Remember Google’s Fusion Tables? Well, here’s its complement.
While Fusion Tables is a useful and flexible platform for viewing, manipulating, and sharing data in table form, it’s a little limited in its visualization capabilities (see an earlier post on Fusion, here). With charts, graphs, and just two species of map (location and intensity), the options for making your data “pop” leave something to be desired.* A newish tool from the developers at IBM’s Collaborative User Experience lab, ManyEyes, looks like the obvious complement. ManyEyes says this about itself:
Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis…We believe that visualizations gain power when multiple people use them to communicate, and that communication gains power when multiple people can visualize and explore information together. We want to democratize visualization, enabling anyone on the internet to publish powerful interactive visualizations and start their own data conversations.
And it appears to be working. There are currently a little over 88,000 data sets uploaded by users, and over 45,000 published visualizations. Like Fusion Tables, ManyEyes allows users to upload their data sets, in tabular form, to the web — where those sets can be displayed, shared with the public, and turned into visualizations. Where ManyEyes sets itself apart, though, is in the latter stage. There are 18 different, robust and customizable visualizations to choose from — all of which are interactive and “embed-ready.”
I took a few minutes to play around with that feature, using a previously uploaded data set about the US Federal Government’s response to the H1N1 virus. The data is a count of “action types” taken by several different governmental departments and agencies. Here’s what I came up with:
As with Fusion Tables, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this data. But no matter the data quality, the visualization possibilities are many and extremely easy to use (I literally just hit the “visualize” button) even for folks with no mapping or GIS background. I think the weakness, here, is in the data upload: while ManyEyes is a powerful visualization platform, the data manipulation options are a pretty limited. Data is sharable with the public once it’s uploaded, but doesn’t appear to be editable or able to be joined with other data sets. Fusion Tables excel in that role — and might be the best way to work with your data prior to visualization. From there, your table should be uploadable to the ManyEyes platform. Here’s a tutorial (featuring theme music that makes me feel like I’m on the highwire in a 1930′s circus act) on how to prepare, upload, and visualize your data on ManyEyes.
We’re so impressed with the functionality and transparency of ManyEyes that we’ve been using it to create our first map. Look for that shortly after the holiday!
*Don’t get the wrong idea: Fusion Tables are powerful! Check out a helpful blog post, with directions, about Fusion here.
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