Choosing Tools to Visualize Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 58

MANy EyES
Many eyes is an ongoing research project by the IBM Visual Communica-
tion Lab. It's an online application that enables you to upload your data
as a text-delimited file and explore through a set of interactive visualiza-
tion tools. The original premise of Many eyes was to see if people could
explore large datasets as groups—therefore the name. If you have a lot
of eyes on a large dataset, can a group find interesting points in the data
quicker or more efficiently or find things in the data that you would not
have found on your own?
Although social data analyses never caught on with Many eyes, the tools
can still be useful to the individual. Most traditional visualization types
are available, such as the line graph (Figure 3-7) and the scatterplot
(Figure 3-8).
One of the great things about all the visualizations on Many eyes is that
they are interactive and provide a number of customization options. The
scatterplot, for example, enables you to scale dots by a third metric, and
you can view individual values by rolling over a point of interest.
FIGurE 3-7 Line graph on Many eyes