Watch Party: Visualizing my content consumption pattern
Entertainment comes in many forms, music, movies, TV shows. I am no stranger when it comes to consuming all that content, specifically video. I can barely remember a time where I wasn’t. To have access to it at such a young age led me to spend countless hours in video rabbit holes and binging the new series many users recommend. Even as I get older, and have less and less time, I still find ways to put some time into watching things online.
Concept
The idea of tracking the type of content I watch came up to me while looking through my search history, trying to find the link to the episode I left off in a series. It left me wondering how many times I had chosen to watch that series in the past few days. It then lead to wondering how frequently I watched other content in general compared to the others. I was even more curious to see this pattern during the Fall semester, since the time I put into watching video content has been cut a good amount.
Data Collection
I had decided for the next week or so to write down each time I would go to watch any form of video. Alongside that I had also written down the device, the platform being watched from, and the time of day. I thought it would add more details to my watch pattern, as I was interested to see how they all correlate. This was all done through the Notes app on my phone. I also referenced my watch and search history from time to time to double check everything was recorded as well.
After a week of collecting data, I had chosen to visualize it in two different ways:
Visual 1: Graphic Circles
I was inspired by an assignment done during my Interactive Media 2 course where we used a chart to create a visualization that described a bit about ourselves. I really liked the simplicity of the visual, where it was easy to pinpoint what each part of it symbolized. I used it as reference to create my own format, where I could use colors and line strokes to my liking as I really wanted to include lots of color into mine.
I wanted to add variation alongside a bright color palette. I opted for using circles as the base, as it would be easy to fill in throughout the week. I chose to use shapes inside the circle to represent the type of device I used to watch, purple ovals to represent the type of genre, and filling in the circle with the colors that represent the streaming service used. Time of day was represented with some lines, yellow being morning, red being afternoon, and blue being nighttime.
Visual 2: Watercolor Devices
Wanting to use the color palette from the previous visual, I wanted to show the the average from each section and letting it all merge together like how watercolors look when you paint. Realizing it would be a bit harder to understand, I decided to use each device as a canvas. That way, I would be able to be a bit more specific but still use the aspect of watercolors.
After a bit of tweaking, I ended up with the final version:
Conclusion
There are a few things that I can take from this Data Visualization. One main thing is that I use my phone as more often to watch content than any other device used throughout the week. This can be because of how easily accessible it was because I carry it on me at all times. The content that I watched the most was commentary videos, and the series Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia following behind as second. YouTube was my main go to site when watching content. I usually watched videos during the afternoon and nighttime, something that I expected as that’s when I’m usually back home from campus.
Overall it was an interesting experience, and I’m considering doing this again in the future to compare results and see how my pattern has changed.
