With resources disappearing from newsrooms, getting the support to build interactive graphics may be an impossible task.

One tool that can help is Many Eyes, a project
of IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group. According to the Many Eyes site, its purpose is to “democratize visualizations.”

What you can do is limited. You’re stuck with the formats and color schemes available – mostly many shade of tan.

But when you need to make some data available to users online in an understandable format, it’s a great tool. We used it at ProPublica for some of our stimulus coverage. We used it to compare unemployment to stimulus infrastructure money. (We even added an interactive scatterplot.)

It also is a great place to look for ideas. Lots of folks have put their visualizations on Many Eyes, and you can search by topic or by type of data.

You first need a dataset, which can be just about anything. You also can use datasets already on the site, depending on how you feel about using other people’s data.

Let’s go through one visualization using some data on hospital occupancy data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (nicar_hospital_example)that I uploaded. From the home page, click explore datasets, then search for NICAR.

On the results page, click the Visualize button to make your graphic.In this example, a map is the most logical way to display the data. But keep in mind that there are many other cool graphics, including tree maps, word clouds and scatterplots.

For a map of U.S. states, go to Country map and click USA.

Next, Many Eyes will generate the map.

If you hover your mouse over a state, you’ll get the actual number. If you like what you see at this point, click Publish at the bottom of the page.

Many Eyes also is a great tool to show data to other folks in your newsroom.

Once you publish the map, you can embed it in a Web page. Just click Share it to grab the code.

If you create your own account, you can add data by clicking the upload dataset link. Paste your data into the box that appears.

You must put in a title if you want to find your data later. Then you can add more information – particularly if you want others to be able to use your data.

Happy visualizing!