Numbers, Words and Colors | MIT World

About the Lecture

Tools developed by Martin Wattenberg and his associate Fernanda Viégas, have changed the way people look at and use visualizations, by empowering and equipping users with the methodology needed to ask different questions. Wattenberg, whose background is in math and computer science, asks how the humanities have influenced the evolution of data visualization and then answers with several examples from his own work.

Web Seer compares Google's "auto-suggest" feature in one-to-one, weighted comparisons such as "why doesn't he…" and "why doesn't she…" The resultant text image uses the size of arrows and words to reflect frequency, demonstrating how text can impart meaning.

Another Wattenberg/Viégas collaboration is Many Eyes, a social media tool and Web site that has "democratized" powerful visualization systems by putting them in the hands of general audiences. This tool lets users visualize data in numerous ways, from scatterplots and bar charts to tree maps and stack graphs.

Word Tree, a visualization technique that lets users pick a word or phrase from a data set, shows the different contexts in which it appears via a tree-like branching structure. Chimera takes care of the "boilerplate problem" by examining large collections of text, such as contracts, and pointing out identical phrases. Seeing results arranged in faux 3D "skyscrapers" clearly illustrates levels of recurrence. Although Word Tree andChimera are fundamentally repetition searches, they are important tools for semantic analysis: simple, but revealing.

The idea behind Phrase Net is to expose a text's underlying network; this visualization tool diagrams the relationships between different words used in a text. It uses a simple form of pattern matching to provide multiple views of the concepts contained a book, speech, or poem.

Another Wattenberg/ Viégas collaboration is Fleshmap, "an inquiry into human desire." The relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation are explored in a series of artistic studies employing song lyrics and body imagery. Flickr Flow, Wattenberg explains, is an experiment whose materials are color and time. Software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos of Boston taken during each month of the year and plotted those colors on a wheel creating a "river of meaning."
Wattenberg addresses questions regarding the impact of race in personified visualizations, and his subjective motives in selecting particular data for analysis. He admits that his "hard drive is loaded with failed visualizations," but emphasizes that the visualization process should be one of trial and error. As for encouraging the development of visual literacy, Wattenberg concludes, "as visualization becomes part of the discourse and people realize, 'this is something that's powerful, it can help me make my case in life,' they'll learn… I'm hoping for education and good, old-fashioned human brain power."




Numbers, Words and Colors | MIT World