Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg on Data Visualization 

 Dear Applied Statistics Community, 

 Please join us for this week's installment of the Applied Statistics workshop, where Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg will be presenting their talk entitled, "From Wikipedia to Visualization and Back'.  The authors provided the following abstract for their talk: 

 This talk will be a tour of our recent visualization work, starting with a case study of how a new data visualization technique uncovered dramatic dynamics in Wikipedia. The technique sheds light on the mix of dedication, vandalism, and obsession that underlies the online encyclopedia. We discuss the reaction of the Wikipedia community to this visualization, and how it led to a recent ambitious project to make data visualization technology available to everyone. This project, Many Eyes, is a web site where people may upload their own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. The goal is to foster a social style of data analysis in which visualizations serve not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to spur discussion and collaboration. 

 Martin and Fernanda have also provided the following set of links as background for the presentation: 

  http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/history_flow.pdf  
  
http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/viegasinfovis07.pdf  

  
And to a website based upon recent work in data visualization 

 Link to Many Eyes site: 
 www.many-eyes.com  

  
As always, the workshop meets at 12 noon on Wednesday, in room N-354 CGIS-Knafel.  A light lunch will be provided