Precedents

Data visualization is quite a developed field with many types of representation and many types of information. In particular, for my project, I was interested to see if there were any data visualizations or sculptures for data across time. One of the websites I found was http://survey.timeviz.net/. I also found a few articles by Lev Manovich who plotted Instagram photos over a period of time (http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~bhecht/geohci2013ps/paper_56.pdf). I felt that the final plot visualization of colored dots and lines over a black background was an interesting and effective method. He also wrote about visual patterns in video games (http://softwarestudies.com/cultural_analytics/visualizing_temporal_patterns.pdf) and this inspired me to make something that was both game-like and represented data.

Jeremy Blum's Arduino tutorial about holiday lights and sounds was also interesting to me and inspired me to use lights to represent patterns in data (http://www.jeremyblum.com/2011/12/25/tutorial-14-for-arduino-holiday-lights-and-sounds/).

I also wanted to see if there were any research on how data visualizations can aid memory (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7192708). It identifies "evoking familiarity, expressing subjectivity and addressing people's privacy concerns by obscuring sensitive data" as challenges; participants also "long(ed) for a representation that they can better integrate into their home where it can trigger serendipitous recounters and stimulate communications with friends. Hence, I felt that it would be appropriate to make something physical and possibly engaging different senses (sight, touch), with the eventual goal of encouraging memory recollection.