Fernanda Viégas

Fernanda Bertini Viégas
Born	1971 Brazil
Alma mater	University of Kansas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist, graphic designer
Years active	1997–present
Known for	Information visualization, social visualization, collective intelligence

Fernanda Bertini Viégas (born 1971) is a Brazilian expert in computer science and graphic design, concentrating on the social, cooperative, and artistic aspects of information visualization.

Biography

Viégas obtained her bachelor's degree in graphic design and art history from the University of Kansas in 1997. She pursued further studies at the MIT Media Lab, earning an M.S. in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences in 2005 under the guidance of Judith Donath. That same year, she became part of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working within the Visual Communication Lab.

In April 2010, Viégas co-established Flowing Media, Inc. alongside Martin M. Wattenberg, focusing on visualization tools for consumers. Just four months later, both joined Google to lead the "Big Picture" data visualization team based in Cambridge.

Social visualization

During her time at MIT Media Lab, Viégas created graphical tools to enhance online communication. Her Chat Circles project introduced features such as proximity-based filtering and visual archives that illustrate conversational patterns. She also developed email visualization systems like PostHistory and Themail that contributed foundational concepts for collaborative storytelling through visualization. Additionally, she analyzed usage trends of Usenet and blogs during this period.

Collective intelligence and public visualization

Together with Martin Wattenberg, Viégas concentrates on collective intelligence and public-facing data visualizations. Their collaborative projects, including History Flow and Chromogram, offered pioneering insights into Wikipedia’s editing behavior, notably conducting the first formal study on how vandalism is corrected.

Viégas played a key role in launching IBM’s Many Eyes platform in 2007, an experimental site designed to make visualization technology accessible to a broad audience. Many Eyes attracted users from individual enthusiasts to nonprofit organizations and media outlets such as the New York Times Visualization Lab.

Art

Viégas’s creative endeavors investigate visualization as a vehicle for expressing emotionally resonant digital information. One of her early works is the 2003 interactive installation Artifacts of the Presence Era showcased at the Boston Center for the Arts. Frequently partnering with Wattenberg, she produced artworks like "Web Seer," which visualizes Google Suggest data. Since 2008, the Fleshmap series has explored themes of sensuality through various media including web projects, video, and installations. In 2012, she introduced the Wind Map initiative that offers live wind forecast visualizations across the United States.

Publications

• Chat Circles. Fernanda B. Viégas and Judith Donath. ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), 1999
• Visualizing Conversations, Judith Donath, Karrie Karahalios and Fernanda B. Viégas . Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 4, Number 4, June 1999
• Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave. ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), 2004
• Many Eyes: A Site for Visualization at Internet Scale. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Frank van Ham, Jesse Kriss, Matt McKeon. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2007
• "Luscious". Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg. Book chapter in Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design. Ed. xtine burrough, Routledge 2011
• "Beautiful History". Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg. Book chapter in Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data Through the Eyes of Experts. Ed. Julie Steele, Noah Iliinsky. O'Reilly Media, 2010

External links

• Fernanda B. Viégas Official personal website of Viégas
• Research papers hosted on IBM's platform
• Many Eyes Public experimental visualization tool