Go and try the New York Times Visualization Lab, “where you can create visual representations of data and information using the "Many Eyes" technology from IBM Research.” This was a smart idea to put this proof of concept out through the New York Times. It is also a nice way to visualize the news.
There are examples of visualizations that the New York Times created and examples done by people trying the tool. You can do your own. They provide data sets such as the 2008 US Presidential results by county, national or National League home runs per at bat leaders 2006-2008. You can choose form such visualization types as tag clouds, word tree (branching view of how a word or phrase is used in a text. Navigate the text by zooming and clicking) or wordle (toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.). There are also some traditional visualization means such as bar charts. You can also see relationships among data points through a matrix chart, a network diagram or a scatter plot. There is much more but go give it a try.
Many Eyes comes out of IBM’s Center for Social Software. Their site says it is a “bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.” You can get a tour at their site and see their visualizations. I have written about it before, see - Large Firm Getting into Facebook Apps - Many Eyes from IBM.
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