Data Viz Stars Wattenberg+Viégas Demo At Boston Meetup

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg (“fm” as the two data viz specialists are known to call themselves) demoed  their newest venture into the journalism space at the Boston groups first event Meetup on July 20.

In front of a crowd of between 40 and 50 at the Microsoft N.E.R.D Center (Microsoft’s status jumped in our eyes for that name alone), Fernanda and Martin showed TimeFlow, a new open source project for displaying large data sets on a time line, targeted at helping investigative journalists sift through information. They’d be working with Matt Carroll of The Boston Globe, and lead organizer of the Boston Hacks/Hackers Meetup.

The TimeFlow tool, which the two have been working on over the summer,  can create visual timelines from textual data. The software can import a table of data — presidential appointments, political contributions — and show it as a timeline or a calendar. It also displays the data as sortable and filterable lists. And if creates tables and graphs and offers statistical summaries. The two just accepted positions at Google, which is interesting.

Austin Gardner-Smith also demoed Pinyadda, a platform to make it easier to share links. Thanks to Boston Innovations for covering the event so diligently, and ComputerWorld.