Fernanda B. Viégas

ManyEyes: a Site for Visualization at Internet Scale

We describe the design and deployment of Many Eyes, a public Web site where users may upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on discussions. The goal of the site is to support collaboration around visualizations at a large scale by fostering a social style of data analysis in which visualizations not only serve as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a medium to spur discussion among users. To support this goal, the site includes novel mechanisms for end-user creation of visualizations and asynchronous collaboration around those visualizations. In addition to describing these technologies, we provide a preliminary report on the activity of our users.

Chat circles

Although current online chat environments provide newopportunities for communication, they are quite constrained intheir ability to convey many important pieces of socialinformation, ranging from the number of participants in aconversation to the subtle nuances of expression that enrich faceto face speech. In this paper we present Chat Circles, an abstractgraphical interface for synchronous conversa-tion. Here, presenceand activity are made manifest by changes in color and form,proximity-based filtering intuitively breaks large groups intoconversational clusters, and the archives of a conversation aremade visible through an integrated history interface. Our goal inthis work is to create a richer environment for onlinediscussions.

Participatory Visualization with Wordle

We discuss the design and usage of ldquoWordle,rdquo a Web-based tool for visualizing text. Wordle creates tag-cloud-like displays that give careful attention to typography, color, and composition. We describe the algorithms used to balance various aesthetic criteria and create the distinctive Wordle layouts. We then present the results of a study of Wordle usage, based both on spontaneous behaviour observed in the wild, and on a large-scale survey of Wordle users. The results suggest that Wordles have become a kind of medium of expression, and that a ldquoparticipatory culturerdquo has arisen around them.

Voyagers and voyeurs: supporting asynchronous collaborative information visualization

This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

Parallel Tag Clouds to explore and analyze faceted text corpora

Do court cases differ from place to place? What kind of picture do we get by looking at a countrys collection of law cases? We introduce Parallel Tag Clouds: a new way to visualize differences amongst facets of very large metadata-rich text corpora. We have pointed Parallel Tag Clouds at a collection of over 600,000 US Circuit Court decisions spanning a period of 50 years and have discovered regional as well as linguistic differences between courts. The visualization technique combines graphical elements from parallel coordinates and traditional tag clouds to provide rich overviews of a document collection while acting as an entry point for exploration of individual texts. We augment basic parallel tag clouds with a details-in-context display and an option to visualize changes over a second facet of the data, such as time. We also address text mining challenges such as selecting the best words to visualize, and how to do so in reasonable time periods to maintain interactivity.

The hidden order of wikipedia

We examine the procedural side of Wikipedia, the well-known internet encyclopedia. Despite the lack of structure in the underlying wiki technology, users abide by hundreds of rules and follow well-defined processes. Our case study is the Featured Article (FA) process, one of the best established procedures on the site. We analyze the FA process through the theoretical framework of commons governance, and demonstrate how this process blends elements of traditional workflow with peer production. We conclude that rather than encouraging anarchy, many aspects of wiki technology lend themselves to the collective creation of formalized process and policy.

Mapping Text with Phrase Nets

We present a new technique, the phrase net, for generating visual overviews of unstructured text. A phrase net displays a graph whose nodes are words and whose edges indicate that two words are linked by a user-specified relation. These relations may be defined either at the syntactic or lexical level; different relations often produce very different perspectives on the same text. Taken together, these perspectives often provide an illuminating visual overview of the key concepts and relations in a document or set of documents.

TIMELINES Tag clouds and the case for vernacular visualization

Most HCI history articles trace digital developments back to the 1980s, 1960s, or earlier. Information visualization is moving so rapidly that its great to have a look back and glance forward on tag clouds, just over a decade old in digital form, from leading visualization researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. ---Jonathan Grudin

Voyagers and voyeurs: Supporting asynchronous collaborative visualization

This article describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a Web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

Visualizing activity on wikipedia with chromograms

To investigate how participants in peer production systems allocate their time, we examine editing activity on Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia. To analyze the huge edit histories of the sites administrators we introduce a visualization technique, the chromogram, that can display very long textual sequences through a simple color coding scheme. Using chromograms we describe a set of characteristic editing patterns. In addition to confirming known patterns, such reacting to vandalism events, we identify a distinct class of organized systematic activities. We discuss how both reactive and systematic strategies shed light on self-allocation of effort in Wikipedia, and how they may pertain to other peer-production systems.