currently, i've been thinking about the role of routines in personal identity, document scanners, secondhand designer clothing, what community means when you travel often, competitive designing, and how people decide where to live, what to believe, what to do for a living, and who to spend time with. i also started to organize the various movies, books, TV shows i like… the lists are not so long at the moment, it will take some time.
i spend an embarrassing amount of time making playlists, it's both a habit and a form of procrastination. occasionally i also make various sounds with my computer at a very amateur level. music is something i care about organizing, although i've come to realize i have a slight obsession with categorizing and archiving, which is probably what lead to my interest in personal databases.
in the practice of collecting and visualizing personal data, i've been building a sort of life repository. so far, this has involved scanning documents from kindergarten to high school, and experiments like “sentiment timeline” which i worked on with yihui. it's a horizontally scrollable webpage which plots over 300 of my pictures on the axes of sentiment and time using the google vision API. there are also some details, like showing images' average colours and metadata.
another reason i want to get better at data analysis is to answer questions i'm curious about, like how human relationships change over time, why songs are so short these days, and how fashion trends get recycled. i also have a theory that people who are friends spend more time on the same apps, and the natural behaviour of which apps we gravitate to also influence our friendships. kind of like internet environments. i'd like to gather data on this and do some analysis, likely through collecting screen time among friends, but it's a bit hard to coordinate.
what if?