Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are pioneers in data visualization and analytics. Their research has helped shape the field, and the systems they've built are used daily by millions of people.

As leaders of Google's data visualization research group, they focus on finding new ways for users to understand and explore data. Their team's work has appeared on the Google search page, on YouTube, and in mission-critical internal data analytics tools.

Before joining Google, the two founded Flowing Media, Inc., which focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. Prior to Flowing Media, they led IBM's Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes, which introduced visualization to millions of users worldwide. The two became a team in 2003 when they performed the first scientific study of Wikipedia, leading to the "history flow" project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia.

Viégas was named one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company. Her visualizations of email and online conversation led the way for new social media interfaces. Wattenberg, as a director of R&D at Dow Jones, created some of the first digital journalism technology. His visualization of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics.

Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for 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. Their artwork has influenced contemporary design practice: for instance, the techniques in their wind map are now used by many major media companies to display the weather.

Sample press

• Blown away, The Economist
• Most Influential Women in Tech, Fast Company
• Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data, New York Times
• IBM's Data-Visualization Champion BusinessWeek.

We're committed to a rigorous understanding of visualization, informed by academic research. (Fernanda has a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab; Martin's Ph.D. is in mathematics, from U.C. Berkeley.) The scientific side of our work includes both design of new visualization techniques and the study of how they are used in practice. The two of us have published more than 30 academic papers; if you are interested in learning more, read our publication list.

Our research agenda encompasses three main themes.

• Visualization for everyone. We believe that visualization is a tool that can benefit everyone, and much of our work has explored ways to make it easy to use for laypeople and non-experts.
• Collaborative visualization. We helped pioneer the space of collaborative visualization and collective data analytics.
• New visual techniques. There's a whole world beyond bar charts and line graphs—or even treemaps and parallel coordinates—that's waiting to be explored. We've invented new techniques for data sets ranging from text to vector fields that have become widely adopted.

Our work explores the joy of revelation: the special electricity of seeing a city from the air, of hearing a secret, of watching a lover undress.

Our medium is data visualization, a technology developed by computer scientists to extract insights from raw numbers. This technique is ideal for investigating a world represented by digital traces, where truth is hidden in masses of information. The resulting studies take the form of web sites, prints, and videos.

At the same time, our artwork complicates and subverts a tool that is largely used by the business and military elite. Unlike these traditional uses, we believe visualization to be an expressive medium that invites emotion. We aim our tools at data sets that range from hip hop songs to Walt Whitman's poetry, from arguments on Wikipedia to expressions of carnal desire. We strive to expand the practical craft of visualization beyond function to create objects of social engagement, pleasure and revelation.

Our process is driven by curiosity and a sense of adventure. Data is the starting point, followed by incessant questioning, with a touch of wonderment and laughter. Eventually we start to ask questions that can't be answered by direct observation. At that point we begin to work in software code, creating a series of digital instruments—telescopes and microscopes of the abstract world—that reveal more than our own eyes can see.

As proponents of expressive visualization, we exploit the power of color and complexity to reveal arresting, unintuitive patterns. Parallel to depth of information, clarity and interactivity are of great concern to us. We strive to build intelligible visualizations that engage viewers at a formal level while allowing them to hold a dialogue with the underlying data. It is in this dialogue, we hope, that the brightest sparks of revelation will be found.

We come to visualization from separate paths: Fernanda via design, Martin via mathematics. After admiring each other's style from afar, we joined forces in 2003—and discovered the thrill of thinking and creating as a team. Together, we set off to explore the possibilities of visualization as a medium; it has become our tool for asking scientific, social, and artistic questions. Today the two of us lead Google's "Big Picture" visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And in our artistic work, visualization is used to excite and provoke.



High-res photos
credit: Matthew Jason Warford