Georg Cockburn

On Saturday Scholz & Volkmer held the see conference for the third consecutive year in Wiesbaden, Germany. As last year, this small, well organized conference took place in the Caligari Film Theatre, a nice place to spend on a rainy Saturday.

Among some nice speeches, there is especially one, that I want to point out. Frank van Ham from the IBM Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge showed a site they developed there called Many Eyes. It offers several visualisations for data. So you can upload data, choose the form of your graph/visualization, and you immediately have a visual compelling, interactive way to visualize any content, even text.

But what’s even better, you can share your this content with others and even implement it into your website, blog, etc. As Frank van Ham points out, what happens here is a very interesting form of social interaction: People start to comment on the data, on certain formations or peaks in the graph. Sometimes a discussion breaks off - some blogs have about 100 comments - Where people start developing their own visualization to argument in their favour.

What’s so appealing about this is the idea of visualisation as a way to easily share your thoughts with others. A website that enables that ads a new dimension to our way of communicating.