Visualizing Personal Thoughts, Public Data

Is there a way to visualize people's innermost thoughts? Data visualization experts Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg say yes (tentatively).

The founders of Flowing Media, a studio focusing on media and consumer-oriented visualization, developed a project that lets users pit parts of commonly googled phrases against one another. For example, one could pit the words "are engineers" against the words "are writers" and compare how those phrases are most frequently completed.

The project, called Web Seer, relies on Google Suggest for data. Google Suggest lets you see what others are asking when they search the web.

Wattenberg presented the project, along with about a dozen others, at last week's Visual Interpretations Conference, held at MIT. The conference was organized by the MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities with the MIT Communications Forum and the Comparative Media Studies Program.

Below are some other interesting Web Seer searches. Intrigued? Try it yourself.