1. Phone usage – how often I unlock it, use various apps, charge it
2. Laptop crashed – sent usage data to Microsoft
3. Added money to Charlie card – data collected on location of the machine I used, what time I used it, and how much money I put on my card
4. Went to dining hall – ID number collected, date/meal attended, time of arrival, number of meals remaining that week
5. Tapped my ID to enter dorm building and use elevator
6. Cookies used by New York Times; track which articles I read, whether I’m logged into a subscribed account or not
7. Facebook messenger – what times I’m active, who I’m messaging and the contents of those messages
8. Sent an email to a moderated mailing list – contents of email stored
9. Class attendance – I contribute to information about how popular lectures are for my classes
10. Turned in a homework assignment – my grade is part of the class statistics
11. ITunes records number of times each song has been played
12. YouTube recalls which videos I watched; learns what topics I’m interested in
13. Amazon – learns what products I’m interested in by recording my queries
14. Chrome browser – records usage like how element inspection is used and items are downloaded, etc
15. Facebook – records which videos I watch, what I click on or like, and how much time I spend looking and different posts
Author: rdshah
Sleep schedule
caption: My daughters sleeping patterns for the first 4 months of her life. One continuous spiral starting on the inside when she was born, each revolution representing a single day. Midnight at the top (24 hour clock). [OC]
This data shows whether the author’s daughter was awake or asleep each day for the first four months since she was born. Perhaps the most interesting fact of this graph is that there is no legend – no description of what blue and tan represent. When I first looked at this graphic, I immediately assigned blue to be sleeping time, and tan to be waking time. It wasn’t until writing this blog post did I realize that nothing explicitly told me this. The audience, broadly, is reddit users who subscribe to r/DataIsBeautiful. The point of this subreddit is to post and share effective and aesthetic visualizations of data; thus, the purpose of posting was less about the sleeping data directly, and more about the unique presentation. The author wanted their visualization to convey, approximately, how their daughter’s sleeping patterns changed over the course of four months. In particular, how their daughter initially slept all day and woke at night, but after some time converged to the standard sleeping schedule. I say ‘approximately’ because we are only given two quantifiable markers: the top of each wind represents 12:00 midnight, and the outermost wind represents 4 months. These could have been augmented with 24 (or even just 12) hour-marks around graphic in a circle, and with circles denoting the 1 month, 2 month, and 3 months marks. I thought the data was quite effective – with barely any information about what the data was of, I was immediately able to see how their daughter adjusted their sleep schedule. Zooming in, I can count rings to see that the switch happened quite abruptly at around 4 weeks.