Data visualisation is a hobby of mine and a frequent topic of my posts. Frequent readers will know that I believe data visualisation to be invaluable to PR professionals in their craft, in their seeking to understand and exert influence.
IBM's awesome Many Eyes service has recently introduced a new way of visualising swathes of text ("unstructured data" in the words of the experts). An analysis they've called "Phrase Net". The easiest way to demonstrate what that means is simply to post up an example.
So I took the text from the last three months of featured posts on MarCom Professional and pasted it into Many Eyes and selected the Phrase Net visualisation, and hey presto...
This is just a static image of course, but if you click through to the actual visualisation then you will see that mousing-over the words gives you their number of occurrences, and mousing-over the connection lines gives you information about the number of matches.
Click here to find the actual visualisation, and you will want to click on "word1 [space] word2" in the "Select a phrase" box to see the grab above.
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My other posts on data visualisation:
Influence… it’s a numbers game
Can you see it? Making influence visible.
Visualising your world of influence with Skyrails
Visualise your SEO
