Another Look at Many Eyes, 18 Months Later

In February of last year, I wrote a posting based on some data I had scraped from Many Eyes, and criticizing where I thought it was going (or not going). Here is an update, eighteen months later, of some of the things that have happened in the meantime, and some new data.

My interest in Many Eyes is not new. I’ve followed them from the very beginning, and I keep watching them because they were the pioneers of social, web-based visualization. But after the initial excitement and interesting work, there was a period of four years or so when nothing happened. I will not rehash the points from my previous posting, but some of them will come up below when I talk about what has changed, and what hasn’t.

There are clear signs of life over at Many Eyes. For one, the site is under new management. While I don’t know who actually runs it now, some of the people associated with it earlier have left IBM or are in different projects. The list of Data Visualization Luminaries involved in the project includes Frank van Ham (an alumnus of the initial Many Eyes team and a serious force in visualization), Alan Keahey (who wrote a seminal paper on the generalized detail-in-context problem), Graham Willis (worked on SPSS), and Noah Iliinsky (co-edited the Beautiful Visualization book with Julie Steele).

That addresses my criticism from last year about the lacking visualization chops in the group. The luminaries’ [...]