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.

A few weeks ago, Michael Surtees posted an engaging commentary on his iPhone and how it related to quarterbacking his blogging and wider online presence. This thoughtful text included a diagram from his sketchbook (pictured above) which really got me thinking about digital identity management and the ever-changing landscape of online presence. Between the explosion of micro-content platforms (i.e. twitter, jaiku, tumblr), and the methodology of these services being deployed on more widely used social networking sites ("status" in Facebook), people are warming up to the idea of broadcasting their activities on a minute to minute basis.

[jeremy keith's lifestream]

My first introduction to the idea of lifestreaming was through Jeremy Keith's Streaming My Life Away a post made in 2006, which speculated on possibilities for data aggregation that are becoming increasingly commonplace:

Every time I ping Twitter, the message is time stamped. Every time I post a link to Del.icio.us, that’s time stamped. Every time I upload a picture to Flickr, a time stamp of when the picture was taken is also sent. Whenever I listen to a song on iTunes, the track information is sent to Last.fm with a time stamp. And of course whenever I blog, be it here, at the DOM Scripting blog or Principia Gastronomica, each entry has a permalink and a time stamp. Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?

Keith supplemented these thoughts with his own personal data stream which quite clearly illustrates the possibilities of ownership (and authorship) of online activities and interpersonal communication.

Some other key reference that I've come across are the chapter on lifelogging in the Metaverse Roadmap (a document that emerged out of a conference hosted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation last year) and Mark Krynsky's Lifestream Blog, which methodically tracks new commentary and technical developments in this field.

[the evolution of steve mann's wearcam]

The idea of lifestreaming isn't new, but the degree to which this phenomenon is implemented is one of the key topics of discussion within tech-culture circles at the moment. Leading tech-evangelist Robert Scoble recently predicted that micro-content was the next email, and there are a handful of new mobile device oriented, locative applications that further collapse the distinction between social media, blogging and mapping (i.e. loopt and dodgeball).

There have been a lot of developments over the last month in terms of twitter analytics, and while at first glance projects like Tweeterboard might appear as nothing more than an online popularity contest, what these applications are really tracking is real-time social presence (and "aura" for that matter). In a recent Read/Write Web post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, I commented that this kind of application is not all that different from other web analytic indexes that have emerged in recent years (i.e. Technorati's authority as a counterpoint to Google Pagerank). As much as social media has established a foothold over the last 18 months, I think it will be the combination of mobile devices & micro-publishing will really drive web-culture this year.

If you are interested in checking out some twitter visualizations and statistics be sure to take a look at Elie Zananiri and Damon Cortesi's recent experiments as well as Stamen's twitter-blocks and David Troy's twittervision (pictured above).