I recently listened to Jon Udell interview Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, creators of Many Eyes, a site which allows users to upload data sets and graph them, as well as make graphs from each others data.  It’s a super cool idea, especially if you are also excited about the idea of governments large and small learning to more readily publish their data as part of their public obligations.

I finally spent a little time poking around the site, and I’m kind of ambivalent. On the positive side, the number of tools available is impressive.  However, the social facets of the site are a bit incomplete.  For example, I can’t even find a general discussion area: each dataset and visualization is designed to support comments, but where can users of the site interact more generally?

I’m just a novice, so there are probably many things I haven’t seen yet.  Also, while I think it’s cool, it’s kind of an esoteric subject, so there may just not be a critical mass of users to jump start the discussion.  

For an experiment, I uploaded a table of data about the immigrant population of Chicago from The Metro Chicago Immigration Fact Book.  It took a little fiddling to make it into a real table, and a bit more to add columns to support the visualization I decided to make, a “stack graph for categories”.  One cool thing is that the graphs are somewhat “live”: if you go to the Many Eyes site, you can change some parameters about how the graph appears interactively. It didn’t quite seem like it could do everything I wanted it to do, but I only played for a few minutes.

It will take some time to see what other visualizations are in there, and I could use a few more inspirations like Jon Udell’s Data Analysis as Performance Art screencast to help think of other good uses.  I was interested to see a few textual analysis visualizers, and I haven’t looked at all the kinds of graphs yet.

It’s exciting to imagine a community like Wikipedia, but oriented around data.  Well, it’s exciting for me, at least!  It’s a little rough around the edges, but worth more attention than it has gotten so far.