Many Eyes is a powerful tool that enables a user to create visualizations from any kind of data set.
Here’s where it gets fun: while a user can upload their own data set, Many Eyes is a community-powered tool. There are over 150,000 data sets to choose from, and many are pre-visualized.
Another (seemingly underused) feature are Topic Centers. Topic Centers allow teams of people to collaborate on visualizations. Topic Centers are organized around certain topics (makes sense, right?), as well as teams of people at organizations and classes (like this one).
Here are some examples:
Average Time Spent Commuting by State
Number of arrests by age and type of crime
News Blogs Dominated By A Few Startups
But selecting a dataset from the community is not always the best option: the metadata associated with many of the datasets is inaccurate or incomplete. Rest assured, because what makes Many Eyes such a versatile tool is that any type of data is accepted, so long as it is in a structured format. Data needs to be pre-formatted in Microsoft Excel (or similar spreadsheet software), then pasted into Many Eyes’ Web interface.
Then the user is presented with an array of visualization options, from tag clouds and word trees to assorted graphs and even maps.
A couple of potential uses for historians:
- Take a historical text or speech (i.e. the Gettysburg Address) and create a tag cloud from it, where the more frequently a word is used, the larger it will appear.
- Create a network diagram to visualize a historical figure’s family tree.
- Use a map to show population trends over time.
Over the summer, I took air traffic control data and visualized it using Many Eyes, for fun. It was easy to use every step of the way. In fact, it’s so easy to use, the hardest part should be finding the data in the first place.
It is beyond imperative to have good visuals when working on the Web, since readers hate long blocks of static text. Bringing a history project to the Web calls for the use of visualizations like those that can be generated using Many Eyes. It will make your work more attractive, and will certainly help your readers understand things better. At the end of the day, it’s all about them!
Using visuals to supplement historical websites are important in providing readers something else to look at besides text for information. It also serves as a way to hold attention from visitors that tired from reading just text for information.
As you pointed out in this post, what the Many Eyes site can do is limited by the type of data state used to produce the visual; therefore having incomplete or faulty data can lead readers into making different conclusions than originally intended. Like Wordle and Voyeur, Many Eyes is another tool that helps put data into a visual form that appeals to reader’s eyes while providing information. But if used improperly or with faulty data, then the site becomes confusing and difficult to understand the point of the displayed visual.
Visuals are important in making a good history project on the Web appealing, however care should be taken to ensure that it does not detract from the learning experience for the users!