Staring at columns of facts and figures isn’t much fun and not very visually exciting, but understanding and being able to quickly read data is important. IBM’s Many Eyes project makes dealing with data more interesting.
The project allows anyone to visual any type of information they want. It can be as diverse as the most popular words or tags on a website (the image above represents the BwLOG homepage, and there are two links below to view the actual visualisation) to the average length of songs based on music genre, to the number of football stadiums in a country based on population size, and here! Whilst these might not be relevant to everyone it shows the power and scope of the project. It makes information accessible and more interesting.
Above, Football Stadiums by Population: The United Kingdom clearly has many more football stadiums per person than anywhere else so we should easily win the next world cup in South Africa. Incidental South Africa is the very small text at the right-hand edge, they’d best get building to be ready in time.
Once you’ve added all your data to Many Eyes you can then choose how you want to visualise it and alter various settings and configurations. When you’re happy you can publish your data and other customise and interact with the data, this lets you explore in a simple and visual way. With a quick glance you can get the gist of what you’re looking at without needing to stare at a long list of numbers. With the world becoming over more cluttered with information bloat such visualisations are likely to become more popular. I’d like something to help me find decent TV programmes based on the genres and programmes I enjoy, trawling through conventional listings trying to filter out what’s hot and what’s not isn’t very efficient.
Being a lover of type one of my favourite visualisations is Wordle, and you can view two versions for our blog here: Betley Whitehorne Wordle 1 Betley Whitehorne Wordle 2. Or visit the Many Eyes project to explore what other people have been doing.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment