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Stamen on Manyeyes

I was first introduced to IBM’s new Manyeyes project when Fernanda Viegas spoke about it at Adaptive Path’s excellent IDEA conference in Seattle back in October. We presented too; it was a “morning of visualization” 🙂 .

Mike Migurski’s Digg friends

Since it launched, the site has deservedly gotten a ton of attention and seems to be growing every day. The focus on “democratization of visualization” is absolutely right on. What clinches the site’s utility for me is that it allows you to basically screencap the particular way you’re looking at the data, so what you make can be shared and referenced.

Visualization (and flash and java generally) have been historically terrible at this aspect of things; data flows through, the framework responds, you get it looking just great, and then… you’re done, unless you want to take a screengrab, post it to flickr, yadda yadda yadda…and then you lose the ability to interact with the data and draw your own conclusions. The chain of reasoning gets broken any time you try and do anything with the material. Manyeyes solves this problem by generating thumbnails of whatever aspect of the data you’re looking at, and provides links back to the original data, so you can make your own graphings; it’s just great. This ability to handle a specific slice of visualized data is becoming more and more of an interest to us here at Stamen; look for more on time and visualization here in the next few months.

Published: 02.23.07
Updated: 09.20.22

About Stamen

Stamen is a globally recognized strategic design partner and one of the most established cartography and data visualization studios in the industry. For over two decades, Stamen has been helping industry giants, universities, and civic-minded organizations alike bring their ideas to life through designing and storytelling with data. We specialize in translating raw data into interactive visuals that inform, inspire and incite action. At the heart of this is our commitment to research and ensuring we understand the challenges we face. We embrace ambiguity, we thrive in data, and we exist to build tools that educate and inspire our audiences to act.