Food for Thought: Part 1 of a Yearlong Personal Data Project
Hello! I’m a student, data journalist, and designer with a love for all things dataviz. In accordance with annual traditions, I spent a lot of time thinking about my New Year’s resolution this year. Because the COVID-19 pandemic has kept me confined to my family’s home since March, I wanted to take more control of my everyday life and learn more about myself in the process.
I was inspired by Dear Data: a personal data collection project that Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec conducted for an entire year. In March, I did a three-week version to track the immediate changes to my communication style after evacuating my college’s campus. I decided to follow in Lupi’s and Posavec’s footsteps and collect a different piece of personal data every week for a year, but since I don’t have a partner, I added a twist.
Each week for fifty-two weeks, I’ll collect a different data point about my habits, activities, or attitudes, but those data points won’t be chosen at random. Fifty-two can be evenly split into thirteen groups of four, so each chunk of four weeks will have a theme. These themes can be anything: from entertainment to energy or color to connection. The important part is that those four weeks of data collection will be connected and (hopefully) reveal a greater truth about my relationship to that topic, which I’ll be…
