The former leaders of IBM's Visual Communications Lab have been hard at work on a "summer project" -- desktop software that will display large amounts of information in a number of visual formats. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg touted version "0.5" of their Time Flow tool as a way to create visual timelines from textual data. And indeed the software can import a table of data -- presidential appointments, political contributions -- and show it as a timeline or a calendar, with color- and size-coded entries that make it easier to spot patterns. But the software also displays as sortable/filterable lists, tables and graphs -- allowing it to serve as much as a visual database as timeline -- and offers statistical summaries of the data. Viégas and Wattenberg created the visualization site Many Eyes which was designed to "democratize data analysis," adding a social component to graphic data (well before the explosive popularity of social media).

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