Data Storytelling Studio 2020

Phone:

• Health data — steps taken, miles walked, flights of stairs taken
• Map data — GPS location
• Photos — photo of several flowers, a few dogs, screenshots of a few articles I read
• Browser — Read the news (NYT, Slate, Nymag, New Yorker), browsed Twitter newsfeeds, liked a number of Tweets, browsed Instagram (mostly dog videos)
• Texts — text conversations I had with a few friends where I sent them the screenshots I took from a few news articles
• Messaging apps — Sent messages on FB Messenger, WeChat, Signal
• Overall — Roaming data, connected to home wifi and used 4G, battery life data

Laptop

• Microsoft Word — Wrote a few lines of a poem
• Browser — purchased a pillow on Amazon, looked up a recipe for bread pudding, watched YouTube videos (watched many dog videos, some videos about babies, some comedy videos, a few celebrity interviews), read more news (NYT, BBC, Slate), browsed more Twitter, checked email on Gmail again

iPad

• Watched a few episodes of show on Hulu

Transportation

• Swiped bus pass twice

Services

• Swiped in at the YMCA gym
• Entered library but did not swipe library card (but not sure if presence was recorded in some other way?)

Purchasing

• Swiped QR code at Whole Foods for Amazon membership, pretty sure all my motions are recorded the moment I step into a Whole Foods
• Credit card data — CVS visit, Whole Foods visit, online Amazon purchase

Appliances

• Smart fridge — I don’t think our fridge has Internet connectivity but it does record things such as the amount of ice left and when the filter needs to be replaced

Morning

Document access

• Captured by
  • Google Docs
    • to check the CMS.631 syllabus and data log hand out!
  • Google Keep
    • to track data log and various other notes to self
  • Info
    • Time of access
    • Time of edit
    • Edits (text)

Schedule

• Captured by
  • Google Calendar
    • To update a rescheduled meeting
  • Info
    • Edit to calendar event
    • Time of edit for calendar event

Location

• Captured by
  • Broad Institute security
    • To get into lab for the work day
  • Info
    • Time + identity of tapping into building

Coffee

• Captured by
  • BostonbeaN Coffee Company
    • Guessing that this fancy coffee machine at least keeps track of how many of each drink it makes
  • Info
    • Type of drink made by the lab coffee machine

Work

• Captured by
  • Broad Institute
    • Bioinformatics is all about creating and working with digital data – more of a loaf of bread than data breadcrumbs here
  • Info
    • login to computing cluster
    • resources used on computing cluster
    • jobs submitted to computing cluster
    • files created+removed

Afternoon

Subway usage

• Captured by
  • MBTA
    • Took the T instead of walking because I happened to be near a T stop after running errands
  • Info
    • Money used on CharlieCard
    • + 1 tap into a subway turnstile

Location

• Captured by
  • MIT Zesiger Fitness Center
    • For team practice
  • Info
    • Time + identity of tapping into building, locker rooms

Physical Activity

• Captured by
  • Google Sheets
    • I’ve been keeping a workout log digitally since my first year of undergrad, it’s nice to be able to search specific workouts though having a physical notebook was nice too
  • Info
    • Workout log

Evening

Home stats

• Captured by
  • Eversource utilities company
    • Just from living my life, having the lights on, cooking etc
    • Not sure how fine-grained the info is, but they’re at least figuring out how much to bill the house every month
  • info
    • Electricity usage (kWh used)
    • Internet usage
    • Heat + cooking gas usage

All day

Web

• Captured by
  • Google Chrome browser
    • Used for many searches and articles throughout the day
  • Pocket
    • To save articles that I found meaningful/interesting/want to read later
  • Info
    • Webpages visited
    • Search terms
    • Time of access
    • Webpages saved

Messaging

• captured by
  • Slack
    • for work
  • Facebook Messenger
    • to communicate with friends
  • Wechat
    • to communicate with family
  • WhatsApp
    • I normally do not use WhatsApp but an international friend who mainly uses WhatsApp was in town so we used this platform to arrange a meetup, I got to introduce her to her first taste of bubble tea
  • Gmail
    • For more official messages and receiving dormspam
  • Groupme
    • For team groupchat
  • info
    • messages sent, received
    • messages time of sending, receiving, read
    • size of messages

