QH18

#API(3), #DataVisualization(2), #JSON, #Interesting, #SpookyStuff, #Dope, #Challenging, #fun, #SelfTracking, #Humanistic, #GraduateStudents, #data, #DataObfuscation, #deep

About

Slides per week
Total slides

570

There are more "free" applications and services than ever before that help us to quantify and track what we do, when, how, and with whom. The quantified self holds the promise of improving our lives, but there is an ambivalence to how these technologies are affecting our lives. This course - Quant Humanists: The "I" in API - examined, questioned, and critiqued the perspectives of personal data and "the quantified self" from multiple perspectives. We explored these perspectives by working with the tools and methodologies for collecting personal data and generating visuals and other tangible output from these data. This is a page highlighting some of the course outcomes.

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Featured Projects

Speak Memory
Jenna

A collection of visualizations spun in D3 from custom python tracking tools, cataloging a month of mood data in blinks, keylogs, facial expressions and sub/objective sentiments.

Site
In Search of Lost Time
Krizia

A gallery of 10-second Point-of-View shots collected via a wearable/connected device. The goal was to observe extraordinary patterns that emerged from a seemingly normal day, alluding to Marcel Proust's In search of lost time, where a mnemonic episode with a madeleine prompted an unexpected wave of memories, thoughts, and observations about the everyday.

Site
WeChat Herstory
Xiran

A timeline of mother-daughter WeChat history, parsing over a year of challenging and one-sided conversations to assess relationship balance and growth.

Site | Code | Blog
Surfing Bilingually
Alice

An exploration of multi/bi-culturalism through the web browsing tendancies of persona "A", an archetype of a third-culture kid navigating the www in Korean, English, Japanese, and "anon" Chrome sessions.

Site | Code
Would you invest in me?
Chloe

Using her own financial data over the last couple years, Chloe analyzed her data to see whether or not her data would warrant investment. Judging by her growth, it seems the prospects are good.

5 Years of Relationship Data
Harshita

Harshita analyzed 5 Years of her conversations with her partner and generated poetry using the conversations as the input to a diastic poetry generator. The results are deeply personal and only readable by her.

Photo Time Capsule
Mengzhen

Imagine a future service that shares your memories with the people you love and makes them interactive. This service proposal allows you to capture the memories of your life in ways and to share the feelings that you might have experienced at given times in your life.

Data Symphony
Miki

A kinetic data sonication project tracking locations, movement, and transit methods throughout the city in a playful Processing visualization.

Site | Code

Interests

Departments Represented
Total students

10

Student interests

interactive media arts(2), design(2), tech(2), ui (2), disability, sports, nurtition, video games, code, mood disorders, mapping, 1.5korean, business, culture, ethnography, media, post-strucuralism, newsfeed-sharing, ux, memory, front-end dev.

Course highlights

Introduction to many topics & projects related to self-tracking (4), thinking about big data and personal data (2), project inspiration, exposing privacy concerns, intro to style guides, intellectually stimulating, examining current issues.

Guest Speakers

Places visited
Total

5

New perspectives

On April 2nd, 2018 the Quant Humanists Course visited Jason Bobe and Ryan Viglizzo to chat about the Resilience Project. We learned about the process of finding “Genetic Superheroes” and the team’s efforts in redesigning the patient-consent process for biomedical research studies.

We had a total of 5 external guest speakers participate in our class this year. We met Lauren McCarthy, Brian Bot, Daniel Goddemeyer, Jason Bobe, and Ryan Viglizzo. We also had Daniel Shiffman and Markus Kreutzer as guest reviewers at our final project presentations.

Materials

Count per week per resource
Resources

122

Curated references

Each week we prepared 3 categories of materials for students to reference - practice, readings, and additional resources. In total we had 122 resources. We had a supplmental reference for materials which included 9 books, 12 Papers, 20 Articles, and 7 Talks which were part of the Course Materials.

Assignments

Project turnover time
Total Assignments

7

Learning through making

Students engaged in weekly project based work that spoke to the topic discussed that week. We learned that in future iterations of the course it might be beneficial to assign the same data to be tracked and allow for more freedom in the visualization/manifestation of the data rather than allowing students to have to decide on both the data to be tracked and the visualization type. Students also wrote about their experiences tracking each week in an assigned blog post.