How to Make Data Visualizations with Many Eyes

Late last year I posted a review of a free data visualization creation tool from IBM called Many Eyes. Over the weekend I learned, via Larry Ferlazzo, of an excellent video tutorial about Many Eyes. The video, embedded below, is a seven minute overview of using Many Eyes to create data visualizations. Below the video I've reposted my original review of Many Eyes.



Many Eyes is an online data visualization tool developed by IBM. Many Eyes provides tools for creating a wide variety of data visualizations using your data sets or data sets hosted by IBM. If you're not interested in creating visualizations but just want to explore the visualizations created by others, you can do that on Many Eyes too. The visualization you see below came from the public gallery on Many Eyes. (If you're viewing this in RSS you may need to click through to see the visualization).


There are six categories of data visualization types offered by Many Eyes. Within each of those categories you will find three or four tools for creating visualizations. You will find common visualizations like line graphs, bar graphs, maps, and word clouds. You will also find some less commonly used and or more difficult-to-create data visualization displays like treemaps for comparison, block histograms, bubble charts, and phrase nets.

Applications for Education

Many Eyes could be a great tool for a wide variety of courses. In any course where comparisons of data sets are used, Many Eyes could help students produce visualizations to aid in making those comparisons.

Here is a related item that may be of interest to you:
Google Fusion Tables - Data Visualizations Made Easy