Interactive graphics that engage a mass audience. Realtime displays of social media streams. Visualizations that let experts find hidden patterns. Come to the BostonCHI May meeting and hear Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of Flowing Media explain how they let social data speak for itself.

Location: Harvard University, Room G-115 on the ground floor of the Maxwell Dworkin building at 33 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138. The T Stop is Harvard Square. Oxford Street runs parallel to Mass Ave.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are world-recognized leaders in data visualization. Their pioneering work has reinvented visualization as a mass medium.

Before founding Flowing Media in 2010, Viégas and Wattenberg led IBM's Visual Communication Lab. Their landmark system Many Eyes was the first to put powerful visualization tools in the hands of a general audience. Their vision of democratizing visualization has empowered journalists, businesspeople, and scientists to tell stories with data.

Prior to joining IBM, Viégas was known for her foundational work in visualizing social activity and conversations. Her Themail and Chat Circles systems broke new ground in graphical communication. Wattenberg created web-based visualization tools that demonstrated the popular potential of the medium. His visualizations of the stock market (SmartMoney's "Map of the Market") and of baby names (Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager) are considered internet classics.

Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art.