The Democratization of Data
One of the great resources that you get as a Microsoft employee is access to the talks over at Microsoft Research. Microsoft really is like grad school.
Most of the talks are recorded, and if you have time, you can head on over to Building 99 and watch some in person. Last week I saw Jeffrey Heer give a talk with the provocative title: Voyagers and Voyeurs.
Jeffrey gave a fantastic talk about his work at UC Berkeley and at IBM Research as part of the Many Eyes project. I'm amazed by his work on the prefuse visualization toolkit which lets you create stunning visualizations:
The flare visualization toolkit is based on Flash (unlike prefuse which relies on Java). You should definitely check out the flash-based demo to get a feel for how well designed these animations are.
As it turns out, Jeffrey also did some work at Many Eyes. I first heard about Many Eyes from Jon Udell. Jon did a great interview with the researchers behind Many Eyes, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg from IBM Research. One of the ideas that Jon explores is the democratization of data, where the Many Eyes visualizations open up a world of analysis to people who never had easy access to the data before. Both good and bad happen here: some people find legitimate problems with the data sets, others manipulate the data sets to support their own views.
It seems like a port of Flare would be a cool Silverlight project ...
WOW, I watched the flash-based demo and the animations are really great! This visualization toolkit looks pretty amazing:) Thanks for sharing!
Posted by: web pixy | February 11, 2008 at 01:53 AM