Understanding Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 353

Nicholas Felton is one of the more well-known people in this area for his annual
reports on himself, which highlight both his design skills and disciplined per-
sonal data collection. He keeps track of not just his location, but also who he
spends time with, restaurants he eats at, movies he watches, topics he reads,
and an array of other things that he reveals each year. Figure 1-7 is a page out
of Felton's 2010/2011 report.

Felton designed his first annual report in 2005 and has done one every year
since. Individually, they are beautiful to look at and hold and satisfy an odd
craving for looking in on a stranger's life. What I find most interesting, though,
is the evolution of his reports into something personal and the expanding
richness of data. Looking at his first report, as shown in Figure 1-8, you notice
that it feels a lot like a design exercise in which there are touches of Felton's
personality embedded, but it is for the most part strictly about the numbers.
Each year though, the data feels less like a report and more like a diary.

This is most obvious in the 2010 Annual Report . Felton's father passed away
at the age of 81. Instead of summarizing his own year, Felton designed an
annual report, as shown in Figure 1-9, that cataloged his father's life, based
on calendars, slides, postcards, and other personal items. Again, although the
person of focus might be a stranger, it's easy to find sentiment in the numbers.

When you see work like this, it's easy to understand the value of personal data
to an individual, and maybe, just maybe, it's not so crazy to collect tidbits
about yourself. The data might not be useful to you right away, but it could
be a decade from now, in the same way it's useful to stumble upon an old
diary from when you were just a young one. There's value in remembering. In
many ways you log bits of your life already if you use social sites like Twitter,
Facebook, and foursquare. A status update or a tweet is like a mini-snapshot
of what you're doing at any given moment; a shared photo with a timestamp
can mean a lot decades from now; and a check-in firmly places your digital
bits in the physical world.

You've seen how that data can be valuable to an individual. What if you look
at the data from many individuals in aggregate?

The United States Census Bureau collects the official counts of people living
in the country every 10 years. The data is a valuable resource to help officials
allocate funds, and from census to census, the fluctuations in population
help you see how people move in the country, changing the neighborhood

FIGURE 1-7 (following page)
A page from 2010/2011 Annual
Report by Nicholas Felton,
http://feltron.com