I’ve changed my data for the visualization project to something a bit less esoteric and more related to me. I had already been in the process of organizing my old email account and decided to use this as a source of data for understanding different changes in my thought process/behaviors/social interactions. Because my email account served as a source for so many different media (a personal journal, place to dump academic ideas, favorite songs and personal memories, place to get updates about friends on social media and also chat with them) I think it has the potential to have a lot of interesting information (from my perspective).

I thought about a couple different features that I’d like to have available when browsing this data. For one, I want to see the concentration of different email-journal messages and the amount of times I replied to these (I used replying to messages as a way of responding/reflecting on things I had thought earlier, it seemed like a good way to organize thoughts). I also want to be able to filter based on words and compare the frequency over time of different words; for example while I was looking through the data I noticed the tendency toward mentioning first person pronouns, as opposed to references to others, was really strong in the beginning of this account. So far I’ve been mostly focusing on top phrases/groups of words but there are plenty of other possibilities.