Feltron 2012 is the eight edition of the project (all images courtesy of Nicholas Felton)
Data is life crunched up, it cannot exist unless it has first been lived. Be it statistics on languages spoken or the cost of someone’s funeral, the numbers on the page don’t float in a vacuum. The best examples of this I’ve come across are Nicholas Felton’s Annual Reports, an on-going project in which the American graphic designer produces a book each and every year charting different aspects of his life down to a minutiae. Narcissistic I hear you shout? Maybe. More a celebration of process and design than anything useful in itself? Probably. But it’s a good starting point for a runaway train of thought about how everything can be data-ised – plus they are also just undeniably cool.
I’ve come to discover that all nifty things can be traced back to the Knight Foundation – the Kevin Bacon of data journalism as it were – and this is no different. I first heard about Nicholas Felton in this video about all the exciting prospects and projects in the world of data journalism (circa 2010) which is well worth a watch if you have a spare hour and a half.
The first thing I think the annual reports show is that you can’t underestimate the importance of good design and visualisations with data. I’ve spoken on this blog before about Francesco Franchi before and how his graphic work with IL magazine interacts with the journalism to make the stories more revealing and easier to engage with. Felton’s work here is no different, it’s are a masterclass in how information can be displayed – what would be mundane facts about someone else’s everyday life suddenly becomes fascinating.
It taps into the whole craze of life-hacking, the idea that if you can quantify yourself, if you can take a peak under the metaphorical hood, then you can tinker and tailor yourself to be that little bit better, to be your best possible version. Without wanting to sound too arch or preachy, the same can be said about society as a whole. The more we know about the world we inhabit, the more data we can crunch and analyse, the better chance we have of ironing out the problems and dusting away the concerns. I struggle to think of much data too small to be of use if taken from a wide enough pool.
If you break down what exactly the annual reports are telling us – where Nicholas Felton has been, what type of transport he has taken, who he has spent time with, how many photographs he has taken, what clothes he has worn and so on and so on and so on…. none of these are areas of life which people would immediately consider as data producing.
This is a mind-frame that people, and especially journalists, need to get out of; to realise that everything we see and do is a potential data set and to think constantly about what stories it may contain and what other data it could be joined, compared or contrasted with. If you take it one step beyond the specific life of Nicholas Felton and consider how this level and type of data on a society-wide basis is a) full of important insights – not only journalistically but also sociologically, commercially and environmentally etc and b) that in some cases this data is collected already – it’s all a question of how it’s recorded, how accessible it is and who holds the keys to it.
The problem is tracking down the data in the first place, if we take types of transport used for example – public transport is easy, records are kept of tickets sold on all forms of public transport and there are certainly educated estimates by transport companies and authorities of how many people successfully evade fares each year. Personal transport is a lot tricker – cars are the easiest, the DVLA holds data on how many qualified drivers there are in the country, from road tax payments we can work out how many cars are on the road, but how far are cars driven on average? The data for that exists – all cars over three years old need to undergo a MOT annually, that figure of how far that car has gone will be taken down and recorded somewhere but this information is currently entirely inaccessible to anyone else.
What about bikes? Shops will know how many bicycles they have sold but even if this was centrally accessible as data it wouldn’t come close to being an accurate account of the number of bikes on our roads. Walking is harder still, the essence of the data is being created by people simply partaking in these activities but currently no one is recording it. Perhaps someone should. Maybe the whole quantified self movement which started off more as a quirky craze more than anything else, actually holds some larger lessons.
The often manic cries lambasting the Big Brother state are not too far off the mark, it’s not necessarily the state doing the collecting but, whether it is us ourselves inputting information onto websites or companies recording our commercial tendencies, we live in a world where most of what we do leaves a trail of ones and zeros. This isn’t going to change so why not embrace it and use the system to improve society by making this data more accessible? Maybe by making more disclosure of anonymised information compulsory or extending the jurisdiction of the FOI Act. Whatever can be done probably should, because as the annual reports show that data is just life quantified and so it follows, wasted data is wasted lives and we wouldn’t want any of them now would we?
