Social Data Analysis at Swivel:

Lessons Learned & Next Steps

Brent Fitzgerald Abstract

Design Chief, Swivel This paper presents Swivel[1], a community web site
brent@swivel.com and web service platform for contribution, sharing,
visualization and analysis of numerical and relational
Sara E Wood data. As early contributors to the nascent
Data Chief, Swivel multidisciplinary field of social data analysis, we
sara@swivel.com present our observations and lessons learned based on
first-hand experience, and our next steps in building
Swivel our product. We also offer several design principles that
http://swivel.com/ inform our ethos, and that may offer guidance or
199 Fremont St starting points for others in the field.
San Francisco, CA 94105
Keywords
Data, social data analysis, data marketplace,
visualization, web, community.

ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.3. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Group and Organization Interfaces.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2008, April 5 – April 10, 2008, Florence, Italy
ACM 1-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Introduction
Founded in 2006, Swivel operates at the intersection of
the emerging world of participatory media and
community systems and the traditional fields of
business intelligence and data analysis. We aim to
foster data availability, accuracy, and understanding of
data, which in turn will promote shared insights and

new knowledge. From our website: “We believe data is
most valuable when it's out in the open where everyone
can see it, debate it, have fun, and share new insights.
Swivel is applying the power of the Web to data so that
life gets better.”[1]
Our approach to this vision is nothing less than
reinvention of traditional data infrastructure,
visualization, and communication. We aim to free data
analysis from the silo of desktop software, and move it
into the realm of the social web.
Swivel
Swivel’s preview edition was released to the public in
December 2006. The site received attention among
figure 1. The Swivel preview edition website, showing a
member-created line graph for Number of Senators
missing a vote, by date (data source: Sunlight
Foundation, http://www.louisdb.org/).
2
bloggers and traditional press, resulting in a spike of
traffic and rapid growth of community.
This first edition provided tools for importing and
uploading a variety of data formats, support for
exploration of simple information visualizations, and—
most importantly—social features that foster
communication and collaboration around the data.
Since the initial release of the preview edition, Swivel
has undergone continual iterative improvement, most
recently leading to a new version that adds support for
features such as private data, sharing and permissions,
sophisticated graph creation tools, and live data.
Additionally, the new Swivel includes a powerful REST-
figure 2. The new Swivel, currently in private beta
testing, features private data, groups, activity
summaries, visual annotations on data sets, and more
expressive visualization options.

based API that exposes all of these features as web
services. This version is slated to go public in January
2008.
Data Tools
The base prerequisites to any social visualization or
analysis are data availability and accuracy. As such,
core to Swivel are features supporting contribution,
organization, and search of structured data. Swivel is
free for anyone to join, and any member can upload
data in a variety of formats, or import data from an
online resource.
Data sets can also be appended, rows can be removed,
and individual cells may be edited. During contribution,
providers include citation sources and URLs, as well as
a description of the data set.
Swivel has also instituted an Official Sources
Program, forming partnerships with governmental
agencies, academic and research institutions,
foundations, and businesses across all sectors whose
goal is to make their data available to the widest
audience possible. [2] An Official Source data set
guarantees that the data set has been curated and
published by the source itself, with no third party
interference or tampering.
The upcoming version of Swivel includes baked-in
support for private data, including private workspaces
for individuals and groups, as well as fine-grained
permissions cutting across data sets, visualizations, and
reports. By allowing for private data, yet building tools
to encourage sharing and participation across group
boundaries, Swivel becomes substantially more useful
3
for applications too sensitive to allow data contribution
to an open system.
In the new version, slated for release in 2008, Swivel
will feature a set of pure data manipulation utilities
for saving sorted, filtered, aggregated, and joined data
sets as derivative views of the original data sources.
Publishers will be able to privately maintain raw data
while publicly releasing and visualizing aggregate
views.
Visualization
Swivel provides support for generating simple
visualizations based on user contributed data. Currently
Swivel supports line graphs, scatter plots, bar graphs,
and pie charts.
Previous versions of Swivel included automated
algorithmic approaches to crawling the visualization
space, using-rule based approaches to attempt to
generate relevant visualizations. The new version has
moved away from this approach, as the graphs
generated were often deemed irrelevant. Rather than
automatic creation, Swivel now gives members full
access to an array of visualization options, ranging
from data manipulation (filters, ordering, and
aggregation) to visual parameters (color, style,
weight). All visualizations of public data sets are
released under a Creative Commons license.
From the beginning Swivel has also supported visual
comparison across data sets. Visualizations may be
created by joining multiple data sets along compatibly
typed columns. This feature is receiving expanded
treatment in the next version as well.

