Maintaining your own data log, being mindful of the data you create, can open your eyes to the many ways you may unintentionally/unconsciously create data. And that raises the question: What counts as data? For the sake of this blog post, my working definition is that data is any saved, intelligible information or state or log that (almost) directly results from my actions.
- Homework
- Search history from looking up things I didn’t know about in my reading about positioning methods
- created an basic weather checking app that sends requests to a weather API
- blogged this post
- highlighted and wrote notes (digital highlights and stickies) on a pdf of a reading I had for CMS.701 Current Debates in Media
- a text file for notes on CMS.631 (this class!) readings.
- Trip to Trader Joes
- purchase data (credit card bill)
- Uber request/trip/payment info
- location data sent to Uber’s servers
- Video for a Friend
- took several photos
- took several videos
- edited these together to make another video
- purchased a drink from a friend using Venmo
- Social Media/Communication
- emails and actions taken to interact w/ email (e.g. delete or star emails)
- text messages on Messenger and over the phone
- Facebook
- liked a few pictures
- every single request (HTTP, etc.) going out of my Chrome browser
- stored cookies (visiting certain websites)
- my Chrome web history
Reviewing my data log, I see that the majority of the bullet points I listed was media I explicitly created for human viewing. On the other hand though, the majority of data (in terms of size) was probably data that I wasn’t intentionally creating–my search/web history, HTTP requests and more.