Voyagers and voyeurs: supporting social data analysis

In recent years, researchers and entrepreneurs have introduced new online services for data collection and analysis, often relying on interactive visualizations to enable mass interaction with data. These sites represent the first step in what looks to be a growing online phenomenon: social data analysis, that is, collective analysis of data supported by social interaction. Engaging crowds of both experts and non-experts in the process of data exploration has applications ranging from political transparency to business intelligence to citizen science. Achieving this vision, however, will require further innovation in the design of systems for collaborative data management. In this talk, I will highlight recent efforts to use the web as a platform for collectively creating, managing, and analyzing data. I will share how web citizens are collaborating with data, and discuss how we might design systems to catalyze social forms of data management and exploration.