Masses’ Data: Helping Regular People Communicate on the Web through Rich Interactive Data Visualizations

December 13, 2010
David Karger | MIT

As we browse the web, we benefit from the many rich interactive information visualizations we find there. Shopping and review sites let us sort and filter items by a variety of meaningful properties. Newspapers incorporate maps, timelines, and a broad variety of charts. But these information visualizations are generally authored by large organizations with developers and computational infrastructure. Regular people settle for conveying their ideas in text on blogs, wikis, or personal web sites.

If the large organizations are on to something, and rich interactive data visualizations improve communication, then we’d be better off if regular people could create them too. I’ll argue that this is possible, and discuss several tools that let end-users author such visualizations, over arbitrary data sets, inside their blogs, wikis, and even plain old documents, using the same WYSIWYG tools that they already use for authoring in these environments. I’ll also discuss a couple of early experiences deploying these tools.

The key to these tools is a web architecture that is centered on data rather than web sites and applications. A common data representation supports the easy migration and blending of information. Users can access any data through simple copy-and-paste mechanisms rather than complex programmatic APIs. Applications can be replaced by lightweight “skins” of visualization and interaction wrapped around data; users edit these skins to create new visualizations the same way they edit documents today.

Speaker Details

David R. Karger is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1994 and has since contributed to many areas of computer science, publishing in algorithms, machine learning, information retrieval, personal information management, networking, peer to peer systems, coding theory, and human-computer interaction. Karger was the recipient of the 1994 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the 1997 Tucker Prize, and the 2002 NAS award for Initiatives in Research.

A general interest has been to make it easier for more people to create, find, organize, manipulate, and share information.