Dear Data

This project started when I saw the headline: “Dear Data and FiveThirtyEight Want You To Visualize Your Podcast Habits.” As a designer and avid podcast listener, I was intrigued!

Reading on, I learned about the Dear Data project, in which Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec picked something to measure each week, then mailed each other a postcard with a visualization of that data. The data covered a broad range of topics, from things like tabulating the animals they saw or clothes they wore, to mapping their emotions and distractions. The front of the postcard shows the way they visualized their data (always hand-drawn), and the back of the postcard serves as a “legend” to help the recipient decode the data. Looking through the backlog of postcards, it’s fun to see Giorgia and Stefanie’s unique drawing styles, and the whimsical, unexpected ways that they put the data together. Now that the postcard project is complete, a Dear Data Book is being published in September of 2016.

Jody Avirgan of the FiveThirtyEight blog “What’s the Point” partnered with the two ladies of Dear Data and invited podcast listeners to take a crack at hand drawn data visualization, and create a Dear Data-esque postcard for a week of podcast listening during the month of March. Below are some pictures of my process and the final result.

I created a note in Evernote on my phone to jot down basic details about my podcast listening – podcast name, time I listened, and what I was doing while listening. At first I thought it might be interesting to track the different sponsors of the podcasts to track the overlap (I feel like I can’t escape from Squarespace, Mailchimp, and Stamps.com!), but I fell off of that eventually.

Field Notes — Once I had finished my week of listening, I compiled a more complete list of data in my notebook – the date I listened, the date the podcast was released, the name of the episode, the podcast length, etc.

Visualizing the Data — I started experimenting with ways I could visualize different pieces of data. I knew I wanted to somehow show the genre of the podcast by color - so all of the political podcasts would be different shades of green, for example.

Boring and Graphy — Displaying the data the way I initially had imagined was a little too boring and graphy.

Kaleidoscope/snowflake — I decided to show the data as a sort of kaleidoscope/snowflake instead.

Coloring Time — Then it was time to get to work on my postcard. I had to redo it once because I ran out of room on the back for my legend :(

Stamp — On the way to the mailbox, I had to stop and admire my nice Artisanal Bread and Cheese stamp.