ManyEyes: a site for visualization at internet scale Joseph Seering Feb 2, 2017 F. B. Viegas, M. Wattenberg, F. van Ham, J. Kriss and M. McKeon, "ManyEyes: a Site for Visualization at Internet Scale," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 1121-1128, Nov.-Dec. 2007. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4376131/.

Fernanda Viégas Martin Wattenberg Frank van Ham Jesse Kriss Matt McKeon

Chat Circles – “Our aim is to use graphics to convey the dynamics of conversation as well as to unveil the patterns of activity that emerge through the interaction among users.”

Many Eyes: A public website where users upload data, collaboratively make large-scale visualizations, and discuss the results

Stack graphs for categories- mostly stacked time series charts here.

Bubble charts: bar charts using circles distributed in space rather than bars

Tag clouds – pretty close to the common word clouds we see today

Discussion tools Persistent pseudonymous handles Ability to make text comments on visualizations Visualization bookmarks allowed users to link to a specific state of a given visualization to facilitate conversation Visualization annotations allowed users to leave graphical annotations, highlighting certain data within a given state of a visualization

Publicity features? Put new, high quality visualizations developed by users on the front page each day. All visualizations had fixed URLs for easy linking “Blog this” button

Question 1: Is it technical HCI Research? From the paper, p. 1121: “the most difficult issues in scaling the audience are not necessarily related to engineering. Instead, many of the key questions are those of design and user experience.”

Question 1: Is it technical HCI Research? From the forums: “The entire paper reads like a product design presentation and it does not seem fitting for a mini on technical HCI, particularly when there does not appear to be anything technical about it.” -MR “the annotation of the visualization states (which filters were engaged, etc) was a novel and interesting interaction type, that could certainly serve a useful rhetorical purpose!” -MM

Question 2: Did they evaluate the right things? From the forums: “They simply describe site metrics, user engagement, and basic statistics on the charts produced, which are data but the approach is not an evaluation of how well the system itself works or how well it accomplishes the goals it set out to achieve.” -JD “I think it also would have been interesting to see ~how~ people are collaborating using these features, like what kinds of comments, snapshots, or annotations are being made, how many of them are conversational rather than singular comments, etc.” -FL

Question 3: Is it a good idea? From the forums: “There is a reason researchers are carefully trained and for our visualizations to be subject to peer-review before publication, and it's because data can be dangerous if it's not handled properly.” -ND “what I really appreciate about this paper is the concept of democratizing visualization […] more complex visualizations were created like bubble graphs than simple ones like pie charts, which means it made these visualization methods more accessible.” -KB