A Quantified Past

How people interact with the data they had collected with personal informatics tools? How people make their own meaning through the data? This paper talks about people’s thoughts towards the accumulated quantitative data, and identifies six characteristics of a ‘quantified past’ through interview-based qualitative research method. Overall, the authors argue that personal informatics data should be more meaningful and be more contextualised to user’s lived experience, rather than solely focusing on tracking one’s behaviour and visualizing the data.

 

Prior to presenting their research, the authors introduce some background information about the field of quantified data such as technologies of memory and personal informatics. According to the paper, the point of view towards the data has been changed from only focusing on the ways of gathering data to finding out other meanings of the data. Harper et al. identifies this as memory as a resource for action [1]. In other words, due to analysing the accumulated historical data, we might be able to read user’s future behaviour. However, since recording and measuring someone’s life via personal data are actually unprecedented, I suggest that we should carefully consider to what extent the data has impacts on people’s behaviour pattern and what are the opportunities and challenges of collecting personal informatics data.

 

In terms of the research analysis, the author used Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which enables researchers to understand how people experience their life with the data, and it helps us to make sense of personal informatics data. According to their findings, everyone has different ways to encounter their historical data. They use their data as means to evaluate and recollect their efforts and memories. Therefore, the interviews were helpful to understand how different individuals experienced their own quantified data. According to the paper, the data can be described as a showcase. That means the data show not only an user’s events, but also their physical differences between the past and the present. People can be reminded of specific moments and periods of their life via accumulated data. The data can be a substitute for photos as a tool that carries memory, and the paper also discussed the differences between these two. I could see many people, who use self-tracking data for looking back their previous events, can describe the events quite vividly and directly. I found an interesting point that although photos are more evocative, the data can record the part of one’s life, thanks to its continuity and durability, that the camera cannot achieve.

 

By considering the findings from the interviews, the paper states six main characteristics of quantified past. To sum up the characteristics, people’s life is recorded by a third party, so actual users are limited to mediate what is recorded and how it is organised in the cloud (I have some concerns here about its privacy issues). In addition, due to the quantified data, people can gather more precise details and facts about their everyday life, but these don’t contain their actual feelings and senses. The paper also points out that personal informatics are egocentric as a recording device. These just record about you without the thoughts on the world around you. The authors also suggest new perspectives on personal informatics tools for better experiencing, curating and sharing personal data, . I agree with the paper’s view that the value of personal informatics tools need extend beyond simply monitoring and motivating behaviour changes. I argue that although there are many benefits of quantified data usage and its bright future, we need appropriate direction to use it. In other words, if the personal informatics tools can help us to think, reminisce, organise our experiences and memories from our own point of views, it would be the right direction to go.

 

 

[1] Harper, R., Randall, D., Smyth, N., Evans, C., Heledd, L., & Moore, R. (2008). The past is a different place: they do things differently there. In Proceedings of the DIS 2008 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. New York: ACM.

 

I found an application called Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal. It is not only tracked and manage your calories & nutrition balance, but also offers a function to count your footstep and show the consumption of your calories. In my point of view, this type of applications is not really helpful to maintain our life healthy. How can we measure our consumption of energy via only footstep? How can this app suggest us the appropriate amount of calories, even though we all have different life pattern? In addition, every day comes different, even for ourselves. I would suggest to be more helpful and meaningful for its users, the application needs to be collect more subjective and personal data (e.g. personal feelings, their daily schedule, and so on.)