Social Visualization Social Visualization for the Masses

2  Social Visualization Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale Harry Potter and the Meat-Filled Freezer: A Case Study of Spontaneous Usage of Visualization Tools Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization

3 Previous Social Visualizations have been a little different what are social visualizations?  visualization of social data  using visualization to as medium for social communication  making use of web technologies?

4 Visualization of Social Data Vizster (social network websites; seeing how people are related) MatLink (social networks) NodeTrix People Garden

5 Visualization as Social Communication Chat circles Keystrokes (somewhere in-between?)

6 as previously seen... web visualizations... previously seen:  wefeelfine  gapminder recall “web-centric” design decisions:  short attention span  fun and interactive

7 Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale Upload data Create Visualization Discuss (Not necessarily in this order!)

8 Many Eyes: Approach to visualization... Let the people decide!  give many possible visualization options encourage discussion via visualization encourage visualization via discussions  both textual information and visualization aid each other

9 Many Eyes: Design Principles asynchronous ( is asynchronous; instant messaging is synchronous) enable easy creation of visualizations simple data format: spreadsheets (tables) web based: available to large audience

10 Many Eyes: Web Expectations Designed for untrained, non-specialist users  survey found certain groups interested... Low barrier to entry Short attention span Bookmarks Undoable (back and forwards button) “Fun” and accessible

11 Many Eyes: Tree Map

12 Many Eyes: Node Link

13 Many Eyes: Stacked Chart

14 Many Eyes: Bubbles

15 Many Eyes: World Map

16 Many Eyes: Scatter Plot

17 Many Eyes: Stacked Chart

18 Many Eyes: Tag Cloud

19 Many Eyes: Node Link

20 The Social Part... comments on data, visualization person identified direct annotation on visualization  usual drawing tools (arrows, text), selection/highlighting bookmarks allow for “snapshot” (state of visualization)  allows for linking “bloggable” (embeddable)

21 Many Eyes: Visualizations used

22 Many Eyes: A Quick Demo... [this slide intentionally left blank]

23 Harry Potter and the Meat-Filled Freezer: A Case Study of Spontaneous Usage of Visualization Tools A review of Many Eyes' results (1 year later)  some interesting results

24 visual analytics global warming and linguistic data standard visual data analysis

25 data quality and error hunting found errors in data from reliable sources  National Center for Health Statistics “visual representations can quickly expose data problems” “many eyes make bugs shallow”

26 sociability – harry potter is freaking popular playful annotations: books read, countries visited  adding personal touch... following from this...

27 generating mirrors – personal and collective people are narcissistic sociable like to share personal information  tracking weight loss

28 sending a message using visualization to express idea (not necessarily a new one)  Multiple Sclerosis  Jesus appears many times in Bible Visualization confirms a persons beliefs

29 innovative use of visualizations digg “Stacked graph”  stacked graphs are meant to show multiple graphs over a time period  only two “time points”: diggs and comments  with percentage scaling can see the relation between these two litmash  use two pieces of literature as a data source

30 Many Eyes: Stacked Chart

31 Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization Heer, Viégas, Wattenberg collaborative visualization tools  enable visual conversations  with attachments is clumsy visualization is part of conversation (uni-directional)  want to be able to see how conversation evolves over time

32 sense.us bookmarks (represents current state of visualization) bi-directional link between conversation and visualization annotation: drawings and text fixed data

33 sense.us

34 sense.us: bookmark trail

35 sense.us: map

36 sense.us: stacked chart

37 sense.us: population pyramid

38 sense.us: scatter plot

39 summarizing all of that interactivity is important! more options are better  people will find novel uses to a visualization when people are involved... visualization is for both:  finding information about data  expressing their own (likely outside) view annotations “games”

40 applications to my project... more options are better... even if I don't find them immediately useful  someone else may find a use

41 example

42 Discussion