Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas interviewed on CNN

Center research scientists Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas were among the data visualization experts interviewed in a recent CNN.com article. Wattenberg and Viégas point out how new tools help us "see" and understand large amounts of data in ways that were virtually unheard of a decade ago. Today's technology lets us make sense of complicated issues such as the health care bills floated by the government and the discussion swirling around them. check out what's happening in our neighborhood, or find what days the American public was the happiest.

Read more about this here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/02/data.viz/index.html

Susanne Hupfer goes to India with the Corporate Service Corps

A few days ago, Susanne Hupfer landed in Ahmadabad, a remote area in Northern India. Susanne, Assistant Director of the Center for Social Software, is one of several hundred IBMers who will spend a month working in developing countries as part of the IBM Corporate Services Corps. She and others from the company will team with the department of tribal affairs to help to jump start ecotourism into the GIR Forest National park -- home to endangered African lions.

You can read more about the program in these recent articles from the Boston Business Journal and Portfolio.

You can follow Susanne's journey via her twitter account.

Social Blue: IBM's internal social network

Find out why IBM started it and why it works so well. In this podcast from the Financial Times online, Joan Dimicco, a Research Scientist from the IBM Center talks to the BBC about why employees and managers alike love it, how they use it. and what surprised the team who deployed it two years ago.

Learn more about SocialBlue.

Listen to the podcast.

Boston Business Journal honors IBM's Martin Wattenberg

On October 2, the Boston Business Journal (BBJ) named Martin Wattenberg of IBM Research one of the Forty Under Forty. Every year the BBJ honors forty rising stars within Massachusetts' innovative business and nonprofit communities who are under forty years old. Martin was selected for his work with data visualizations from more than 300 nominations. Here are highlights from Martin's profile in the special supplement:

The technical aspects of visual representation captivated him and in 1992, Wattenberg joined IBM Corp. to perform research on how to make data and text easily understood by a wide variety of people.

The visual beauty of some of his creations have landed them in institutions around the world including at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Museum in London and on outdoor screens in Harvard Square.

Center takes the lead on transparent text with Symposium

On September 21 and 22, the Center for Social Software marked its first anniversary with a groundbreaking symposium on transparent text. The symposium, held in Cambridge, focused on ways to make large collections of documents understandable to lay people and experts alike. The symposium connected over 140 pioneers in government, nonprofits, academia, and the media, jumpstarting the discussion on how to disseminate, analyze, and explain textual data. The keynote address was delivered by the Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO for Open Government, who directs the White House Open Government Initiative. A key challenge for transparency and citizen engagement lies in unlocking the value and meaning in textual data. The speakers and attendees alike explored approaches that shed light on unstructured text, ranging from novel statistical techniques to web-based crowdsourcing. The highly successful symposium vibrated with energy, generating potential collaborations, partnerships, and customer engagements.

To see a list of speakers, attendees, and topics, click here.

To read sample attendee blog posts:

• The Noisy Channel - Day 1
• The Noisy Channel - Day 2
• Nieman Journalism Lab - Five projects on the frontier of text-based data analysis and visualization

Follow the tweets from the Symposium by searching for #tt09 on Twitter.

To see pictures from the Symposium, search for text09 on Flickr.

Center Welcomes Summer Interns

To some people, Summer in Cambridge means Red Sox baseball, trips to Cape Cod, and ice cream. To those of us at IBM Research, it also means a new group of talented young interns come to work with us on social software. This year our interns hail from as far away as China, South Korea, and Germany, and from as close as just a few blocks away. They represent a wide variety of universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin, and University of Canada, and University of California, Irvine, where they are studying computer science, design, and psychology, During the next few months they will tackle issues that help us understand how people can collaborate more effectively.

For example, one of our interns is exploring how people represent themselves online in e-meetings. As companies become geographically distributed, we frequently find ourselves working with people on the other side of the globe. Even when our colleagues and customers are close by, it's easier and cheaper to meet electronically rather face-to-face, And even though meeting digitally has become commonplace, the jury is still out on how best to represent ourselves to others sitting around the "virtual table." Granted, the recent explosion of digital media has given us a vast array of ways to tell people who we are and what we are doing. But what works best? Text? Pictures? Status messages? Video? Some combination of these? What happens when we have limited space -- do we become more creative? What kinds of information get people to click to find out more about someone?

We are excited to have them working with us. Watch for more stories about what are interns are up to this Summer.

Wordle Wins a Webby!

Congratulations to Jonathan Feinberg on winning the Webby Award! The Webby Awards celebrates the best Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video, and Mobile applications with The Webby Award and The People's Voice Award. This year Wordle -- Feinberg's popular tool for turning text into dazzling visualizations that can be shared with others -- took both honors in the The Best Use of Typography category. Of the thousands of entries received, less than 15% are nominated, and only two in each category take the prize. Members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences choose the nominees for both awards in each category, as well as the winners of the Webby Awards. But the People's Voice award is the collective voice of people from the worldwide online community who vote for their favorites.

We sat down with Jonathan, to ask him a few questions about Wordle and winning the Webby.

How did you get the idea for Wordle?

Excerpted from Can I have a Wordle with you? -- an IBM Research Computer Science Spotlight interview with Jonathan.

The core of the visual part of Wordle -- the word layout algorithm -- is something I developed as a tangent while working on another project called Dogear, which is a social bookmarking engine.

One of the ubiquitous features of social bookmarking is a tag cloud. A tag cloud is a layout of the most frequently used tags, tags being arbitrary text key-words that people assign to their bookmarks, or by extension, to other resources. It's kind of a gestalt or a gist way of looking at the work you've been doing or of the metadata you've been creating.

The tag clouds I saw at the time were pretty boring and in my opinion kind of ugly. One day a blogger who calls himself Black Belt Jones put on the Web a really simple but very lovely tag cloud that he had made of his own tags from the Delicious social bookmarking engine. He had represented some of the tags in different fonts and he’d laid them out in interesting angles on the page, and he even had the dot of an “i” inside the counter of a G. I thought there's got to be a way to write a computer program to do that.

What has been the response you've gotten so far?

I've received thousands of emails from all kinds of people who enjoy using Wordle. Many of the emails have suggested FAQs, design refinements, and new features.

Do you have a favorite Wordle? What was it used for?

There have been many. The one I remember most fondly is the Boston Globe's comparison of the Obama and McCain blogs. That was the first time I thought that someone had understood how to exploit specific choices in font, layout, and color.

How do you feel about winning the Webby?

I take the Webby award as a validation of Wordle's design as a web application -- not, necessarily, as a visualization. While I would have done a couple of things differently, knowing what I know now, I think that my decision to privilege "low barrier to entry" as a design constraint has been vindicated.