Data Visualization: Prez. Bush's favorite words
Here's a great tool - especially for political reporters - that will enable you to upload a creative digi-feature to your news organization's website. It's called Many Eyes, a project by IBM, that enables extremely interesting data visualization. Not unlike Data360 and Swivel, Many Eyes will translate numbers into a pretty chart... it'll then be made public for commenting and sharing.
Many Eyes also has a feature that allows you to upload speech (transcripts, interviews, articles) and will create a tag cloud visualizing the number of times a particular word is said and showing the references. This could potentially be a great reporting tool (upload your transcript, learn more about the subtext by analyzing which words were said more often). Below, I compared the transcript of Bush's 2003 State of the Union to his 2007 iteration. Interesting to see which words changed...
[State of the Union 2003]
[State of the Union 2007]
And dig this - the damn thing works in foreign languages (well, at least the ones I speak). I pasted in the transcript of a recent speech made by Japanese Prime Minister Abe and it worked...kinda sorta worked. It visualized sentences and phrases rather than words - impressive, nonetheless!
One drawback: Right now, you have to upload data in order to create visualization charts, which means that your data (or interview, or transcript) is made available for public consumption.
I wonder why social data has become so popular suddenly... Many Eyes is a fantastic program, yes. But so is Data360 (if you haven't yet tried it, Tom Paper and crew were one of the very first to develop an online data visualization/ sharing tool). Swivel is cool as well...and there are lots more. Thoughts on why we're excited about socializing data?
Thanks to data guru Aron Pilhofer who introduced me to Many Eyes...
