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project objective
Choose one element of your daily life to meticulously observe and record over a week-long timeline. Determine the data points to observe, organize the collected data, and glean information from observed patterns in order to create an organized, quantitative visualization of the chosen element of your dailylife.
discover
the rules
To begin recording a daily habit or activity one must first create a set of rules to follow. When recording the music you listen to during a week's timespan, there are a few questions to first be asked?
What does it mean to hear a song?
In order to log a song as heard, I determined it must be actively chosen – whether that means through a station on the radio, a playlist off Spotify, or an album I've put on the record player. However, anything passively heard – i.e. a song playing in the grocery store or a song passingly heard on someone else's speaker – would not be logged.
recording data written log
When actively listening to a song, I should first attempt to log it in a journal I carried along throughout the week. In any case where the song could not be physically recorded, I would take a picture to record the song (i.e. a picture of my radio's display) or access my spotfiy history.
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organizing data determining the data points
Creating multiple points of data collection is crucial for gleaning relevant information from the data. Analyzing the data points alone may provide helpful knowledge; however, cross analyzing these data points allows for a more thorough analysis. I chose 11 varying data points in order to have a substantial amount of data to synthesize. Certain data points were less objective than others and and thus required original scales, such as with Lyric Familiarity & Brought up Memories.
eleven data points
Date & Time
Listened To
Song Title
Song Artist
Release Year
How it was Played
Lyric Familiarity
If it was Listened
to in a Group
Brought up Memories
Song Length
Song Genre
Setting in which
it was Heard
organizing data logging in numbers
After recording the data, I collected the songs from each of the sources previously mentioned, and began the slow process of logging each song and doing the research to collect all of its data points, logging 326 songs.
define
After researching visual inspiration based on 1970s iconography and wallpaper designs, I began experimenting with ways to display as many points of data as possible.
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The final visualization of my quantified self walks the viewer through four main points of data and allows the viewer to see how those points interact and overlap. First, the data is organized on the x and y axis of the poster to show on average how many songs were listened to during each hour of the day. The colors of the circles correspond with a key in the bottom right corner of the poster, to show which genres were listened to more frequently by the amount of color that appears on the poster. Last, the text within the circles illustrates the most popular themes of the songs, growing in size based on their corresponding popularity.