While Swivel’s visualizations are humble in their current
form, they serve their key purpose of offering a starting
point for conversation and dialog. Additionally, as the
API matures and finds adoption among developers and
researchers, we expect sophisticated alternate
visualizations to emerge from the community.
Community
While data sets provide the raw materials, and
visualizations provide the conversation points, the true
focus of Swivel is providing a collaborative community
forum in which members can share not only data or
visualizations, but opinions, insights, and ideas across a
range of topics.
Swivel’s first preview edition offers several basic social
gestures: comments (dialog around assets such as
data sets and visualizations), ratings (scoring of
figure 3. Line graph showing internal Swivel metrics,
with the data annotated by viewers.
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assets), features (curation of assets into a collection),
and shout outs (direct, person-to-person public
communication).
The next version simplifies this feature set, but
maintains and expands the use of comments, and adds
support for annotations on data via the visualizations.
Similar in some respects to work in [3], viewers may
attach comments to a specific data point via the
visualization interface. The annotation remains
attached to the data, and can be turned on or off for all
subsequent visualizations or views of that data.
Greatly refined in the next version of Swivel is the
treatment of groups. Coupled with private data,
groups become a shared workspace and meeting place,
in which members not only work with the same visuals
and data, but also may view activity summaries of
fellow group members’ recent actions within the group.
It is hoped that these summaries will help members
quickly assess which data sets and visuals are currently
the center of attention.
In response to a lack of support for user curation of
collections, the next Swivel version also supports
authorship of reports: collections of visualizations,
data sets, and commentary text. Reports can be shared
with groups or individuals, and offer participants a
means of collecting and presenting related assets from
across Swivel into a single, cohesive, up-to-date
presentation.
Next Steps
There is little doubt that we face an exponentially rising
volume of data in all parts of our lives. As connectivity
increases, and as streams of data are produced,

communicated, and received by more people and
devices, there are substantial opportunities to provide
tools to help people understand this data. Conversely,
poor or misleading implementations of these tools carry
risks of misperceptions and misunderstanding.
To foster clarity, understanding, insights, knowledge,
and good decisions—this is the true goal of this young
field of social data visualization and analysis. By
offering enabling analytic and visual tools, and
providing connections and affordances for rich social
participation, we aim to offer collaborative
enlightenment among a rising sea of confusing
information.
As early contributors to this field, we have a
responsibility to set an enlightened precedent, to
promote openness and transparency of data and
processes, and of compatibility and interoperability
among the systems that we build. Whether in academia
or commerce, research or business, visualization or
5
quantitative analysis—openness, standardization, and
cross-pollination will benefit the people who use our
creations.
Acknowledgements
Big ups to the rest of the Swivel team: Dmitry Dimov,
Brian Mulloy, Tao Ge, Visnu Pitiyanuvath, Seema
Sharma, Huned Botee, Richard Nghiem, Gerad
Suyderhoud, Ben Walsh, and our scholarly advisor Joe
Hellerstein.
Citations
[1] Swivel. http://swivel.com/
[2] Wood, Sara E., Opening data to the world: why
health numbers matter. Bulletin of the World Health
Organization (BLT) 10.2471/BLT.07.046649, Volume
85, Number 10, October 2007, 733-820
[3] Heer, Jeffrey, Viegas, Fernanda B., Wattenberg,
Martin, Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting
Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization.
ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI),
2007.