For the Dear Data assignment, we had to keep track of something for the week of our choosing. So for this assignment, I chose to keep track of the amount of media I watched over the week. This included videos from all social media, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and as well it includes videos from sources like Netflix, and Television.
I kept track of this information in a notebook, since I thought that it would be more convenient for me to track all of the information, since I would be watching videos from all sorts of sources including my phone, so the notes app would not be as beneficial.
Here are the images of my notes from throughout the week:
Then in order to create my Dear Data Postcard I made some notes with some ideas of how I want to show my results:
Later on I narrowed down the categories and decided on exactly what symbols I wanted to use per each category:
I made symbols for how I thought I would show this information, branching it out into categories of where the media came from (the source) and what genre the media was.
Afterwords I made a draft of an idea of how I wanted the postcard to turn out (by using mainly Sundays data)
This draft turned out alright, However I did not like the overall look of it. In order to make it more simple I took away the stems coming out of the boxes, and instead placed the category symbols underneath the boxes. Then to signify if something was watched before, I outlined the box again, but with red. As well for the final card, I kept it black and white (with the red) to keep it simple and less busy looking. I liked this look better than my plan before (image above) and overall I am happy with the look of my postcard.
Here is the final result: with the front, and the back:
Overall I found this assignment interesting but at times difficult to do. It was hard to remember to always record every thing that I had watched. Especially in the case of two of the Youtube videos on Monday, since they were watched during my Art History class. So I had to make sure to write them down on the side of my notebook, and then record them in my data notebook again later. It was also interesting because I recorded if I had seen the video or television show previously, leading me to find out that I had rewetted 29/92 of the videos that I watched throughout the week. This shows that I like re watching content, even though I have seen it before. Another part that I found surprising was the fact that I only watched one video on Netflix. Usually this number is higher, but this week this was not the case. Along with that, there was more TV content this week, which I wasn’t expecting since I thought the Youtube content would be much higher.
I am happy with my final result of this project, and I learned a lot about myself and about data collecting. It would be interesting to carry out collecting this data again another time to see the different results. For example, if it was summer and if I had more free time what would the data look like. Or what would it look like in a month from now, when the end of the semester with final projects and finals happening. Comparing it to this project now, I am sure that the data would be much different.