Cool Tool #7 Many Eyes

Posted by Andy

Many Eyes is a free online data visualisation tool made by IBM and allows users to import their textual data and turn it in to one of many different visual diagrams.

You need to register with the website first, and after a small learning curve you can create, share and embed visualisations onto your blog or website.

Below is one that I used to create a diagram breaking down the various subject themes from David McCandless' brilliant book - Information is Beautiful.

This is not a static diagram, you can select various parts of diagram within our blog -very cool.

What IBM says about the tool:

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

All of us in CUE's Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.

Information is Beautiful

Posted by Andy

This has to be one of the most interesting sites I've come across in a long time. Not only does it take information from a collection of words and numbers and turns them into graphs, but it does it in a very attractive and cool way. With graphs showing you how to Reduce Your Chances of Dying in a Plane Crash to latest Swine Flu stats in a Google Doc to Mountains out of Molehills looking at moral panics
There is a a book to accompany the project. I won't say anymore as this post is about visualisation and not text - so with that in mind I will shut up.

Cool Tools #1 - Creately

Posted by Andy

We usually have a recommended website every month, but given the fact I was going to post two in a month it would make it that little less valued, no single website should share the award. So I've decided to start giving them their own little tag line of 'Cool Tools'. These are anything from Web 2.0 tools to support your research, teaching, collaboration and learning, to websites that search scholarly articles in a new way. Considering there are so many great new tools out there, it seems a shame to restrict them to just one a month when we stumble on them, so from now own they'll have the tag cooltool along with the usual keywords, which you'll be able to search of find in the tags on the right hand side of this blog.

So enough of the waffle, here's the first site to get the Cool Tool treatment. It's an innovative little website that allows users to draw diagrams and designs online. This is anything from online flowcharts and computer networks to Web mockups and sitemaps. Creately works on the idea that it is "easy, collaborative and smart."

The main features of Creately are that it is an easy and intuitive online diagramming tool which is Web-based with smart user interface and quick start templates, with the bonus of accessing your charts anywhere. Like most decent Web 2.0 tools you can:

Draw Diagrams & Designs right in your browser.
No Software Downloads. No Installs.
Collaborate on online diagrams.
Create, Share and Publish diagrams online securely.
Large email attachments are history
Intelligent objects speed up designs
Automatic validation checks and smart connectors
Data powered diagrams
Capture data in your diagrams. No more back and forth between multiple tools.

If you want to know more - view their short five minute video below