Lifeloggers. Wearable Computing. Self Expression From Performance DataQuantified Self. Typically when we think about Quantified Self and the associated collection and visualization of personal data we’re left struggling in the world of charts, graphs, and other well-worn visualizations.
That’s not to disparage those of you who love spending some time tinkering in Excel. Those are valuable tools for understanding and there is a good reason we rely on them to tell us the stories of our data. It’s important to realize that those stories rooted in data aren’t always just about finding trends, searching for correlations, or teasing out significant changes. Sometimes data can represent something more visceral and organic – the expression of a unique experience. Vincent Boyce is a an artist and designer who spends his free time riding on asphalt and water. In his great talk filmed at the New York QS Meetup Vincent describes his motivation behind building his prototype system and his goals for future versions. Sparkline tools - sparklines for Excel, Word, PowerPoint, HTML and information tickers. Data taken out of context is boring, if not misleading, and nearly always worthless.
Nonetheless, most data is presented as a single, isolated value: a big company's turnover, the current unemployment rate or the last reading of a stock quote. With sparklines (word-sized graphics, data words), it is easy to provide the necessary context. Thus, an elusive figure like the Euro's exchange rate movements against the US-Dollar becomes a vivid, data-intense measure when given in its historical context from its introduction on January, 1st 1999 as bank money until today For the equivalent of a single word, the embedded graphic gives us the worth of six years of monthly Euro exchange rate readings. Defying its tiny size, the graphic depicts the year long development in a clear and concise manner, including the 25 % loss after the introduction of the euro banknotes and coins on January 1st, 2002.
Write with sparklines Due to their word-like quality, sparklines allow for "writing with data". Sparkline theory and practice. How to Make a SparktweetQuantified Self. Update: Want to make your own Sparktweet?
We made a simple tool that you can use. Check it out here! I was stumbling around Twitter the other day when I was confronted with something new and different: Sparklines on Twitter. @edwardtufte must be proud RT @justinwolfers: ▂▃▁▄▄▃▄█▇▄█▁My graph of U.S. monthly payrolls growth over past year— Steve Cavendish (@scavendish) April 5, 2013 Apparently that little data representation is not all that new and different. ▁▁▂▂▃▄▄█▁▁▂ ▃▄▄▅▆▁▁▂▂▃▄▄▅▆▁▁▂▂▃▄▄▅▆ Can you guess what I’m coding in Excel? Before we get into how you too can start populating your Twitter feed and Facebook (I checked and it worked there as well) with representations of your own Quantified Self data let’s dive into some history. The data visualization theorist and pioneer, Edward Tufte, is primarily responsible for the widespread use of sparklines.
A small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution. Fun with SparktweetsQuantified Self. It’s no secret we love data here at Quantified Self, but we also love seeing how people interact with data.
We’ve explored many of those interactions here and we’re always on the lookout for new and different ways people communicate their data and the insights therein. A few weeks ago we wrote up a short “how to” post describing a recent phenomenon on Twitter – sparktweets. It didn’t take too long before we started seeing the Quantified Self community using these new “data words.” We couldn’t stop thinking about sparktweets. What kind of data could you communicate in 140 characters? What kind of conversation can you start with you data? You've Started Self-Tracking. Now What?
QSEU13 MindMaps.