Pivot is a New Way to Look at Data - TED Demo

Gary Flake recently demoed Pivot at TED.  It is a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing. Gary is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Live Lab. He shows how you can take control over data to see trends that might be undiscovered otherwise.  For example, being able to see all Wikipedia pages related to a topic at once, allow you to see trends that are not contained in any single entry.

He said that with Pivot you can navigate the Web as if it is a Web and see relationships.  He talks about taking the curse of data overload and turning it on its head to take advantage of quantity to see the patterns within it. Here is Gary’s Pivot talk on TED.

Although we take a different approach this is exactly the goal of the Darwin Awareness Engine. Instead of bringing you long lists of content on topic that are order by popularity, we show the top 100 themes within the content that relates to your topic of interest.  We attempt to let you discover unexpected patterns, content, and relationships in this manner.