IBM researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are the creators of Many Eyes, a new kind of social website dedicated to data visualization and analysis. Members upload batches of data - about politics, weather, or anything else - then chart, interpret, discuss, and even re-visualize one another's data. The process is fun, and it also points toward a future in which our collective interpretation of the world is more firmly rooted in data.
Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg are research scientists in IBM's Visual Communication Lab. Viegas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg's visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered internet classics. Both Viegas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the "history flow" project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis it enables.
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