One of the conceptual issue that I was tracking was “How often do I feel stressed out throughout the week?” Lately, one of the emotions I’ve been feeling intensely is stress. Whether is about academics, social life, or personal issue, I feel stressed out about the tinites situation. Creating a data that visualizes how often i feel stressed showed me how my stress levels are at an unhealthy level. At the end of each day, I took note of how high my stress levels from that specific day was from a scale of 1-10. I found it easy to track my data on my notes app because I use it quite often for my everyday mini notes. If I were to continue this project, I would probably keep track the same way because it’s a habit to go on my notes app. Overall collecting data was a good tool for self reflection and it showed me areas in my life or habits that i need to fix to be better myself.
Another conceptual issue that I was tracking was “How many hours I devoted to myself throughout the week? My idea was to compare how my high stress levels are and what I do to take time for myself . One of my observations is the main cause of my stress was academics. Majority of the time, I choose to study for hours because it doesn’t feel right when i taking time for myself and not being productive. But the times I do take times for myself is usually sleeping and once in while socializing with my friends. Similar to the first data, I tracked it on my notes app as well. If I were to continue this project instead of tracking how many hours i take for myself, i would substitute some key activities to destress and see how i feel after the first week. Overall collecting both data showed me, how unhealthy my habits are and why I need to change my habits.
The activity that I decided to collect data on was the type of music I listen to when I am studying. I am a huge music fan and I constantly have my earbuds in listening to music, for almost every activity that I do during the day. During the time we had to collect data for this assignment, happened to overlap with my studying for the QTM midterm. So the data I decided to collect was does the type of music that I listen to when I study affect how well I stay engaged. Of course there are a lot of outside factors that could have also played a significant role in this study, so I tried to limit al of these factors by trying to got to sleep and wake up at the same time during these days and making sure I go to the gym after I study, to try to limit fatigue as a factor of my data. In addition, I went to the quiet section of the library, the Matheus Reading Room, to try to limit outside factors affecting my study as well.
The main way in which I measured my data was observing how many times i looked at my phone during my study session for my QTM midterm. I made this a sign of “losing focus” in my study. I studied for this midterm for 10 days, 5 days during the week of October 16th, and 5 days during the week of October 23rd. I listened to 5 different genres of music: Hip Hop, Country, R&B, White Noise and Hindi. I listed to each genre of music twice during the span of the two week period, to gather my data.
I also logged the time I spent studying for my for my QTM midterm each day, so I could see if this had any effect on my ability to focus as well.
The results demonstrate the the music that I actually study best with is R&B, but this was also the type of music that I spent the least amount of time studying to as well, but the result that surprised the most was that the “White Noise” genre of music was actually the type of music that caused me the least amount of focus, because this is considered to be the best type of music for most people to study and get the most work done with.
Through the information collected in this graph, I wanted to track the relationship between my mood and what playlists I listened to throughout the day. For context, the two playlists I collected playback data from are “Vibey Scs” and “Feels Scs.” Vibey Scs acts as my happy playlist, for times when I’m enjoying my day and living life in a positive light. Feel Scs acts as my pick-me-up playlist when I’m feeling down because I find that listening to music that tells the stories of other people’s groggy days is therapeutic. From collecting this data, I was able to see that on days where I wasn’t feeling the best because I missed the homecoming concert, like on Saturday for example, there was an increase in the number of times I played my sadder playlist “Feels Scs.” While on days where I felt like I was winning in life, using Tuesday when I got some good sleep and had time to really unwind over break as an example, there is a significant domination of Vibey Scs playback count over Feels Scs playcount. It’s also important to note that the average number of times I listened to Feels Scs per day this week was 1, while the average for Vibey Scs was 2. This speaks to the fact that this was a solid week for me and one that I enjoyed a fair amount.
The chart communicates the idea that my mood does indeed have a relationship to the number of times I played each playlist throughout the week. It shows that the genre or style of music I listened to had a direct relationship to how I was feeling on different days. This relationship’s presence is likely due to the role music plays in my life as auxiliary to my wellbeing. If I were to do this project again I would look more into the songs that I listened to and the messages behind them in order to track if it has any connection to the current events in my life. This would be interesting to see because I feel that a lot of the time when I’m listening to music, I try to find songs that I can relate to more deeply and it’s those songs that reflect my mood the most. I enjoyed doing this “Visualizing Data” assignment because it was fascinating to see how intensely music is connected to my everyday life.
