Social Science Statistics Blog

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14 February 2007

Data sharing and visualization

A friend of mine pointed me to this website, Many eyes. Basically any random person can upload any sort of dataset, visualize the dataset in any number of ways, and then make the results publically available so that anyone can see them.

The negative, of course, is much the same as with anything that "just anyone" can contribute to: there is a lot of useless stuff, and (if the source of the dataset is uncited) you don't know for sure how valid the dataset itself is. There may be a lot of positives, though: the volume of data alone is like a fantastic dream for many a social scientist; it's a great tool for getting "ordinary people" interested in doing their own research or analysis of their lives (for instance, I noticed some people graphing changes in their own sports performance over time); many of the interesting datasets have ongoing conversations about them; and only time will tell, but I imagine there is at least a chance this could end up being Wikipedia-like in its usefulness.

It may also serve as a template for data-sharing among scientists. Wouldn't it be nice if, every time you published, you had to make your dataset (or code) publically available? We might already be trending in that direction, but some centralized location for scientific data-sharing sure would speed it along.

Posted by Amy Perfors at 10:24 AM