Category: Student Posts

My phone tracks the distance that I travel during the day. I wanted to categorize the distance I traveled into categories of leisure, exercise, and walking to classes. I was particularly curious to see how frequently I moved around during my free time. Basically, I discovered that my most consistent distance that I travel in a day is from walking to class, which isn’t surprising.

My main takeaway from this sketch is that I noticed that I barely move during my free time which isn’t great. After reflecting over the data, I realized that I spend most of my free time just sitting around and doing nothing. I feel like it would be better for my health if I spent more of my leisure time walking around or doing something more active.

For my data viz project, I chose to track how many times I spoke to my mother over the course of a few weeks. Before I go on, I just want to say that I love my mother with all of my heart, she is a wonderful woman, and an outstanding role model. I also know that she does want the best for me (no matter what I think in my head when I’m angry sometimes) and she is willing to push me until I realize my full potential. Reasons why I chose this project:

1. My mom can be a little overbearing (she knows this)
2. I’m pretty sure she has a serious case of FOMO, as she wants to know Every. Single. Detail. of my life. I say this jokingly (kinda).
3. I was actually really curious how often I talk to my mom!

I decided on tracking how may cell phone calls, FaceTime calls, and text messages exchanged between my mother and me. As you can see in the graphs below, there is a lot of fluctuation within some of the days. April 16th, for example, was the day I got an exam grade back while April 18th was the day she had breast reconstructive surgery following her breast cancer diagnosis in June of 2017. On the average, I think we FaceTime at LEAST one a day, and average about 40 texts. Here are the graphs. (I included pictures as the background because my mom and I are kind of the same person. My dad says the apple didn’t fall far from the tree with us!)

Throughout the span of almost two weeks, I recorded my level of food satisfaction on a subjective scale of 0-100. This tracking assignment yielded some interesting results, which after developing a visual representation of the data, revealed key information about my eating habits throughout the week.

Firstly, a noticeable trend appears in the weekends, where my levels of food satisfaction increase dramatically compared to weekdays. This is because during the weekend, I tend to go out and eat with my friends or my girlfriend, in an attempt to escape the brutal grip of the duc-ling; its merciless grasp on my palate is accurately reflected by the low values presented during the week days, where values oscillate in the lower bound of the graph. Any strong outliers during the week day, such as the second Tuesday in my tracking assignment, are attributed to my ordering Uber Eats. As a general rule, if the value of food satisfaction exceeds 30 during a week day, it could be due to three factors: either I ate outside of Emory, went to Cox, or ordered food through Uber Eats.

This particular assignment was unique because it involved a long process with data collection.  I was tracking to see my overall emotional health through this assignment where I posed four different factors: productivity, happiness, positivity, and confidence.  These, I believe, are salient in determining a spectrum of emotional health.  Though more categories can certainly be added, these seemed to be solid universal determinants.  I scaled them based on what degree I felt at the current time (12 PM and 6 PM everyday for a week).  The lower end of the spectrum was towards one, while the opposite was ten.  In  essence, I was trying to determine if these factors are related  to my overall mental state; rather than one question, it was a an exploration to narrow down a correlation.

Though I cannot definitively state causes, there does seem to be some evidence to assert an adequate correlation.  One is that the “happier” I was, generally the more positive and confident I was.  About half the time, when I was productive, i was surprisingly happier.  Another important illustration in the data was that I tended to be happier and less productive on the weekends.  I do, however, feel uncomfortable jumping to a precise conclusion because my measurements were obviously very subjective.  For instance, an 8 happiness one day could be completely different than an 8 another day.

I chose to visualize the data in two ways.  The first is a bar chart that blatantly shows the data and neatly sorts the information by color.  I felt that this would be the easiest way to interpret it.  Next, I put the data into a line graph.  The line graph shows information over a period of time.  This was appropriate for the information that was taken at two times over a week.  If I were to continue this project, I would replicate my process. This is assuming that i begin to get a better grasp on how to adequately use the subjective measurements and create a proper, consistent standard.

This certainly was a valuable tool for self analysis. Often times, and proven true in this case, it is easier to conceptualize information when the data is visualized.  Also, keeping track of these measurements allows for a deep degree of introspection that one may generally ignore.

For my project, I chose to track my stress levels over the course of a few weeks. Since stress is such an intangible things, I was curious how stress manifests itself in my day-to-day life. To quantify that I decided to assess my stress levels through four different measurements: anxiety level, number of hours slept, time listened to music and number of pages read. I tracked these four measurements for two weeks, during which I had tests, homework, papers, social events and events for extracurricular clubs. Looking back on these two weeks, they are fairly representative of most of my college life so far, in terms of stress.

I set out to find out how stress shows itself in my everyday life and I believe I got the answer, at least in some ways, that I expected. Of course I couldn’t track every aspect of my life for two weeks so narrowing down on things I do consistently daily was important. I was conflicted as to what to include – there are many things I do every day – but landed on a few daily activities that measure both leisure time and work time, physical things and psychological things. I chose anxiety as my first indicator because it is almost directly linked with stress and I’ve had a complicated history with anxiety before, so I’ve had practice tracking it. I chose hours of sleep because, through my tracking of anxiety, I found that my sleep is directly effected by the amount of stress I am undergoing. I measured the number of hours I listened to music because I generally listen to music everywhere I go, whenever I can, so I figured, since I generally can’t listen to music when working or studying, I could track the amount of stress I was experiencing by paying attention to how much music I listened to every day, the less music listened to, the more stress I was undergoing. Lastly I chose to measure the amount of pages I read each day. I chose this measurement because a lot of my stress is related to work I do on a daily basis. A lot of that work comes in the form of reading, so I figured that depending on how much reading I did that day, I could track the amount of work I had and therefore stress I was.

Tracking wasn’t hard, I was able to remember to track and log all the measurements I set out to track. I thought a while about what the best way to visualize all the data was. After trying a few of the programs suggested by Professor Morgen, I decided to use the free-website Infogram, which was very easy to use.

The conclusions I drew from the resulting data was at first a little shocking. I surprised myself with how little I sleep sometimes, how many hours I spend with headphones on and with the amount of pages I read a day (it always feels like more…). However, once I thought about the results a little harder, I realized that I really was not that surprised after all; I had been living the numbers for almost a year and seeing them on a screen, while initially startling, started to make sense. I found myself saying “that seems about right…”. I guess that’s a pretty unsatisfying conclusion, but it makes sense to me. If I were to continue this project further I think I would change a couple measurements. I think instead of looking at the level of anxiety I experience and the number of pages I read, I would choose to track the number of times I complained about something in a day and the amount of words written (either by hand or digitally). I think those two combined with the other two measurements I kept would make for a much more interesting and telling statistic.

You can access the Infogram here.