Conceptualising a Quantified Past

This literature review sets out foundations to advance the concept at the heart of this thesis: a quantified past.

The essence of this concept is that quantified data has an under-explored potential to document one’s life. Much like social media, email inboxes and web browsing histories, a by-product of self-tracking tools is that they are technologies of memory. Through the lens of digital possessions, we can therefore investigate longer-term relations, practices and values of quantified data.

Further, in recognising the way that mediators of memory “contribute their own

dynamic” (Middleton and Brown, 2015, p.145) the core matter of interest in this thesis is the ways in which remembering with a quantified past is a distinct experience. Put simply, this thesis suggests that remembering running with quantified data may be a different experience to remembering running with a photograph, a video or a pair of old running shoes. Personal, quantified data that documents our everyday activities is an emerging phenomenon. However, some brief examples from artists and consumer applications are instructive as to the potentially intriguing features of such a record.

Perhaps pushing most critically at the potential to “collect, list, database and absurdly analyse the data of everyday life”, artist Ellie Harrison undertook a series of data-

collection projects between 2002 and 2009 (Harrison, 2005, 2009). Notably ahead of her time, many of her projects relied on manual tracking using log sheets; projects such as Goldcard Adventures, which accumulated her travel across London, are now routinely collected by Transport for London and individuals themselves. Importantly, her work presented self-tracking as something more than a conduit to behaviour change, and highlights the diversity of what one might quantify about one’s everyday life.

Graphic designer Nicholas Felton’s ‘Annual Reports’ (available at feltron.com) provide perhaps the clearest example of a quantified past. He was one of the first people to use personal informatics to lifelog, as much as to change or improve his life. Over ten years, his work exemplifies two things: the diversity of what can be quantified, both manually and automatically, and how it can be represented. Felton employs a number of common techniques. Counts – such as a striking total of 3,761 book pages read – are often used as a summary and an introduction to a topic, which is then explored in greater depth.

Ordered lists, particularly of food and media consumption feature frequently, as do percentages and pie-charts. Alongside these arguably ‘simpler’ representations, are also more complex visualisations and correlations – for example, mapping call history and message archives.

Looking beyond Felton’s striking typographic style, his work raises questions about the particular qualities of this way of representing and remembering one’s life. There’s a certain uncanny level of detail and precision expressed by quantified data. What kind of narratives does it foster or invite? Recall Schwarz’ insight that once stored in a database, memory can become non-narrative, and subject to multiple ad-hoc reformulations. What context is captured, and what is left out? How does quantified data compare emotionally to the pictures painted by photos and video?

Felton’s work is undoubtedly idiosyncratic, requiring an obsessive degree of self- surveillance, present in earlier lifelogging research. Much of what Felton captured, required manual logging and note-taking, although he also made extensive use of existing digital traces, and personal informatics tools. Felton even developed a manual tracking

app ‘Reporter’3 based on his practice. However, a key aim of this thesis will to be investigate the quantified past as a more everyday and mainstream concern.

Appropriately, Felton’s final annual report in 2014 exclusively relied upon commercial self-tracking tools.

A primary example is the Moves app (acquired by Facebook in 2014)4. Moves “The Activity Diary of Your Life” uses a smartphone’s accelerometer and GPS to constantly track a user’s location and activity (walking, running and cycling: measured in steps and distance). This data can be viewed daily as a map, and as a timeline. It is easy to navigate through one’s Moves history and view the data on a monthly scale. Moves data can also be easily exported to a number of other ‘Connected Applications’. Although Moves implicitly encourages greater physical activity, and highlights ‘record’ distances covered, it is striking as a personal informatics tool that promotes itself as an automatic diary. Moves, as a record of one’s life bears some comparison to the SenseCam, through its passive, ongoing accrual of data. Although the data initially presented to users is not as ‘raw’ as SenseCam images, ‘Moves’ captures the mundane routines of everyday life that might rarely be worth capturing. Used over long periods of time, the volume of data captured is potentially vast, leading to questions about how such an archive might be navigated to rapidly browse points of interest and support a ‘mobility of vision’ (Lindley et al., 2009a).

The prospect of a quantified past is particularly intriguing when considered in relation to a reconstructive memory. Data is intended and designed to provide a precise and

determinate view of the world; but this seems so at odds with our experience of

remembering – “an affair of construction rather than one of mere reproduction”, to recall Bartlett’s terms. In relation to images, Susan Sontag argued that photographs, so realistic, literally fixing light, have become so culturally dominant that “reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras….’It seemed like a movie.’ This is said, other descriptions seem insufficient to describe how real it was.” (Sontag, 1977, p.161) Taking photos becomes a way not only of remembering, but a testament that the

3 _{http://www.reporter-app.com/} 4 _{https://moves-app.com/}

remembered experience could be real. The contemporary refrain “pics or it didn’t happen” (Whitehead, 2015) reflects this ongoing conflation between photography and reality. But what of data, with its guises of objectivity and scientism? What is the relationship then between data and realism?

As the reach of data capture expands, will reality be restrained to what is captured? What then of the inevitable reduction, and lapses in the record? The Moves app, for example, relies on a strong phone signal to pick up an accurate location, and requires the user carries their phone continuously. How might people maintain an ‘authentic’ relationship with such a record, similar in the way they manage other digital traces Schoenebeck (2016)?

These kinds of questions are core to the experience of remembering, and are at the heart of this thesis. They suggest that as we live an increasingly data-driven life, a potentially distinct record of one’s life may emerge. The Moves app is just one example. Gyroscope5 is a ‘health tracking dashboard’ that showcases the array of self-tracking data now available to consumers. And while these devices and applications are overwhelmingly aimed towards becoming fitter, happier and more productive, it cannot be overlooked that they are also creating a remarkable record of everyday lives, especially if we consider longer term, or even lifelong use.

This data may be construed as creating a new kind of digital memory, but how and when and why people remember with that record is another matter entirely. This discussion has so far been largely absent from both the study of technologies of memory, and the design of self-tracking tools. This is what my two central research questions, introduced earlier, seek to address.

1) What is the experience of remembering a data-driven life?

2) What are design considerations for remembering with data-driven services and technologies?