serial consign

I've been doing a little thinking about biography and self-archiving this weekend. Said train of thought was inspired by a chance encounter with the above project on ffffound! last week. This visualization is designer Ritwik Dey's Lifemap, a project he completed in an information design course at Parsons in 2005. The chart tracks Ritwik's education, topics of study (top), general interests (bottom), geographic location as well as milestones (i.e. the year he met his partner). These topics were traced back 18 years and Dey's elegant organizational scheme for these timelines lends itself to hypothesizing what activities inspired what subsequent interests (i.e. it appears calligraphy was his gateway into the world of design). If this project is of interest to you be sure to examine Ritwik's personal site as he has an interesting range of projects in his portfolio.

The image above is a detail of Gregory M. Dizzia's ambitious visual relationship history, a project that I have wanted to write about since I first saw it on Infosthetics last July. With commendable graphic flare, and a well-honed sense of humour, Dizzia mapped and qualified his entire dating history tracking everything from emotional involvement, degree of intimacy, heartbreaks, the context in which he met the partner and a qualitative index of the attributes of each of his partners. Where this project really shines is the semi-cryptic nature of the "breakup" icons (red octagons/stop signs), each of which suggests their own little story. In many ways the complexity of this graphic language and implicit narrative reminds me of everything that I love about a good Chris Ware panel. Later in 2007, Dizzia used a similar scheme to organize his Curriculum Vitae.

All of this thought about memory and the representation of personal timelines reminds me of the 2001 This American Life show on Numbers. This episode featured a segment on Jerry Davidson, a man who has kept daily lists of everything he has done and felt since 1955. Once you start applying this kind of rigor to lifelogging (or automate the process) you can start talking about lifestreaming and visualization in the same breath.

If you're curious about seeing more work in this vein be sure to check out Nicholas Felton's 2007 Annual Report (which was approved by approximately 92.5% of the Internet) and MYPOCKET by Burak Arikan.