Martin M. Wattenberg

Martin M. Wattenberg (born 1970) is an American scientist and artist known for his work with data visualization. He is currently the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Along with Fernanda Viégas, he worked at the Cambridge location of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the Visual Communication Lab, and created Many Eyes. In April 2010, Wattenberg and Viégas started a new venture called Flowing Media, Inc., to focus on visualization aimed at consumers and mass audiences. From 1996 through 2002, he lived in New York City and worked for Dow Jones, on the personal finance and investing site SmartMoney.com. In 2002 he took a position at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in its Cambridge, Massachusetts location; in 2004, he founded IBM Research's Visual Communication Lab.

Artwork

As an artist, Wattenberg uses interactive graphics and visualization as expressive media. He has primarily worked on internet-accessible projects, but has also created installations, videos, and prints.

In the 1990s he began to work with information visualization as an artistic medium. For example, his Shape of Song series (1999–2002) depicted the form of musical compositions; this project exists online as well as in prints that have been exhibited in multiple venues. and were include in Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, a 2025 exhibition that features "widely recognized design icons [...] highlighting pivotal moments in design history."

Publications Key publications: 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, and 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, and Martin Wattenberg. ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol 21, No. 4.