IBM’s research labs have a new data visualization service running, called “Many Eyes.” The idea is to put data sets into the public domain and then have many eyes look at them and to create insights through the group’s analysis. I think it’s a great idea and the tools are excellent — simple, powerful, and effective.
Sangha Population
To test Many Eyes out, I used a ‘data set’ I had lying around, a spreadsheet that I had put together of the population of Buddhist monks and nuns around the world. This monastic community, the sangha, is organized in the sense of having clear hierarchies and monastic rules, but it is not organized in any overall sense, so there isn’t a single source for this data. There is excellent, precise data on the number of Catholic monastics (which would be interesting to represent in Many Eyes), but Buddhist monastic population information is hard to come by.
So, years ago, I put together a plain spreadsheet with a row for each Buddhist region (I had Tibet as a separate region, for example, although Many Eyes didn’t acknowledge this) and columns for total country population, Buddhist population, monastic population, % Buddhist, % monastic, and a rating for my confidence in the data (low/medium/high). Now, overall, I’m not at all confident in the numbers that I put together, but it’s a start. There are definitional issues, for one thing, especially in Japan. Japan, which has very accurate (or precise?) data, counts Pure Land priests as monastics, although it could be argued that they are not recognizably monks. Other countries, e.g., Laos, just don’t have good information at all and I had to guess. China, because of its size, is in a league of its own; Buddhism, and religions in general, are seeing a renaissance, but it’s very hard to say how many Chinese Buddhist monks and nuns there are.
Moving this spreadsheet to Many Eyes was simple. I copied the table I wanted to move, pasted it into a textarea and then agreed to the tool’s guesses at the data types. It’s much like DabbleDB and others in that category.
Where the service really excels (pardon the pun) is in the visualization tools; I especially like the Treemap view. For me, the primary insight from the visualizations is the existence of a “Buddhist Big Three”: Thailand, Japan, and Burma (Myanmar).