When Mason Currey wanted to understand how he could manage to produce more creative work despite the challenges of everyday life, he set about studying how a bunch of other famous creative people organized their daily lives and what routines they established for their own creative work with the assumption that there were valuable lessons there. Daily Rituals was the result of that research — and then a number of different people and organizations have set out to visualize the insights of that book so that we can see larger patterns in the midst of all this biographical information. Podio’s graphic, which is the feature image on this post, is one of those (check out their site for the interactive version)
For this sketch assignment, you will choose one concept in your life that you want to analyze, something that is not already easily and obviously measured, or doesn’t vary within the span of a day or a week (good categories: awesomeness, mindfulness, healthiness, creativity, productivity, and similar … bad categories: number of steps, hours of sleep, caloric intake, how good is my eyesight?). Decide on a set of about 5 categories that you can use to measure that concept in your life and track those categories for a week or more, then you will produce a visualization of the data that you have gathered and use that visualization to help you understand something about your own life that might not be obvious from your own day to day activities.
Tracking Data
If you’re looking for suggestions about what to track, browsing the “quantified self” tag at Lifehacker might be worthwhile.
Once you’ve got categories, create a spreadsheet where you can track those categories throughout the day. Either take notes in a journal or on your phone and enter the results into your spreadsheet at set intervals, or make the spreadsheet in Google Drive and access it from your phone, or use the site Trackthisforme, or install a tracker app on your mobile device (I found some by searching for “quantified self” apps).
Whatever method you use, the key activity is to decide what you are going to pay attention to and then to create a system that is manageable for your life for the span of a week wherein you will quantify information about your self or your behavior.
For example, one step of this process might be to decide to measure how happy you are and to create a spreadsheet with a column for “Happy.” Then when you wake up in the morning, while you’re waiting for the coffee to brew, you’ll pull up the spreadsheet and enter a number between 1 and 10 indicating how happy you feel. You will continue adding rows at some set interval (every hour maybe). You will probably have some columns that are a little less subjective than “how happy do I feel right now?” (like “how many times did I talk in class today?” or “how much time did I spend studying?” “how many minutes have I spent looking at my phone in the last hour?”). You can decide how objective or subjective your categories are, but recognize that those decisions will impact the sorts of conclusions you draw from this process.
For now, you just need to decide what you will track and then to be as meticulous and careful as you can be about actually tracking this information either directly into a spreadsheet or in a format that can easily be transferred into a spreadsheet at the end of the week.
Visualizing that data
Now that you have gathered your data, it’s time to analyze it further and visualize it.
With the data set that you’ve gathered, which is just for a week or so and only with a handful of variables, you probably won’t need a computer or special tools to analyze it. However, you might find loading your data into a spreadsheet (like in Excel) if you haven’t already been keeping it in that format will help you a lot to analyze it and see patterns in the data.
Because this is an assignment about collecting data about your own life, there is room for you to decide how “scientific” you want to be with your project. Even if you have never used spreadsheets for much of anything, try to quantify your data as much as you can and make an effort to be detailed and accurate with your information, but that said the types of data you chose to collect and the category you’ve decided to study will have a huge impact on the type of analysis you undertake. It is okay for you to have some more subjective categories and it’s okay if your final analysis or visualization is somewhat subjective too.
Tools
There are numerous methods you can use to create your visualization — anything from paper and crayons/markers/pencils to sophisticated data visualization software like Tableau. MS Excel also has some pretty sophisticated charts that you can create from your data. And there are also lots of free online tools that you can use too — it’s admittedly been a year or more since I really surveyed the set of free tools available, but I’d probably still recommend Infogram if you want a free web-based infographic maker and aren’t sure where to start.
For help deciding what type of chart or graph might be most effective in visualizing your data, consult the Data Viz Catalogue (it might be most helpful for you to switch to the “sort by functions” view at the top of the page).
Digital Images
Hand-drawn charts and graphs are perfectly 100% acceptable, if that’s what you prefer. However, please do not spend lots of time carefully crafting hand-drawn charts and then snap a crappy picture of them on your cell phone to post to the web. There are lots of scanners available on campus that you can use to scan your chart into a high-quality JPG image — I’d suggest that you take a quick trip to the Media Lab on the 4th floor of the library and scan your drawings. That space is underutilized and an excellent resource that you should know about.
If you create your visualizations with an online tool, just make sure that you can export them as a JPG image, or that you can at least take a good screenshot of your work.
Publish
Publish your charts as a sketch post to your site. Identify what conceptual issue you were tracking or what question you wanted to answer (or begin to answer). Include 2 or 3 paragraphs explaining what conclusions you have drawn from the data that you collected. Were you able to answer the question you had posed for yourself? What sorts of judgement calls did you face while gathering the data? Why did you choose to visualize your data in the manner that you did? What do these visualizations say about your own life? If you were to continue this project into the future, would you go about it in pretty much the way you have done this week or would you do things differently now that you have looked at the data to this point? Have you found this to be a valuable tool for self analysis?
