Martin M. Wattenberg

Martin M. Wattenberg
Martin M. Wattenberg
Born	Template:Birth year and age; Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist, data visualization expert, digital artist
Years active	1996–present
Known for	Many Eyes, Map of the Market, data visualization research
Notable work	Many Eyes, Map of the Market, History Flow, Arc Diagram, Word Tree, Chromogram, Fleshmap series

Adapted from the English Wikipedia article Martin M. Wattenberg, available under CC BY-SA 4.0Updated 9 August 2025

Martin M. Wattenberg (born 1970) is an American expert and creator in the field of data visualization. He holds the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Alongside Fernanda Viégas, he was part of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they developed Many Eyes. In April 2010, they launched Flowing Media, Inc., a company dedicated to consumer-focused visualization solutions. Shortly thereafter, in August 2010, both joined Google to co-direct the "Big Picture" data visualization team based in Cambridge.

Biography

Raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, Wattenberg completed his undergraduate degree (A.B.) at Brown University in 1991. He then earned an M.S. from Stanford University in 1992 and obtained a Ph.D. in Mathematics from U.C. Berkeley in 1996 under the mentorship of Charles C. Pugh. His dissertation was entitled Generic families of dynamical systems on the circle. Between 1996 and 2002, he was employed in New York City at Dow Jones, working on SmartMoney.com with a focus on personal finance and investment topics. In 2002, Wattenberg joined IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Cambridge and established the Visual Communication Lab two years later. He transitioned to Harvard in Fall 2021 as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science.

Journalism

During his tenure at SmartMoney.com, Wattenberg was a pioneer in interactive online journalism. His early initiatives (1996-1997) included developing financial decision-making tools and graphical stories illustrating bond yield curves. In 1998, he introduced the Map of the Market—the first web-based treemap—which displayed stock price movements for hundreds of companies, setting a precedent widely emulated by financial news outlets. He also directed SmartMoney’s research and development team responsible for creating interactive charts, graphs, simulations, and visualization toolkits. Beyond Dow Jones, Wattenberg is noted for producing interactive visualizations that have engaged broad audiences with diverse datasets such as baby names and museum archives from NASA and the Smithsonian.

Collaborative analysis and collective intelligence

Together with Fernanda Viégas at IBM, Wattenberg has extensively published on topics related to collective intelligence and social data visualization. Their projects like History Flow and Chromogram generated pioneering research into Wikipedia’s editing patterns, including the inaugural scientific study on vandalism repair processes.

He co-established IBM's Many Eyes platform in 2007 with the goal of democratizing access to visualization tools. The technology behind Many Eyes has been adopted by various nonprofit organizations and media outlets such as the New York Times Visualization Lab.

Visualization techniques and theory

Wattenberg has contributed significantly to visualization methodologies. The Map of the Market introduced an innovative treemap layout algorithm. The Arc Diagram offers a way to depict structural patterns within long sequences and connects to concepts like linear embeddings of networks; it has been widely embraced by designers. Collaborating with Viégas, he developed several text visualization approaches including Word Tree and Chromogram. In partnership with Zan Armstrong, he created novel visualizations addressing Simpson's paradox.

Artwork

Wattenberg utilizes interactive graphics and visualizations as a form of artistic expression, concentrating primarily on projects accessible via the internet, alongside installations, video works, and printed media.

Since the 1990s, he has approached information visualization from an artistic perspective. His Shape of Song series (1999–2002) digitally interprets musical pieces and produces prints that have been widely exhibited. In collaboration with Alexander Galloway and Mark Tribe, Starrynight (1999) introduced an innovative visual navigation system for online social discussions. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Idealine (2001) stands as an early web-based artwork that utilized crowdsourced data to chart the digital art landscape. Additionally, Wattenberg contributed visualization methods to Golan Levin's project The Secret Lives of Numbers (2002).

Often working with Marek Walczak under the name MW2MW, Wattenberg explores the intersections between language and spatial representation. Their work Apartment converts text provided by viewers into architectural floor plans inspired by the memory palace technique; this piece has been displayed both online and at the Whitney Museum. Other creations such as the Thinking Machine series (2004–2008) offer interactive encounters through a chess-playing program that reveals its internal reasoning process.

Beginning in 2003, Wattenberg has collaborated with Fernanda Viégas on interactive projects aimed at fostering insight and user engagement. Their prints, which apply academic methods like history flow analysis, have been exhibited at institutions including the New York Museum of Modern Art. Their artistic visualizations encompass the Fleshmap series (2008–2009), which investigates aspects of sensuality across digital platforms such as web interfaces, video, and installations. For instance, Fleshmap: Touch maps collective erogenous zones, while Fleshmap: Listen visualizes language related to the body as expressed in song lyrics.

Publications

Notable publications include:

2007: 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.
2005: Baby Names, Visualization, and Social Data Analysis. Martin Wattenberg. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization.
2004: Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations. Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Kushal Dave. ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI).
2002: Ordered and Quantum Treemaps: Making Effective Use of 2D Space to Display Hierarchies. Ben Bederson, Ben Shneiderman, Martin Wattenberg. ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol 21, No. 4.