Dear Data

July 6, 2016 @ 5:44 AM

One of the amazing people I work with at H2O.ai is Micah Stubbs. He frequently hosts the Bay Area D3 User Group meetup at the H2O offices. This week was movie night, where we watched a presentation by Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, about their joint project, Dear Data.

Georgia and Stefanie live far apart - in New York City and London, respectively. They met at a data visualization conference and found that they had a lot in common. They wanted to stay in touch, so they invented a project that allowed them to collaborate via mail. The project consisted of each participant collecting personal data of some kind for a week, and then visualizing it through hand-drawn illustrations on the backs of postcards that they would send each other every week. The result was a year-long exploration of observing oneself through the lens of data collection and visualization. The resulting visualizations are real works of art. Check them out.