Many Eyes is a new Web app (still in Alpha) from IBM that lets you upload data and create all kinds of different visualizations from that data—including maps, histograms and scatterplots (which, while I have no idea what it is, sounds really fun) and even the ubiquitous tag cloud. I found out about Many Eyes from a link to this tag cloud visualization of Alberto Gonzales’ testimony on Thursday, which has a big, fat “i don’t recall” in the middle of it. I was inspired, so I spent the better part of 2 hours trying to find some testimony or transcript that would produce an equally compelling tag cloud. Easier said than done.

I ended up with the following 2 visualizations. The first is a compilation of 5 of President Bush’s weekly radio addresses, and the second is a compilation of 5 of the weekly Democratic responses to his addresses. They are from 10/14, 10/7, 9/30, 9/23 and 9/15 of last year. I wanted to use the 5 most recent, but those were the latest transcripts I could find of the Democratic responses (can’t anyone take dictation anymore?). I guess for me, the most interesting point was how often the President uses the word “Terror” in some form on a weekly basis (37 times out of a total of 738 words). And that the Democratic response used “Republican” 6 times more often than “Democrat”. And also how difficult it was to find some data that produced an interesting result.

There are some other very interesting visualizations that I saw, particularly this one showing emissions by state for coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Texas is the orange-est for all three.

Also, nice to see IBM is still occasionally innovating on an individual level.