IBM’s Many Eyes collaborative visualization tools

IBM has a cool project now in beta called Many Eyes, which was developed by their Collaborative User Experience‘s Visual Communication Lab. Many Eyes is a set of visualization tools and web services that allow users to create and share visualization projects, with the goal of creating a collaborative social networking space for exploring and analyzing visualizations. In order to participate in Many Eyes, you upload your data sets (which are then hosted by IBM), create the visualizations and then let others view and comment on them. All you need is a table of data values, and if you don’t have your own set, you can use some of the freely available data already out their on the Internet. The visualization options include maps, graphs, charts and histograms, and even tag clouds. These are tools that those of us with statistical software packages can get access to any time, but the goal of Many Eyes is to host the visualizations so that others can share in and comment on your research.

You can even share your visualizations by embedding live interactive versions in your own site or blog, like the example I have below. One note, however: you can’t host the visualizations or data sets on your site.