Jim Panttaja

PCs and now the web have offered many powerful ways to visualize data. On the PC Excel (and its predecessors) have given us very powerful ways to view data. The web has contributed to this ability in several ways. New visualization tools have appeared, but data is also becoming more available. Some of this data is ‘public’ data that people are making available on the internet (government data among others), and some is now individuals create data and making it available.

I have looked at a lot of analytic tools in the past, but in this entry would like to present some information on some web based visualization tools.

We had dinner with Bob Zurek of IBM over the weekend, and one of the things that he pointed us at was IBM’s Many Eyes, and the somewhat related Swivel.

Many Eyes let’s you upload data (which becomes public), and then use your dataset, or another existing one to apply various visualizations. Some of these are the usuals (pie charts, bar charts), and some are creative and experimental. I am attaching two below.

One of my hobbies is genealogy. I have been creating my genealogy (and the genealogy of various ‘related’ (pun intended) families for about forty years, ever since my two grandmother’s each independently gave me a family bible, along with other documents and notes. I now have about 8000 people in my database (at some point I will write more about the tools that I use, but the core database is part of Family Tree Maker).

I decided to take a list of the surnames from my database, and display them using two of the visualization techniques.

The first is called a tag cloud. It displays each surname a different size, based on the number of occurrences of that surname. If you click on the following snap shot, you will be taken to Many Eyes, and can view, and interact with the visualization. Note - on a Mac, this will work better if you open it in Safari rather than Firefox.

A Couple of insights here. The first is that the surname that stands out is Scudder. This is my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. It was the place that I started - with one of the family bibles that I was given. In addition, the Scudder Association has tracked back the family to the 17th century. So it isn’t surprising that I have the most data there. Somewhat surprising is the occurrence of Mary. This is not a surname in my database, but when I extracted the data - Family Tree Maker tried to determine the last name based on a single name field that include first, middle and last names. The occurrence of Mary on this list means that I have lot’s of Mary’s for whom I do not know the last name. I am surprised that it is as many as it is.

My second example is a bubble chart. This based on a similar data upload - essentially the surnames, and the number of people with that surname. These bubbles are to scale - so it allows you to compare instances where the data varies dramatically in scale. In this particualr example, there are so many surnames, that there is not room to display the names themselves on most of the bubbles.

These are instances trying to get insight in to data that I have. Many of the examples on Many Eyes are of data that is interesting to a larger number of people. And a major goal of the site is to have lot’s of people look at the data, and try to gain insights from it. There is also a commenting feature that let’s people manipulate and annotate their insights.

Mary has also blogged on Many Eyes.