ARTIST PROFILE: FERNANDA BERTINI VIÉGAS
Fernanda B. Viégas is a research artist and computational engineer. She was born on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and came to the United States to study at the University of Kansas (alumni.media.mit.edu). Upon graduating she did her masters at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, in which she focused her research on developing graphical user interfaces for online communication and visualizations of online communities (wikipedia.com, fernandaviegas.com). Fernanda also received a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 2005. Later that same year she started working at IBM’s Visual Communication Lab and in 2007 she developed in collaboration with Martin Wattenberg an online visualization interface called “Many Eyes”(fernandaviegas.com). In 2010, Fernanda co-founded Flowing Media, (flowingmedia.com) and shortly after she joined Google and became a co-leader, with Martin Wattenberg, of Google’s data visualization group “Big Picture” in Massachusetts. Currently, she is still employed at Google and continues working on developing groundbreaking visualizations.
Fernanda’s work is all about data visualization, since her very early pioneer work until now. In one of her works, “Chat Circles”, she designed an interface in which users could browse an entire social network, chat groups and online conversations:
“Our goal was to build a chat interface that would enhance social interaction by intuitively structuring the conversation, giving the user a better sense of the other participants, and depicting the activity in the virtual space.” (Donath et al.).
This simple yet powerful interface makes an entire database of conversations a lot more interesting and appealing. It also allows users to interact with other users based on same interest topics, and even incorporates the concept of hearing
“… where proximity brings focus to hearing, the participant approaches a topic in order to enter it.” (Diamond).
“Chat Circles” make use of simple analogies, and in result makes a whole online system easy to understand, a lot more personal and highly interactive. Another example of text visualization that Fernanda developed is called “Themail”:
This unique system uses conversations exchanged through emails as its main database. In "Themail" Fernanda proposes a more intuitive and personal form of interacting with systems that are regularly not perceived as such:
“Our hypothesis is that the patterns of communication we build up over time are themselves significant. As email archives grow, they become valuable records of people’s relationships. An increasing amount of our interaction with colleagues, friends, family members, etc. occurs via electronic media such as email.” (Viégas et al.).
“Themail” works in a way that allow the user to quickly visualize relationships between email content. It makes use of common visualization elements such as color and size, and also displays the words most commonly used through the conversations, making it more easier and meaningful for the user to search and browse the database.
Another very interesting work of Fernanda is “Many Eyes”, a visualization tool in which different users can collectively create databases, visualize them in different ways and comment them. This work promotes the idea of making data available to anyone and not only to a selected few. This work also brings a whole new perspective of how we interact with data, how we understand it and share it.
What is very interesting of Fernanda’s work is how she makes use of public databases and through her visualizations makes them more personal and meaningful for others to see and appreciate. Her work “Many Eyes” has opened infinite possibilities for people to explore different visualizations of topics of common interest, and even gives them the opportunity to further manipulate those visualizations and engage in dialogs about them. Furthermore, most of her data visualizations are indeed very simple yet beautiful created. The use of color is one of the elements that she employs in very creative ways. For example, in her recent work “Luscious”, she takes photography works published in magazines and with an algorithm extracts all the color information present on the images. Then, her abstract visualization of all these images is presented by displaying randomly placed circles in a plane allowing the viewer to contemplate just the chromatic design of the images (fernandaviegas.com).
Simple but powerful ways of manipulating data, just by finding its intrinsic components and extracting them to produce attractive imagery, or different stories, different relationships that otherwise would be missed. Another example of this concept that I find quite fascinating can be seen in her work “Phrase Net”.
Here, Fernanda breaks down a text into its most common keywords. These keywords are linked representing their relationships among the text, and viewers can make sense of the concepts and stories being told in the text by following the links (fernandaviegas.com). This type of tool can be of great benefit for students, teachers and researches that need to quickly summarize a book, or just get a sense of what it is about. Another one of her most recent works is “Web Seer” in which text is also the main source of the database. Text is the most common medium to tell stories; likewise, it can be very useful to reveal stories. This is the idea behind “Web Seer”. What types of searches do people type in Google? How can those searches define our culture and generations? What is the most searched answer in the web? Questions like these can have very complicated answers, but with Fernanda’s visualization we can get a better understanding or at least be inspired to make our own assumptions, and yet be surprised by the results.
Social trends and patterns are of great importance to understand entire generations, and this is just one of the most useful applications of data visualization. Fernanda’s data visualizations have made great influences in the field of graphical information tools. She has developed systems that allow us to play with data, extract it, quantify it, and read statistics in more meaningful ways than just spreadsheets filled with numbers that otherwise will soon get forgotten. However, the use of visual elements remains longer in our minds, and the use of text combined with imagery can have amazing effects in our behavior and understanding of the world that surrounds us. To me, Fernanda Viégas proposes this same combination as a recipe for a better, clearer and more profound view of our lives.
RESOURCES:
1. http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/me.html
2.http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/projects/chatcircles/index.htm
3. Diamond, Sara. “Lenticular Galaxies: The Polyvalent Aesthetics of Data Visualization.” Code Drift: Essays in Critical Digital Studies. (2010): n. pag. Web. 1 June 2010.
4. Donath, Judith & Viégas, Fernanda B. “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces”. In Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems. 2002. London: ACM Press, 2002. Print.
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernanda_Vi%C3%A9gas#cite_note-5
6. http://fernandaviegas.com/
7. http://flowingmedia.com/
8. Viégas, Fernanda B., Golder, Scott & Donath, Judith. “Visualizing email content: Portraying relationships from conversational histories.” In Proceedings of Computer-Human Interaction. 2006. Quebec, Canada: ACM Press, 2006. Print.
9. http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/