Your Data Story
low-tech ways to spot patterns in everyday stuff
swipe to begin →
You already do this every day
Big data and AI sound like someone else's job. But pattern recognition? You do it every single day.
You just don't call it “analysis.”
The Data Collection
Make an observation or two about yourself. Write it down: one or a dozen, as much or as little detail as you want. A notebook is all you need.
brain dump = data lake
The Analysis
Read it back with a highlighter. What repeats? What surprised you? Circle the patterns. Congrats: that's clustering.
what repeats = clustering
The Peer Review
Hand your notes to a partner. Ask what they notice. Their read won't match yours, and that gap is the whole point.
like ML, done by hand, from their own knowledge
The difference is scale. Not sophistication.
A machine just does this to millions of rows at once.
The thinking is the same thinking you just did.
A new form of self-care
Noticing your own patterns is a practice that already has names. You've been fluent this whole time.
further readingLi, Dey & Forlizzi (2010). Personal informatics systems. CHI '10.
Lupton (2016). The Quantified Self. Polity Press.
keep it · pass it on