Visualization tool: ManyEyes from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from the co-creator of Many Eyes. Here’s a 7-minute video interview I did with Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, following her talk.
Fernanda describes some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don’t know" and "I don’t recall." With a little imagination, this tool could prove useful in a wide variety of classroom settings.
Watch or download video in high-quality (H.264) on Ourmedia (480 pixels)
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo
Here’s a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and mobile media. You can see it as a tag cloud, as a word tree, or in other ways.
I was just reading about Fernanda Viegas and her partner Martin Wattenberg in the July issue of Wired magazine (page 121) in the article "Visualizing big data" (can’t find a link).
A related tool, Wordle, also does visualizations, and Paul Lamb of the IdeaLab has a post about it here.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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