Martin Wattenberg developed the “Baby Name Wizard” which provides a visual analysis tool to help users assess the popularity of baby names over time as a companion to “The Baby Name Wizard: A Magical Method for Finding the Perfect Name for Your Baby” written by his wife, Laura Wattenberg.

The opening JCDL plenary lecture on Wednesday June 18, 2008 was given by IBM Visual Communications researchers Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. Both are new media artists who focus their work around data visualizations that allow anyone to “look at tons of numbers easily.” They are currently transforming data access and analysis with a new web site called Many Eyes.

Information visualization was accomplished in the 1990s by and for experts. These early images were often of colorful landscapes that represented many data.

Viegas believes that visualizations can be more powerful when lay users begin to understand visualization and “the traces people leave online.” Some of Viegas’ work at MIT focused on “getting a sense of the relationship you are carrying” by text analysis and visualization of email archives. Her research project entitled Themail gathered archives from people who were guaranteed that their privacy would be protected. As it turned out the email contributors wanted to play with the visualizations even though the images often represented very private life events. The email analysis visualizations turned out to be social artifacts around which people wanted to gather for further conversation and reflection.

Wattenberg also noticed that tools like the Baby Name Wizard were being used by people who did not need to name a child or, in some cases, even like babies. People were interested in collaborating and building on each others ideas and work. What was powerful was the number of people trying to make sense collectively. Viegas and Wattenberg wondered what might happen if the audience around visualizations was scaled up.

At Many Eyes users create their own visualizations using their own, or provided data sets, discuss what they see, and share insights with their communities of friends, family and colleagues. Many Eyes encourages users to broadcast their data visualizations in other blogs by providing html snippets to add to web pages.

Viegas and Wattenberg have developed a system that enables data analysis as a distributed social process.

The more you understand about context the richer the understanding of the data. For example, each time a user comments in the Many Eyes blog, the system adds a notation to the data visualization. The system has proven to be particularly interesting for word analysis of political speeches allowing users to “dive deeply and a non-linear way.”

So what are people doing when they go to Many Eyes?

Someone created a social network image based on a new testament data set. The visualization traveled far and wide and inspired blog discussions that cut across many discipline communities including technology and the social sciences. This phenomena is a text book example of what Viegas and Wattenberg hoped would happen–if there is a community that is already interested in a particular data set then Many Eyes provides the ability to visualize issues and spark discussions.

Tag clouds for political discussions have proven to be very popular as is crime analysis and advocacy for changes in laws or policies.

Many Eyes visualizations may be published papers or broadcast in blogs with attribution The overall goal is to multiply the impact of data. Viegas and Wattenberg believe that many more people can come to conclusions and form questions if they have tools to connect people to the meaning of the data.