Sugunasri Maddala's Column - "Many eyes"

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (http://www.many-eyes.com/), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Ben Shneiderman, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a pioneer in information visualization, says sites like Many Eyes are helping to democratize the tools of visualization. “The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools can be brought to a much wider audience,” he said.

Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. “But sometimes it’s like driving with your eyes closed,” he said. “With visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something that will help you” — for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers in the data.

“The great fun of information visualization,” he said, “is that it gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.”

Data can be organized many ways on Many Eyes. Above is a chart of Olympic medals.

Note: This is an excerpt from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: August 30, 2008

I read about this earlier, perhaps in newspaper. But, before trying it for myself, or forget about it before doing anything with it, I thought of sharing it with our community. Some of us may try it. Visualization may help to make our point more clear and may help many a librarian convince their directors and users.

Librarians continue to be knowledge professionals. Would you like to communicate to the Principal Blogger of India Librarian directly? email to .- lotus5673@yahoo.co.in .- 1816gbgv

I am going to introduce to our ILI community, Ms.Sandhya, the silent, shy and senior serials librarian shortly.!!

Dear Mr. Devrai,
Greetings and good wishes!

I am going to introduce to our ILI community, Ms. Sandhya, the silent, shy and senior serials librarian - shortly. Whole of last week we were busy with our co-ordinator from FAO.Pl. have a look at this link.

http://www.arboretum.org.in/

Do you personally know Mr. Prafulla Chandra who is in this project?I contacted him via e-mail and I got a response. Beyond this I don't want to disturb him now. I came to know about this when I mentioned to Srinivasachary, (another friend of mine who works in Manage) that I am interested only in growing a few trees and preach only that to people.Their tag line - ...at peace in the lap of nature ... gave me instant peace.I know that a single tree in our own garden gives more peace than 1000 trees in an arboretum. But we have to work - for money!!! Then is it better to work in an arboretum?I nurture one more `dream lifestyle' in the context of this arboretum. But after I hear more from you about this venture and people concerning it.

Thanks for your encouragement and support. Your ILI blog is encouraging and supporting many people like me.Waiting to hear more from you about this project,

Mrs.Sugunasri Maddala - Independent Information Consultant
ILI Blogger/Author
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Librarians continue to be knowledge professionals. Would you like to communicate to the Principal Blogger of IndiaLibrarian directly? email to .- lotus5673@yahoo.co.in .- 1816gbgv

SUGUNA'S CORNER - How gender friendly is the Library profession?

ILIs poll on the `status of Library Profession' has set me thinking. It requires more than a poll to respond. Nevertheless, I answered the question from amongst very many interesting options given. I chose the safest option although personally I have very raw feelings about the profession which I think I should keep to myself.

But I definitely feel that it would be useful to share my views on the Gender aspects of it.

Why I chose to migrate from my basic discipline, Agriculture throws light on some of these aspects.

Deadly combination!

In a way it was the other way round, it was Library science that I wanted to pursue over a base of some professional course, which happened to be agriculture in my case. In fact this was the advice given by Dr. Sreepathy Naidu, Ex. Librarian of S.V. University, Tirupati, to his students to guide their children into Library profession via some professional course. My mother happened to be in his class pursuing her B.Lib. Sci. and my career is the result.

Cool roof over your head!

But this idea was reinforced within myself on a particular hot summer afternoon when we saw two women library staff sitting under the comfort of a fan in an already cool Library building, while we had just returned from our Agronomy practicals class. While I enjoyed doing those planting, weeding and harvesting operations, I was not ready to take those tensions of `timely' operations in the rest of my life.

Wider choice!

Choosing library profession, facilitates a wider choice while selecting your `spouse'. Whomever you marry, be it in Amalapuram or in America, you can be sure of having a Library and hence sure of having a profession for yourself. It is not the case with Agriculture.

Under one roof!

Once, a couple discovered very lately, that their professions don't match. That means they can never get jobs at the same place even if they manage to get high level recommendations. One works on Oceans and the other on Deserts! Difficult to co-exisit!! (We don't know, with climatic change it could be possible!!). But, then one of them switched to Library profession so that they could nest! (I don't remember the exact disciplines but it was something similar to this combination)

The top most and ...

Gender suitability is not the same to all the positions in a Library. Even when they are capable, at certain times, it becomes difficult for them to `attend to' or `stay late' or make `surprise visits on Holidays', because of their obvious domestic responsibilities.

Some women, (like me) have a tendency to do all the things by themselves and fail to delegate or effectively manage others. In that case the first position is not suitable.

Another job which women cannot handle in a library is to shelve, take out or otherwise handle large bound volumes. I found it very difficult during my pregnancy but was not complaining about it outwardly as in those days we were not talking `such' issues.

At your own pace!

It is this property of the `Library profession' that gave me the facility/luxury of working from home. Certain jobs like Cataloguing and Classification are intellectual and demand a good amount of concentration, undisturbed by the administrative responsibilities and obligations in a Library. These jobs could better be done away from a library. This is what I am doing now as a free lancer. It is not totally new in our family, as my sister Smt. Kameswari, a Library professional herself and wife of a Librarian, used to prepare entries on cards for Kendreeya Vidyapeeth in Tirupati. I am using computer instead!

SUGUNA'S COLUMN - INDIA LIBRARIAN WELCOMES SUGUNASRI AS AN AUTHOR CONTRIBUTOR

INDIA LIBRARIAN TAKES IT AS A MATTER OF PRIDE TO WELCOME Mrs.SUGUNASRI MADDALA - INDEPENDENT INFORMATION CONSULTANT AS AN AUTHOR/CONTRIBUTOR. CONGRATULATIONS!

YOU CAN REACH HER BLOG AT : http://sugunasrimaddala.blogspot.com/

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SUGUNASRI ON HERSELF :

"I am an independent Information Consultant specializing in agricultural information. I am a graduate in Agriculture as well as in Library and Information Science and a Post-graduate in Information Science. I started my career in ICRISAT in 1989, where I worked on expert systems and provided literature searches to scientists. "

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Knowledge is power. Librarians continue to be knowledge professionals. gbgv...1816....

Reach my blog to know more about me : http://indialibrarian.blogspot.com/