Data Is Poetry

At a dinner the other night, my friend Jessica was reflecting upon the past year and said that she had been collecting all sorts of personal data (number of meals eaten at restaurants, average number of hours between lattes) because she was interested in examining the significance in everyday things.

I’ve seen a lot of friends and data junkies doing similar things, and I think the fascination boils down to the following: aggregating the data helps draw out the significance of something small by using repetition to create a narrative around the act, and once this significance becomes something you are consciously aware of, the act itself, in isolation, is more significant.

Finding beauty and meaning in the everyday act has traditionally been the duty of the arts–a still life painting, a poem or haiku, and as both a student of the humanities and a data junkie / information worker, I love that data exhaust is now cool enough to inspire arts/humanities mashups like the Feltron Report and meetup groups like The Quantified Self. Nike fit, Foursqaure, and all sorts of personal data tracking iPhone apps are the tools for a new kind of poet, and hopefully we’ll all look at this new poetry and experience what we experience when we read a well written poem.

Pause, reflect upon the consequences of a simple act or the significance of an object we take for granted. Take a moment to think about how each datum in isolation is part of a much larger narrative.

I think it’s fitting to close with a poem, The Red Wheelbarrow, by William Carlos Williams:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Related posts:

1. Piping Data Out – How do you monetize an open platform?
2. Meaningful Referrer Data and Semantic Web
3. A Temporally and Spatially Aware Google