The social life of hypertext

We live in a world where networks of people mingle with networks of documents, creating networks of ideas that are linked to the people and documents that subscribe to them. New tools are being created that facilitate the interactions between these networks, greatly expanding the role of hypertext as a social media tool. Interactive visualization is a particularly powerful tool that capitalizes on the immense visual processing power of the human brain. With Web 2.0 and related technologies the world of ideas is being shaped by the wisdom of crowds. People understand data better when we scale up the audience. While one can learn a lot simply watching visual displays of information, there is also a pent up desire to analyze. People want their own controls, so that they can see data in their own way by looking at it differently. ManyEyes is a system that features a range of visualizations, where people can upload data and see that data in a variety of ways. When people find interesting views of the data they can annotate them and share their comments with others, thus building a community around visualization and interpretation. Sharing visualizations and interpretations lets people have deeper discussions in the communities that they belong to, facilitating conversations on politics, economics, health, and a host of other issues. We have found that visualizations are particularly powerful when used to analyze words. Dynamic visualizations draw people in and lead to interesting new conclusions. Scalable real world deployments let research keep up with the wisdom of crowds, and this keynote will explore some of the emerging research in this area. More information about the Many Eyes project can be found at www.many-eyes.com.