Phone stats

• Captured by
  • Samsung phone manufacturer
  • Network provider
• info
  • Mobile data usage
  • Wifi data usage
  • Battery usage

Organization stats

• Captured by
  • Broad Institute
  • MIT
• Info
  • Wifi usage

Location

• Captured by
  • Private + public security cameras in Cambridge (visual)
  • Apps on phone w/ access to location (GPS coordinates)
    • Google Maps
    • etc
  • Info
    • Presence in a certain location

Payments

• Captured by
  • Credit card company
  • Merchant
    • Today most of the purchases I made were food
  • Budget tracking app
• Info
  • Merchant
  • Transaction time+date
  • Transaction amount
  • Transaction type (restaurant, groceries, etc)

Physical activity

• Captured by
  • Samsung Health
    • Automatically tracked though I’m sure I can turn off some of the tracking
  • Info
    • Est steps
    • Est distance walked
    • Est calories burned
    • Est distance walked at diff points in the day
    • Estimated time asleep (calculated from when user is not active on phone)

Chatting with people

Texting via iMessage, Whatsapp, GroupMe

Social Media scrolling and sending posts to friends via Instagram and Twitter — I have limited myself to 1hour/day on these apps

Video chatting via, FaceTime and Whatsapp

Moving around town

I used ridesharing services a total of 4 times yesterday! This is abnormal as I usually take the T or the EZ Ride bus to get around.

Accessing student lounge with student ID

Getting online

I definitely go down the YouTube rabbit hole, watching videos on nutrition, daytime talk shows, and celebrity gossip

I spend a lot of time researching products before I buy them. On this day I researched moisturizers and smoothie “boosters”

I created a month-long workout program and looked up existing exercises for inspiration and copied workout pictures to remind myself of the moves while at the gym.

Other things

I try to purchase most things on my credit card so that I can accumulate points.

Yesterday, I bought brunch for 5 people and Venmo requested those same 5 people

Listening to my audiobook (on the public library app) and to 3 podcasts on the Podcast app.

Social Data / Chatting

In my day-to-day, I would guess that I am producing the most information through this category of activity. I have multiple active group chats on WhatsApp, which can leave breadcrumbs about my location and activity calendar (when/where I am messaging more frequently). I also use messenger on Android, which I imagine collects similar bits of data though in a less secure environment.

For work and school, I set up my MIT email to work through my personal gmail account for convenience. Our department’s computer team tells me that this means Google reads all of my emails now. My lab and another student group I work with communicate over Slack; they are not the most active but I do check them regularly throughout the day.

The last set of communication channels worth mentioning are Instagram and Reddit. I posted a neighborhood-tagged photo on instagram that morning, which of course provided some location data as well as information on some of my tastes, which I’m sure instagram takes in concert with the things I like to target more and more effective ads into my feed. On Reddit, I mostly read (rather than comment) but the subreddits I follow probably paint a pretty detailed picture of my online interest profile.

Moving Around

I’ve been using Bluebike to get around lately while I put off some bike repairs until it gets warmer. Because it’s a docking system, they collect my start/end points as we saw in the data we explored a few classes back, as well as the information attached to my subscription through MIT. I plan trips using the app Citymapper, so they get more granular information about my trips.

I was good about packing coffee/food today, so I didn’t pay for anything with my credit card — though on a normal day there would at least be some data on my caffeine, lunch, or afternoon snack habits around my neighborhood and/or campus.

As I moved around, the Fit app on android tracked my steps and my location.

Getting Online

I primarily use chrome for my web browsing because it makes it easy to pick things up across machines and between my phone and my computer. Most of the group projects I am on work between Dropbox and the Google Drive suite of products (often both).

I used the MIT VPN from my apartment to get access to research materials online through the library, requiring my MIT ID. I used google scholar to help in researching which articles would be useful, leaving behind information about both my work and my interests

Other Things

I use an alarm clock app that (supposedly) tracks my sleep cycles to help wake me up at easier times, which means that there’s some behavioral data being collected even in my sleep.

I opt-in to sending analytics for many of the sofware that I have on my laptop, which likely means that my usage of things like adobe creative cloud registers somewhere in their analytics platform.