As the setting to begin explaining what he does, Martin Wattenberg, the computer scientist and mathematician, has chosen a room at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art filled with more than 1 million plastic cups.
“Individually,” Wattenberg said, “the cups are boring and meaningless. But when combined together with an interesting method, it does something profound.” In this case, the artist Tara Donovan has used an algorithm to stack the cups in such a way that, when viewed en masse, they create a topographical model of a whimsical canyon that is so stunning that it’s hard to remember that all you’re looking at is a bunch of boring and meaningless 21-centiliter plastic cups.
This, Wattenberg says, is what he does with data. He works in data visualization, a discipline that is usually associated with number-crunching scientists. But Wattenberg has focused on visual explorations of culturally significant data — everything from baby name popularity to the history of the edits on the Wikipedia article about abortion — to create images that are both instantly illuminating and museum-quality beautiful.
His visualizations have been shown at the Boston Museum of Modern Art and, beginning next week, will be the featured exhibition for a two-month installation on outdoor screens in Harvard Square that are part of the Cambridge-based Lumen Eclipse public art project.
Wattenberg, 38, said he thought about nothing but math until he was in his mid-20s, but in the final year of studying for his doctorate in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, he fell in love with the potential of the Internet (which was still in its training wheels phase). So instead of pursuing a traditional academic track, he moved to New York to look for a job with a media company, and landed at Smart Money.
It was there that he got hooked on using graphics and interactivity to create new ways of seeing information, and helped create the influential “Map of the Market,” which provided a simple color overview of the health of the financial markets. Green was good, red was bad; lately, the page has been awfully red.
In 2002, he moved to Massachusetts to become a founding manager of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, and he began exploring the emotional potential of data visualization. “The traditional approach to visualization in science and business is to create something transparent and neutral — a telescope with clear glass,” he said as he roamed through the ICA exhibit. “But for an emotional approach, or an artistic approach, you want to bring a point of view. Not all data is interesting. The art is pointing the telescope at the right set of data.”
An important moment in his career happened somewhat inadvertently, when his wife, Laura, got pregnant with their second child. “When we were choosing a name, I would propose them and then she would go to the Social Security Web site and get stats for names and then create graphs showing me what names were getting too popular.” This back in forth eventually led her to write a book, 2005’s The Baby Name Wizard, and Wattenberg created an interactive visualization for her Web site that charted name popularity over time. The tool became hugely popular, and made him start thinking about visualization in a new way: as a group collaboration.
He’s recently been working with Fernanda Viegas, an IBM colleague, on two large public projects. Many Eyes is a site that allows users to upload their own data and create interactive visualizations that add something to a cultural conversation — Sarah Palin’s word choice in her speech at the Republican National Convention led many to create visualizations. Fleshmap explores the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation; his visual explains such things as how often a particular body part gets mentioned in songs from different musical genres (eyes get the most mentions in country songs, while the derriere is tops in hip-hop).
“Martin’s work is about democratizing visualization, making it for the masses and not just the elite,” said Karrie Karahalios, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“What makes him stand apart from the rest is that he’s putting it out there as a catalyst for debate and discourse,” Karahalios said.
Wattenberg, whose work can be found at bewitched.com, says that for all his mathematical and technical credentials, his view on the world is that of a humanist.
“It’s about using the computer as a new way to learn about people and cultures,” he said. “Almost everything can be reduced to data, so my job is analogous to the photographer. My projects are about what you choose to look at and how you crop it.”
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