Martin Wattenberg — Many Eyes — public data-visualization platform

2007

Artists: Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Viégas · Year: 2007 · Medium: Public web platform allowing anyone to upload datasets and generate interactive visualizations · Substrate: IBM-hosted web application; automatic dataset processing; library of visualization types (network diagrams, word clouds, tag visualizations, map overlays); public sharing · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: IBM Visual Communication Lab Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas launched Many Eyes in 2007 at IBM Research's Visual Communication Lab. The platform was a public, free, web-based tool that allowed anyone with a web browser to upload a dataset and choose among a menu of visualization types — bubble chart, treemap, stack graph, word tree, phrase net — to produce a shared, linkable, embeddable visualization. No software to install. No account required to view. Every visualization produced on the site was public and searchable. In the first eighteen months after launch, Many Eyes had hosted over 150,000 user-uploaded datasets and hundreds of thousands of derived visualizations. What Wattenberg and Viégas argued, operationally, was that data visualization should be a shared democratic craft rather than a specialized profession — that if the tools were made usable by non-experts at zero cost, a visualization culture would emerge. They were right. Within a few years of Many Eyes' launch, the practice of amateur data-visualization had become widespread; Reddit's r/dataisbeautiful, the civic-data movements of Code for America and OpenNYC, the explosion of D3.js-driven journalism at the New York Times and Washington Post, the long wave of Flowing Data and Information Is Beautiful books — all of these are downstream of the infrastructure Many Eyes established. Wattenberg and Viégas had both arrived at IBM's Cambridge-based Visual Communication Lab from independent practices. Viégas had been at the MIT Media Lab, where her thesis work included History Flow (2003–04, with Wattenberg, a visualization of the edit-history of Wikipedia articles). Wattenberg had been at Dow Jones, where he had built the Smart Money Map of the Market (1998), one of the first major commercial interactive visualizations of financial data. Their 2007 collaboration at IBM married both their practices and the infrastructure resources to run a public platform at scale. Many Eyes was decommissioned by IBM in 2015 when the business group supporting it was closed. Wattenberg and Viégas moved together to Google's PAIR (People + AI Research) group in Cambridge, where they currently lead research in machine-learning interpretability and visualization; they are represented in this archive in that capacity as well through later moments. Lore The Many Eyes platform ran on a small cluster at IBM Cambridge; the visualization rendering was done server-side in Java, which meant the server hardware had to scale as traffic grew. Viégas has said in interviews that they were continuously surprised by what users uploaded — demographic surveys, political speech transcripts, personal weight-loss logs, sports statistics, literary texts — and that the platform's strongest argument was that the demand for data-visualization infrastructure had been latent and enormous but was waiting for someone to build the tooling. The decommissioning of Many Eyes in 2015 was a loss that the data-visualization community is still mourning. A few of its visualization types — the Word Tree, specifically — have been ported to independent JavaScript libraries and are still widely used. Sources • Viégas, Fernanda B.; Wattenberg, Martin — "Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale" (IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., 2007). • Viégas, Fernanda B. — "Visualizing Email Content" (MIT PhD thesis, 2005). • Google PAIR — People + AI Research (pair-code.github.io).