Social Visualization

Social Visualization for the Masses

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Social Visualization

Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet ScaleHarry Potter and the Meat-Filled Freezer: A Case Study of Spontaneous Usage of Visualization ToolsVoyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization

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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?

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Visualization of Social Data

Vizster (social network websites; seeing how people are related)

MatLink (social networks) NodeTrix People Garden

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Visualization as Social Communication

Chat circles Keystrokes (somewhere in-between?)

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as previously seen... web visualizations...

previously seen: wefeelfine gapminder

recall “web-centric” design decisions: short attention span fun and interactive

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Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale

Upload data Create Visualization Discuss (Not necessarily in this order!)

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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

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Many Eyes: Design Principles

asynchronous (email is asynchronous; instant messaging is synchronous)

enable easy creation of visualizations simple data format: spreadsheets (tables) web based: available to large audience

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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

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Many Eyes: Tree Map

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Many Eyes: Node Link

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Many Eyes: Stacked Chart

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Many Eyes: Bubbles

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Many Eyes: World Map

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Many Eyes: Scatter Plot

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Many Eyes: Stacked Chart

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Many Eyes: Tag Cloud

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Many Eyes: Node Link

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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)

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Many Eyes: Visualizations used

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Many Eyes: A Quick Demo...

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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

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visual analytics

global warming and linguistic data standard visual data analysis

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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”

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sociability – harry potter is freaking popular

playful annotations: books read, countries visited adding personal touch...

following from this...

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generating mirrors – personal and collective

people are narcissistic sociable like to share personal information

tracking weight loss

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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

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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

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Many Eyes: Stacked Chart

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Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative

Information Visualization Heer, Viégas, Wattenberg collaborative visualization tools

enable visual conversations email with attachments is clumsy

visualization is part of conversation (uni-directional) want to be able to see how conversation evolves

over time

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sense.us

bookmarks (represents current state of visualization)

bi-directional link between conversation and visualization

annotation: drawings and text fixed data

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sense.us

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sense.us: bookmark trail

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sense.us: map

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sense.us: stacked chart

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sense.us: population pyramid

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sense.us: scatter plot

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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”

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applications to my project...

more options are better... even if I don't find them immediately useful someone else may find a use

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example

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Discussion