YS and I were recently interviewed about self-tracking and Quantified Self by one of the major news channels in Australia. I will reflect on the experience after the show has aired, but it was an overall great experience. We have a new respect for filming what may ultimately be just a two minute segment. Depending on how the editing is done it will either provoke the hosts to contemplate the value of a data-centric macroscopic view of the world, or give them lots of fodder.

One of the things I like Tableau, a piece of software to visualise data, is that it aggregates on dates really well. Below is a spread of beer / wine / coffee over 18 months, but grouped by what hour is fell in. You can see some trends, like I usually consume coffee in the morning, and that I usually drink after 17:00. There are exceptions, of course, like that beer I had at 10AM, and that coffee I had at 1AM.

There is the possibility I will be giving an interview on the Quantified Self “movement”. What follows is a brief summary of QS, the things I track, and some pretty charts. What is Quantified Self I suppose it depends on who you talk to. Wikipedia states that it is “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs”, but I side more on the idea that the movement is “a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking.” It is at this point that it is probably important to interject that most people are self-trackers: weight, height, reps at the gym, hours …