Like most things I come across, this started out as something completely different. A colleague sent me to Stephen Few's Web site about data visualization to highlight an example related to SAS.

While I was there though, I read this recent entry about IBM Visualization Data Explorer.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked with the IBM team at the TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. I was the technical writer who wrote the user manual and programming reference for Data Explorer. Now it turns out that the project has an open-source version; perhaps my words live on within this reincarnation of what was a very interesting project.