Comments on: I [Heart] Charts and Graphs

I [Heart] Charts and Graphs

Monochrome — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:43:16 -0800

Data analysis, brought to you by Big Blue, is following a trend. Data has never been more social. Geeks and statistics groupies used to be isolated, but the internet is changing that. Ever pine for a pile of Excel spreadsheets? Have you tried running an ANOVA on a year's worth of traffic data? You're not alone. New sites add sociability to cold hard facts; take a look at the "YouTube for data" or IBM's Many Eyes. Both sites induce squeals of delight from anyone who's ever felt Tuftian. What's next? One word: infornography. Please, keep your Standard Deviation jokes to yourself.

By: Monochrome

Monochrome — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:46:04 -0800

It's my first post in the blue after 1.5 years of lurking.

By: jouke

jouke — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:10:05 -0800

Interesting. I particularly like network diagrams with nodes you can drag around, with weighted distances and collapsable nodes.

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:47:28 -0800

I am doing network diagrams and STATA work right now, and I already did an analysis of MetaFilter awhile ago... does this make me a statistics groupie? or can I just stay a normal geek if I don't understand the underlying theory?

By: faux ami

faux ami — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:05:59 -0800

cor Neat Post, c | Neat Post -------------+------------------ Post | 1.0000 Neat | 0.8452 1.0000

By: blasdelf

blasdelf — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:22:33 -0800

I must have played with IBM's Many Eyes for an hour or two the other day – the first and only Java applet of quality I have ever beheld. VNC clients have been the only other java applets I've used for longer than the few seconds it takes to close the tab in a panic – and even those will be replaced with Flash soon enough.

By: psmealey

psmealey — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:13:51 -0800

Very timely. I have been working on a massive data visualization project for the past three weeks, and have become very familiar with Swivel and Many Eyes over just the past few days. Good post. This is probably more familiar to everyone, but I've often found clowd tagging to be a somewhat useful tool when analyzing writing or speeches.

By: naturesgreatestmiracle

naturesgreatestmiracle — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:43:56 -0800

faux amy, you can't get a correlation from an n of 1!

By: grobstein

grobstein — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:30:35 -0800

These are great. Many Eyes would be much cooler if you could merge datasets with some degree of automation, though. That would also enhance the collaborativeness of the endeavor. For example, there's an interesting graph of coffee imports by country on the site now. It would be interesting to see that per capita, and not surprisingly there's a population dataset on the site, too. But in order to combine them you have to download both datasets to your computer and Excel them together.

By: Milkman Dan

Milkman Dan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:33:42 -0800

This might be a good thread to bring up NetVis: If, for some reason, you like analyzing your online relationships, this tool offers "Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks." Haven't used it, but it sounds like the perfect embodiment of, as monochrome says, "infornography." Or maybe just an interesting new way to play with data and learn a thing or two.

By: mendel

mendel — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:34:29 -0800

clown tagging

By: xthlc

xthlc — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 06:37:23 -0800

Woo, thanks for the post Monochrome. Many Eyes is in Alpha now -- we're mostly interested in getting feedback from people on new tools that they might want to use (e.g. grobstein's comment above), trying out different community features that will help people have discussions around data, and of course adding new and cool visualizations based on what our users ask for. For the time being, though, I'm just sitting back and enjoying all of the cool and weird data that people are looking at. McDonald's as a big lipid ball, Co-occurrences of names in the New Testament, and Presidential campaign receipts and disbursements are some of my favorites so far. :)

By: nj_subgenius

nj_subgenius — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:13:56 -0800

Nice post!

By: tkolar

tkolar — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 08:04:26 -0800

Bounce bounce bounce. Happy tkolar! Thanks, Monochrome.

By: brianmulloy

brianmulloy — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:38:47 -0800

I wanted to go with 'Get Your Curious On', but the bloggers ran with the 'YouTube for Data' tagline. Fine, we'll take it :~) Monochrome, thanks for including Swivel in your post. When we launched Swivel in December 2006 a ton folks said, 'Data = Fun? No way.' After seeing Swivel and now Many Eyes not only can we say, 'Data = Fun.' We can also say, 'IBM = Fun.' This is exciting stuff. We hope a whole of lot of hidden value gets unlocked from the world's data because of sites like Swivel and IBM's Many Eyes. Go data!

By: MtDewd

MtDewd — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:13:02 -0800

I like the pile of Excel Spreadsheets: 'Have you ever made a spreadsheet for your personal life?' ...well, duhh...

By: brianmulloy

brianmulloy — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:51:16 -0800

grobstein, what you described about automatically combining data is a big part of the value of Swivel. mashing up data sets together. for example this graph of wine consumption versus violent crimes is a mashup of two data sets uploaded by two different people and combined by a third person: it's the beauty of many people working together to discover insights.