This IBM experiment has quite a few fun options for visualizing data, and Emily and I have enjoyed playing with different ways to "see" numbers. Like most of the other sites listed on this blog, Many Eyes is free and cloud based. All you do is upload a excel-style spreadsheet, enter data by hand, or pick a data set that someone else uploaded. While interesting, I haven't used this website in class and haven't blogged about it because I don't do a ton of work with hard data. That changed with the President's State of the Union.
I was speaking with a class of ESL students about graphs and pulled up Many Eyes. We started looking at the variety of visualization possibilities and discussing what visualization would work best for what kind of data set. From scatter point charts to word clouds, the range of possibilities is stunning, but we noticed, pretty quickly, that someone had uploaded the President's speech. The class was interested in seeing what topics were of concern to the President in his speech, so we started to explore.
We opened the already-created word cloud and saw some words were clearly larger, indicating that these were spoken frequently.
Right away we noticed "jobs," "energy," and "tax" as we discussed the cloud in class. Under the cloud we found a link to the actual data file--basically the speech in a text document. Once we were there, we clicked on the visualization link below the speech and were offered a wide range of new charts to visualize the speech. We selected "word tree" and entered the word "jobs" in the search bar. This is what we found:
From this visualization we could easily see in what context the word "jobs" was being used in the speech. It occurred to me then, that this website would be an excellent way to find topics for research. Students could upload a text document, visualize the data, and figure out different approaches to the text.
Whether you use this website in class or not, I would encourage you to have fun and play with this site. If you are working with information by state or country, I would highly encourage you to see what Many Eyes can do to help you visualize and share information with others.
