Dear Data Mobility Diary

Collect

For one week I tracked my mobility in and around New York. It was important that I vigilantly tracked as I went through the day because there was no

one I would remember where I went or how long it took to travel from place to place. I tend to visit quite a few places throughout the day, so it was surprisingly validating once I saw the data that there actually is a reason I feel tired by the end of the night! All of the data can be found here.

Parse/Filter & Mine

Reviewing the different styles for visualizing data via Pinterest and through the work Georgia Lupi has done, I had expected to feel really overwhelmed and confused about how to represent all of my information. However, when I actually sat down to strategize, I realized that I didn’t need to represent every piece of data (i.e. time of day when travel took place) and could focus on the pieces I found more interesting (time spent traveling and mode of transportation.

Represent & Interact

I then decided on which pieces of information I thought were worth representing, these included:

• Transportation style (walking – empty square, subway – filled in square and on-demand transportation – triangle).
• Locations I visited, were represented with circles.
• Time was then standardized across the board, with each increment representing 5 minutes.

I bunched two columns at a time to represent a day – so reading top to bottom and then left to right. So the first two columns of data = Friday, the next two columns of data = Saturday and so on.

Refine

When all was said and done I, of course, had thoughts about ways I could have done it better or made the information more clear. I realized I probably didn’t even need to distinguish which subway station I was at since the data was really more focused on the mode of transportation and travel time vs. where I actually went.

I genuinely enjoyed this project though. It actually inspired me to use this approach for another year-long project I am working on for my Leadership class. I’m definitely looking forward to doing more of this, particularly because there is freedom in the mediums we use going forward.