counting conversation

Quarantine Data Portrait

Collecting data about one aspect of life under quarantine for three days and creating a corresponding visualization

I chose instances of conversation or communication with others categorized into:
conversation in person, over video call, in a group chat, and via direct/private messages.
Each day starts when I wake up and ends when I go to sleep. Each square/block represents 15 mins. I marked the time regardless of whether the conversation actually took up the entire 15 mins or just occured within the 15 minute time block.
→ link to code

Design Process

I started off thinking about things like stress level, body temp, exhaustion, but conversation seemed to be the most interesting to think about conceptually and to break down and categorize as data. (This was meant to be a partner project, to exchange and visualize someone else's data, but was changed to be your own data.)

I think I'm a more analytical thinker than emotional, so I tend to have trouble coming up with more emotional or abstract representations of things like this where there's hard data. My final visualization is pretty much just a reproduction of my spreadsheet that I used to record my data. I recorded four days but I used the last three because my first day wasn't very exciting.

Reflection

It was fun for me to really inspect what could be categorized as "conversation" and how to divide these different forms of conversation into succint groupings. I think I definitely could have come up with something more visually interesting, but I was very stuck on the spreadsheet format. I might have to revisit this later.

Credits

This project references the Dear Data project by Giogria Lupi and Stefanie Posavec.