Social visualization Viégas began her research while at the
MIT Media Lab, focusing on
graphical interfaces for
online communication. Her Chat Circles system introduced ideas such as
proximity-based filtering of conversation and a visual archive of chat history displaying the overall rhythm and form of a conversation. Her
email visualization designs (including PostHistory and Themail) are the foundation for many other systems; her findings on how visualizations are often used for storytelling influenced subsequent work on the collaborative aspects of visualization. While at MIT, she also studied usage of
Usenet and
blogs.
Collective intelligence and public visualization A second stream of work, in partnership with
Martin Wattenberg, centers on
collective intelligence and the public use of data visualization. Her work with visualizations such as
History Flow and Chromogram led to some of the earliest publications on the dynamics of Wikipedia, including the first scientific study of the repair of
vandalism. Viégas is one of the founders of IBM's experimental Many Eyes website, created in 2007, which seeks to make visualization technology accessible to the public. In addition to broad uptake from individuals, the technology from Many Eyes has been used by nonprofits and news outlets such as the New York Times Visualization Lab.
Art Viégas is also known for her artistic work, which explores the medium of visualization for explorations of emotionally charged digital data. An early example is Artifacts of the Presence Era, an interactive installation at the
Boston Center for the Arts in 2003, which featured a video-based timeline of visitor interactions with the museum. She often works with Martin Wattenberg to visualize emotionally charged information. An example of these works is their piece "Web Seer", which is a visualization of Google Suggest. The Fleshmap series (started in 2008) uses visualization to portray aspects of sensuality, and includes work on the web, video, and installations. In 2012, she launched the Wind Map project, which displays continuously updated forecasts of wind patterns across the United States. Works by Viégas and Wattenberg are in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art, 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 ==