Why oh Why?

Millions of people are familiar with Many Eyes, the tool that Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg created to help users make sense of data by visualizing it. In this New York Op Ed piece, Fernanda and Martin take a turn at asking seasonal questions and using Many Eyes to find out which ones people are asking most often on the web.

Try it out here.

Courtesy of the New York Times

IBM Hosts Second Life Exhibition Space

For the last several years, IBM has maintained a presence in the virtual world of Second Life, including the well-used IBM 6 public sandbox. The sandbox has been home and training ground to some of Second LIfe's most talented builders. Since May of 2009, the Center for Social Software's IBM Exhibition Space (located near the sandbox, on IBM 2 and IBM 3) has been hosting large-scale virtual artworks. The site is curated by Andrew Sempere, who selects the works and collaborates with the artists to ensure that the Exhibits represent the best that Second LIfe artwork has to offer. IBM's Exhibition Space was recently featured in a post at Art 21, the blog spun off from the Emmy-nominated PBS series on Art in the 21st Century. In this article, author Nettrice Gaskins interviews IBM Artist in Residence Bryn Oh about her piece
The Rabbicorn.

Read more
here.

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.