"...self-experimentation with data forces us to wrestle with the uncertain line between evidence and belief, and how we come to decisions about what is and is not legitimate knowledge." - Neff, Gina. The Self-Tracking (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) (p. 18). The MIT Press.
What is the Quantified Self? How are we represented by the data we produce? Are those representations meaningful? For whom? We will explore these questions and many more throughout this course, "Quant Humanists: the 'I' in API". Today, we will introduce some basics of this course, take care of some technical logistics, and dive into the quantified self experience.
DISCUSSION:
- Introductions - happy to see yous!
- Course logistics
- Overview of context, terminology, methods, & resources
- Presentation
Project Highlight - Critique & Feedback
Margaret Rhodes (2015), This Guy Obsessively Recorded his Private Data for 10 years
STUDIO:
- Assign base/default questions + brainstorming about questions students are interested to answer through self-tracking ⇒ feedback about technologies and methods to do so
- Each group to come up with 5 questions, with at least 3 data types
- We’ll add these to a collaborative cluster and vote on a top 10 (?) list of questions
- Hu, Elise., NPR, Self-tracking apps help you quantify yourself
- Schüll, Natasha., Our Metrics, Ourselves - summary of 4 books on the quantified-self
- Nield, David., Gizmodo, Best Journaling Apps to Record your 2017
- Nomie App, blog and video, Mobile Track Anything App
- Epic list of Quantified Self apps and projects, @woop/Awesome Quantified Self
- Woo, Twinsen., Introduction to Quantified Self
- Reporter App: unofficial questions
- Measured Me, How to Design Self Experiments
- Amyx, Scott., Wearing your Intelligence
- Lupton, Deborah., Book, The Quanitified Self
- Neff G. and Nafus D., Book, Self-Tracking
- Nafus, Dawn., Quanitified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life
- Knot, Hjorth, Mueller., Understanding physical activity through 3D printed material artifacts
- Gilboa, Itamar., Sculpted Quant-Diet
- Lupi, Georgia,. Sketching Quant Correspondence -- We will revisit this in Week 3
- Wolfram, Stephen., Quant Visualization
- Solver, Sam., WrapGenius: personal food tracking experiment
- Koester, Mark., Blog, What I'm Tracking in 2017
- Koester, Mark., Blog, Ultimate guide to tracking
- Experimentable, Blog, Experimentable QS Resource Guide
- Platel, Joost., Questions for a Self-Tracking Service
- Benson, Buster., How I track my life with Reporter
The assignment this week is to get setup with your self-tracking tools and to dive in to the world of the quantified self. You will hit the ground running by spending this week fine tuning your self-tracking data collection. You will discover by engaging in the practice of self-tracking how you might need to adjust or adapt your data collection methods to best suit your own needs/personality/questions.
Along with your data collection you will also begin the habit of reflecting on the process of self-tracking - a task you will maintain, along with your data collection, throughout the course.
Below you will find a checklist of tasks for this week.
- About: If not already, please create an account with Github: Signup here
- Submission: ✨
- About: Setup the self-tracking tools (e.g. reporter-app, nomie 2, moves, etc) and begin the habit of self-tracking. Spend this week to adjust and adapt to your own needs/personality/questions. Take this week to sort out aspects of your self-tracking such as sampling frequency and granularity (e.g. level of detail) with the intention of maintaining these habits for the rest of the semester.
- Submission: Continue tracking throughout the semester.
- About: Find 3-5 examples of projects that relate to self-tracking and the quantified self and write a 1. short summary description of the project, 2. the project's broader significance, and 3. why it is interesting to you. When possible, speak to the project implementation as a way to catalog useful methodologies.
- Submission: Submit your Github Gist/blog post link as a
comment in its respective github issuein the quant-humanists-2018 repository. See NOTE below.
- About: Write a short reflection about what your current relationship with self-tracking (e.g. hopes, dreams, perceptions), questions you have about self-tracking and how it could help or harm you, and how you hope the course will help facilitate your interests. Write about which questions you've identified to track, how you plan to track those variables of interest, and what challenges you expect to encounter as well as what you hope to learn.
- Submission: Submit your Github Gist/blog post link as a
comment in its respective github issuein the quant-humanists-2018 repository. See NOTE below.
NOTE: Please structure your blog post submissions according to the assignment template here: Quant Humanist - assignment template