Martin Wattenberg

Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist. He is a co-leader, with Fernanda Viégas, of Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group.

Before joining Google, he and Viégas founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. Prior to Flowing Media, Wattenberg founded and managed IBM's Visual Communication Lab, exploring new forms of visualization and how they can enable better collaboration. A key project was Many Eyes (http://www.many-eyes.com), an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis.

His visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Session: Pictures of Arguments, Songs, & Ancient Texts

Some of our favorite visualization problems involve words. How can you see the shape of an argument? Is it possible to make a map of a book, or poem, or even a song? Finding ways to turn words into pictures is one of visualization's great unsolved problems. We'll show a series of projects tackling this challenge, and talk about what worked and what didn't.