3.07.2007

Many, many eyes

Remember NameVoyager, the baby name data visualization that was a rage last year? Well, its developer has another experiment: Many Eyes.

While it lacks many of the annotation features of Sense.us, since its public release last month it has gotten substantial attention - to date, 1,336 datsets have been uploaded, with 1137 separate visualizations.

I'm certain we'll see more like this soon (e.g., Data360, Swivel). I also predict that as the designs become more sophisticated (ability to generate statistical and structural metrics would be nice), and gain traction as collaborative media, we'll also see editing and viewing controls emerge (ala Google Docs). Imagine what it might mean to the scientific process when datasets and access codes are published along with scientific articles.

It will certainly change peer review.

Addendum: I should note that both Sense.us and NameVoyager were built using Prefuse, billed as a "Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization applications."