Wiki-flavored visualization dashboards
We created Dashiki in order to explore alternative ways to help people visualize and tell stories about th eir data. Dashiki is a website that enables any registered user to create and edit HTML pages using a simple markup language; in addition, users can easily embed multiple visualizations in their pages, drawing data from local or external sources. An interactive editor makes it simple to customize visualizations as needed.
The video below provides an overview of the system.
Dashiki was launched as a public service with limited features in November of 2008, under the name Many Eyes Wikified. We discontinued this service in November 2010. Dozens of people created dashboards on the system; you can read the details of our observations in our Infovis 2009 paper.
Results Highlights
The Dashiki system architecture included multiple extensions to the WikiCreole 1.0 syntax to provide live data and visualization embedding.
From a design research perspective, Dashiki is one of the few visualization systems to deeply integrate h ypertext content authoring and layout with data visualization in a publicly available website. We observed a number of interesting dashboard styles that emerged from our users' work, including:
- Notebook-like, "stream of consciousness" pages that were created solely for the author's use while ana lyzing a dataset
- Gigantic, multi-visualization monitoring dashboards used to track social media content
- Spare, context-free pages that were created solely to be included in other websites using Dashiki's li ve embed feature.
While this project has reached the end of its lifespan, some technologies that we developed for it have be en included in Many Eyes. Moreover, the lessons we've learned about storytelling, user behavior and working with live data continue to inform our work.
Gallery
(click on images for bigger screenshots)
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| Fig 1. Dashboard showing usage of Mozilla Firefox by country and version | Fig 2. Page that displays sample data from an accounting application |
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| Fig 3. Blog post that includes Dashiki content and a tutorial | Fig 4. Essay created on Dashiki regarding narrative voice in Jane Austen's novels |
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| Fig 5. "Scratchpad" created by a user taking notes on the 2008 financial crisis | Fig 6. Example dashboard showing live data from an IT monitoring system |