See more at his personal site.

Martin is a mathematician whose research interests include information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, bioinformatics, and art. Before joining IBM, Martin was the Director of Research and Development at SmartMoney.com, where he designed internet-based financial software. His work at SmartMoney included the groundbreaking Map of the Market, which visualizes live data on hundreds of publicly traded companies.

Martin has also worked with nonfinancial data ranging from email archives to DNA sequences. In addition he is well known for artistic data visualization, visualizing such disparate information sources as music, museum collections, and web searches. His artwork has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, and Ars Electronica. Martin holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

See papers:

The Visual Side of Wikipedia

Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia

Artistic Data Visualization: Beyond Visual Analytics

Martin Wattenberg

From an article:

Understanding the daily fluctuations in the stock market is a serious business for traders, analysts and investors. There is money to be made in those fluctuations and the Map of the Market is one of the best visualization tools around: it can show the changing stock prices of over 500 publicly-traded companies on a single screen. Since its launch by SmartMoney.com at the end of 1998, the Map of the Market has become a firm favourite with users. This is due, in large part, to the fact that it presents large volumes of fast changing data in a very useful and usable format, providing people with answers to the basic question 'how is the market doing today?' at a single glance. It is probably the most useful exemplar of information mapping on the Web today and is well worth trying out if you've never used it. On one single map one can quickly gain a sense of the overall market conditions, yet still see many hundreds of individual data elements.

Map of the Market

Dozens of blue semicircles of varying sizes meander across a horizontal axis, some repeating in a uniformly-sized arc again and again, while others hop along at random intervals and at random sizes. This, Martin Wattenberg asserts, is the shape of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” The arcs connect repeating sections of the musical score to convey the overall structure, or shape, of the song. Wattenberg displays the shapes of several songs, from the folk song “Clementine” to John Coltrane.

Wattenberg’s investigation into the shape of song is part of his overall mission to make the invisible visible. He explained the thought processes and engineering behind some of his most interesting projects in his lecture “Revelatory Interfaces,” presented in the comfortably crowded McConomy Auditorium last Tuesday. His Shape of Sound project uses a computer to detect repetition in musical scores and draw the corresponding arcs. “One of my favorite types of music to look at is jazz,” Wattenberg said. “It begins with a series of repetitions and then it takes off and often baffles the computer.”

Wattenberg translates complex social data into images. His images have been exhibited at the London Institute of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, among others. The images are beautiful and artistic, but they are also designed to relay information about our culture. Wattenberg’s visualizations provide everyday people with new toys to play with, new tools for investigation, and new ways of understanding.

See a talk at the Media Lab or a talk at SIMS. See also his exhibit at the Whitney.

Freud in the bedroom and fleshy-colored nouns

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

visualcomplexity.com

Welcome to the alpha version of Many Eyes!
View your data, ask questions, and share your discoveries.
Harness the collective intelligence of the net for insight and analysis.

Many Eyes

Comments from the local experts?

Fortify Software, which said it discovered the new class of vulnerability and has named it "JavaScript hijacking", said that almost all the major Ajax toolkits have been found vulnerable.

There's no mention of Jitko either here or in the Slashdot story.

Web 2.0 is vulnerable to attack

The evolution of tactics knows no mercy ...

"Children in the back seat, lower suspicion, we let it move through," Barbero said. "They parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back."

In case you didn't know this about Esther:

Ms. Dyson is also a player.

For those in the Boston area:

Former president Bill Clinton will speak to Harvard University's graduating seniors at Class Day on June 6, the university announced today.

Class Day is a less formal, more student-focused celebration held the day before commencement. This year's commencement speaker is Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

What's the deepest cosmic puzzle for the next 20 years?

Cory Doctorow:

"The difference between alchemy and science is if you tell people what you’ve learned."

Bruce Schneier:

"It’s the pollution of our age. How we will solve the data problem is what will define us as a people."

”Why isn't plain old pollution the pollution of our age? Last I checked we hadn't solved that ...

Some Hofstadter coverage:

An Idle Mind, or More? Alpha Oscillations and Consciousness

In the new issue of Seed, Douglas Hofstadter talks about "strange loops" - his term for patterns of level-crossing feedback inside some medium (such as neurons) - and their role in consciousness.

Strange Ways: A weaving together of minds, machines, and mathematics

Hofstadter argues that this lack of consciousness also applies to newborn babies. Although children are born with the basic apparatus to host a strange loop, it takes time for a self-representing feedback loop to form from the whirl of their experiences. In fact, Hofstadter argues that it takes several years for a child to develop full-fledged human consciousness.

On books about books:

John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer are mildly entertaining, more or less harmless bits of fluff, ideal for winter beach reading (You don't go to the beach in winter? Exactly.), while Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night is a real book, masterfully written and actually about something.

Francine Prose: "Instead of looking at works and point out what is wrong with them, why not look at brilliant works and see how they did it."

... and some books that made a palpable impression ...

Are you a fox?

Hedgehogs tend to be either spectacularly wrong or spectacularly right, and that last category smooths the path to greater formal recognition.

For more on fox/hedgehog distinctions in other disciplines ...

No, not this one. The one before that.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book version was recommended here back in 2003.

Charlie Wilson, a Texas congressman known for his foreign exploits, love of beautiful women, fun-loving lifestyle and serious legislating, always seemed to be a creation of Hollywood.

Now, he is.

The former Democratic lawmaker, who retired in 1996, is the main character in "Charlie Wilson's War," a movie starring Oscar winners Tom Hanks as Wilson, Julia Roberts as a connected Houston socialite and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a shadowy CIA agent. The film, directed by Mike Nichols, is nearly wrapped up for release on Christmas Day.

"It's just unworldly," Wilson said of watching Hanks play him.

Here's the plot outline:

A drama based on a Texas congressman Charlie Wilson's covert dealings in Afghanistan, where his efforts to assist rebels in their war with the Soviets have some unforeseen and long-reaching effects.

The film is directed by Mike Nichols, whose prior work includes "Closer" and "The Graduate".

America's Afghan Victory, Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Thad Starner was ahead of his time.

"Consumer electronics in many respects has become a lifestyle business and, I would say, a fashion business."

This, I didn't know:

The idea for the fashion shows came from another of the Infocharms co-founders, Katrina Barillova, a former model. Ms. Barillova came to the United States from what was then Czechoslovokia, where she had worked as an industrial spy by posing as a model, wearing listening devices while attending fancy parties. She designed and sewed her own dresses, she said, because she had to find creative ways to hide the devices in her clothes.

On the Market for Fashionable Electronics

“You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?”