The Friday Fillip

Hint.fm, the baby of a couple of IBM scientists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg (who are actually a couple) [UPDATE: actually NOT a couple; my mistake; see the comments], is a website about visualizing data. As we’ve talked about many times on Slaw, one method of trying to understand the current surges of information involves using data to construct visual Gestalts that our minds might ingest in a gulp. The fact that a picture is worth 10³ words is nothing new, of course; charts and graphs and diagrams have been around since before Babylonian geometry. What is new, though, are the abilities to incorporate great quantities of data and to make the display dynamic, interactive.

Viégas and Wattenberg offer nine examples of their work on hint.fm, and I want to direct your attention today to one in particular: Web Seer. This is an interactive tool for displaying and comparing what people think about something — millions upon millions of people, millions upon millions of somethings. It depends for its data on Google Suggest, that (somewhat annoying) feature Google lets you implement whereby as you type a query it leaps ahead with possible completions to it based upon what a myriad of other searchers have asked.

They’ve set up their tool so that you can compare pairs of response sets, such as “why doesn’t she…” against “why doesn’t he…” or “are democrats…” against “are republicans…” — though you don’t need to work in pairs. Let me illustrate (visualization!) by showing you what happened when I asked the Seer “is canada” and “is mexico”. (If you click on the image you’ll see it in a decent size.)

Try “conservatives are” and “liberals are” if you want to see some fun — and see where most of the queries to Google come from. Let us know if you come up with some amusing or interesting comparisons.