Data displays for self-awareness

February 10, 2010  |  Edward Tufte
15 Comment(s)

Can our Kindly Contributors think about data, information, and displays for life tracking?

Diaries, calendars, blogs, tweets, income tax returns and their back-up data, Google’s retention and display of searches, ISP records,
credit card bills, and email history all generate large amounts of data that might be relevant for making life-tracking displays–and,
more importantly, for understanding and possibly changing one’s life or one’s allocation of time.

What kinds of effective displays are used by people in planning, recording, and assessing their daily activities? Since so much
information is compiled, it is important to identify what kinds of data are relevant to understanding and changing one’s activities, to
go beyond score-keeping. So we’re looking for data that would help see what we’re doing, how much is habit, and how one can be
more effectively self-aware. The issues are less about display methods and more about choosing the key data worth looking at.

It would be interesting to see what I suspect are endlessly repeated looping patterns in internet use (in my case, for example,
NYTimes to weather to email to flight status to ESPN, and then over and over during the day), with the only variation being whether
the loops are executed on my desktop, laptop, or iPhone. Thus one might generate one’s own ISP logs or get the records from your
ISP.

Here is a start:

Topics: E.T.