I'm continually amazed at the developmental progress in -- and growing use of -- visualization tools to summarize data. In a previous post I wrote about the progress companies like Intronetworks has made in visualizing relationships between member profiles and member interests in online community networks. In a recent article, NY Times wrote about a data visualization tool called "Many Eyes."
Here, an experimental site from IBM's Alphaworks, Many Eyes (www.many-eyes.com), gives users the ability to upload data and collaborate with other users to visualize data sets in various interactive displays. These range from traditional line and bar charts, bubble graphs and bar stacks for numerical summaries to tag clouds, word clouds and word trees for displaying relationships and/or frequency of text-based data.
For example, below is a visual comparison of data sets using the text of speeches given recently by Presidents Bill Clinton and Geoge Bush at their respective party conventions about their respective party candidates.
Bill Clinton's Speech on Barack Obama:
George Bush's Speech on John McCain:
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After importing the text of each speech, the Many Eyes engine can present a visual of the data set via several models you choose. In the cases above I chose a Wordie cloud to show the frequency of words used in each speech. The larger the text, the higher the frequency.
The visualizations above suggest the greater frequency in which Mr. Bush mentions Mr. McCain by his first name than did Mr. Clinton of Mr. Obama. Kinda gives you the impression that John is George's BFF, huh? Whereas Bill seemed a little more formal in his references of Barack as suggested by the relative frequency in the use of "Barack" and "Obama."
But interesting, too, is the frequency of other nouns used in each of the speeches. 'Seems to be a more "wordly" theme to Mr. Clinton's speech about Obama than those used in Bush's for McCain.
Another beauty of these types of visualization tools is the flexibility they afford in being able to get another view of the data set. For example, the snapshots below show a tree diagram from the same data sets, but using each candidate's last name as the root.
Clinton speech using "Obama" as root:
Bush's speech using "McCain" as root:
What jumps out at me is the "meatier context" in which Clinton's words use "Obama" than the contexts in which Bush uses "McCain."
But, perhaps most remarkable to me about these visualization tools isn't so much that they are being developed, but that they're evolving in ways that solicit input from multiple minds. IBM's platform for Many Eyes allows a user to publish her visualization in a discussion forum. This helps get the perspective and input of others on the same data set. There's no way that any one person can "know it all." And, by collaborating in a way that knowledge capital from multiple members of a group is solicited, then it opens up more opportunities for new insights to be found by examining the same data set in different ways while also protecting against biases of any one individual.
If you know of other online sites offering other visualization tools, I'd love for you to share them with the rest of us through the comments.
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