diagnosis similar to Mycin?
Machine based medical diagnostics?
http://www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/news/Lipkin_GreeneChip.html
Could IBM pioneer Mycin/QGC for the physician and for the home?
How will Genbank and Human Genome data (Oracle) integrate with QGC?
Quantum Genetic Computing -(QGC)
Use Quantum Database search to solve genetic problems.
Comparative Genomics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_genomics
Mycin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin
http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~alison/ai3notes/section2_5_5.html
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~laza/Software/Mycin/mycin.html
Peacekeepers of the Immune System
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0005AFFE-A2F0-150E-A26183414B7F0000
T Cell 'Brakes' Lost During Human Evolution
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060502224533.htm
Scientists find potential 'off-switch' for HIV virus
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/pu-sfp011107.php
Immune System Microarrays
http://www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/news/Lipkin_GreeneChip.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060309190112.htm
http://www.BioArrayNews.com
http://www.affymetrix.com
http://www.perlegen.com/
http://www.bioconductor.org
Peacekeepers of the Immune System
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0005AFFE-A2F0-150E-A26183414B7F0000
T Cell 'Brakes' Lost During Human Evolution
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060502224533.htm
Scientists find potential 'off-switch' for HIV virus
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/pu-sfp011107.php
Immune System Microarrays
http://www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/news/Lipkin_GreeneChip.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060309190112.htm
http://www.BioArrayNews.com
http://www.affymetrix.com
http://www.perlegen.com/
http://www.bioconductor.org
Diagnostic Microarrays
http://www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/news/Lipkin_GreeneChip.html
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/vlabs/index.html
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/figsonly/103/11/4011
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15887
http://www.combimatrix.com/products_influenza.htm
http://www.govhealthit.com/article92290-02-13-06-Print
Microarrays for Students
http://bti.cornell.edu/pgrp/teachers/curriculum_activities.php
http://www.affymetrix.com/corporate/outreach/lesson_plan/downloads/standardsconnection_lessonplan.pdf
Amusing description of Medical AI
Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut
Unintelligent Design - Viral mediated evolution
http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-06/cover/
ocean virus identified in human blood
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20060323-16451600-bc-us-vesivirus.xml
Evolution from the sea:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/304/5667/58
Second Life relationship diagrams - How to record a meeting?
Could Second Life interactions during virtual meetings
represent dialog exchanges? IBM wants sub grids under Second Life to carry on private corporate conferences.
How could a Second Life sub grid be reconstructed?
Could Many Eyes record and visualize conferences?
https://secondlife.com
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Linden_Lab_Employees
I've seen these a few weeks ago. One thing I should say is that how Martin managed to get rid of the dull and ugly Java Interface styles, making those graphs much fluid like flash movies. And in that sense if Java applet can visually displayed well, it definitely has more power and potential than the flash player.
I do have concerns about it as there are just so many visualization approaches that look fancy but none are intuitive enough for viewers to understand instantly. Each of them will be useful under some situations though, but I guess there should be one or two approaches that are ultra clear to look at to really spread around the web. So far I don't think any of them is more intuitive than a tag cloud, although the uses might be not appropriate to compare with.
Quantum Genetic Computing - QGC:
Use Grovers Algorithm to correlate genetic information.
Could IBM create a Quantum Genetic Computer (QGC) from D-wave system? Building a visual interface to complex data.
Could a lab-on-a-chip/QGC technology sample patient blood and draw diagnosis similar to Mycin?
Machine based medical diagnostics?
see http://devshots.com
clean one