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The Digital Human BBC podcasts

Notes on Quantize

Measurements. Data is constantly falling around us all the time. They make sense of the World around us. We can turn everything into numbers. More data/information the better?

Data collection. The Guardian data store or Data Driven Journalism. They constantly publish different pieces of data: e.g (number of kills by James Bond), graphics representing those kills with colored circles (revealing: “Man with the golden gun” = 1 kill, Golden eye = 47 kill), it takes this data (or source material) as a “clay” that is able to be molded in many diff ways, which discovers what the story is within that data.

Nicholas Felton (infographic graphic designer) He gave us the social network timeline story (check also feltron report). Looking at different aspects and topics of his life and creating reports. “Reporter” app: it captures random sampling.

Data by itself is not enough, data needs poetry.
To catalogue a human experience, turning data into stories. *(this reminds me of E-Lit)
Sonification: turning data into sounds. If we could turn an infinite Universe into numbers and sounds, why couldn’t we do the same for ourselves?

Understand the World in quantified ways: having complete location data about a person was something available. Is personal data so valuable, interesting or a hazard? “Nights spent alone? 265 days".
Transform raw data in a way that has to be interpreted by other human senses.
Daytum.com, helps people count/track different daily data in life (as an expression tool of quantified representation of oneself’s identity).

Self-awareness through data, being way more critical by better understanding our own self.
Reconstruct the psychological state of a person. The question is then, what is not measured or captured? One of the problems of facing analysis is completeness, many apps might just not have enough context into the situation, like emotional activity. Not everything that is important is measurable.

Brendan Dawes. Artist and designer exploring the interaction of objects, people, art and technology using form and code with a mix of analog and digital materials.

John Gadd is the writer of Britain’s biggest personal diary, 150 volumes and 33,000 pictures. Of course, we have been quantifying our data before the digital age.

Douglas Adams wrote about data driven music in ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’, and what would have been Richard MacDuff’s Fathom article.

Ethical standards towards the purity of data. Data is not neutral, it is a story-telling device, interpreters. What they tell us about the World around us is subjective, but it can be meaningful.