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ManyEyes

What is it?

Web 3 brings together the tools that make technologies work better for the people that usethem. As a tool which puts this into practice, ManyEyes brings together visualization toolsthat make the analysis of information easier to understand and enable staff to make the bestuse of such analysis to inform decisions on how they improve their services.

Why are we researching this?

ManyEyes can help tackle the information overload – making quantitative (such as statistics)and qualitative information (like policies, evaluations or even  online conversations) moremeaningful to those people who haven’t necessarily created the knowledge in the first place.

For example, a statistician may have created datasets on a customer group but it’s theservice manager that is best placed to make use of them to personalise the service. A web

developer may have set up a tool that enables the public to comment on a particular issue,but it is the policy officer that needs to use that feedback when formulating policies.

ManyEyes can also help us open up our expertise from staff to the public – a priority in the“Future Challenges” agenda - so they can make better decisions on areas that affect them.

For example, GapMinder and the New York Times Visualization Lab have been veryeffective in enabling people to manipulate information such as longitudinal statistics tomeasure the impact of a policy over time and place, government spending or crime rates.

In other words, it can allow policy makers and resource managers to pick up on new trendsand unmet needs by visualising different types of information, while allowing the public to

become more informed citizens.

ManyEyes Wikified can enable staff to collaborate in providing the necessary context tothese visualisations.

How can you develop this?

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other, so you canevaluate how well they’redelivering together towards a project’s

objectives (i.e. Pic &Mix), a corporate (i.e.Future Challenges) or even local agenda (i.e.responsible for an LAAoutcome or NationalIndicator)

outcome / National Indicator leads

Different words throughpattern matching or tagclouds

Policy and research officers

Different dimensions of… Analysis (such as a

technique or resources)

Business analysts

Numeric values throughcircles to comparedifferent aspects of acommon variable

Data analysts

The distribution of resources or prioritieswithin a project or department

Resource managers

Change over differentoptions over the same

variable, such as time

Service managers

Change for a samevariable over differentmeasurements (such asbetween level of expertise, technologyand time required)

Service managers andperformance monitoringofficers

Hierarchical structureswhere specific issueshave been divided intocategories (i.e. spendingon children’s services

divided into differentteams)

Organisational and workforcedevelopment officers

More traditional graphing,such as line graphs andpie charts

Service managers

Translation of unstructuredinformation to structuredknowledge to…

Uncover all the differentcontexts andrelationships betweenspecific keywords andturn the information into

Consultation and press officers

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structured “issue trees”

Graph the importance of specific words over others in documents

Policy and research officers

What does the analysis show us?

ManyEyes is an online based data visualization tool, using Java applet technology (whichcan be downloaded here and needs to be Java 1.4 or above). It is recommended to run oneither Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.0.6 – naturally it’s preferable if more updated versionsare used. IBM has advised that it may not be bug-free as it is still a proof of concept.

The colour palettes have been chosen to make sure that people who are colour blind canvisualize the data, while the data is set out in a text format that can be used byscreenreaders.

Similar applications currently used within the Council, such as Xcelsius – used by PersonnelInformation Systems, Employee Services, KASS Finance and Business PerformanceMonitoring, require a high level of expertise and experience of both Xcelsius and Excel.

How will we measure impact?

Costs

Process

Inputs Measure Outputs Measure ScorecardPerspective

Askparticipantswhat theyvalue fromvisualising therelationshipsbetweendifferent typesof informationor the differentdimensions of a same set of information, inother words,

what metrics

User-definedmeasures

User-definedmeasures

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