Picture your data
1
TO BE ALONE WITH YOU(RSELF)
When I was but a wee college student, sometimes I surprised my friends by staying in on a Friday night (gasp!) so that I could spend time by myself (hands-over-heart double gasp!). I hadn’t connected with the concept of FOMO yet—it wasn’t in the lexicon, for one, but I was also self-centered enough not to imagine too deeply how other people spent their time when I wasn’t present—and I was confident that time spent alone was restorative (though I didn’t have the vocabulary to define it thus then); my gut, my inner voice, told me to stay in, to brew a pot of coffee and paint swoopy nightscapes and write in my journal (emulating, as best I could, my perception of a brooding artiste), so I did, and it was, indeed, restorative.
It would be harder to make the same decision now because if there’s one thing the internet does well, it’s to show us all the things we’re not doing that our friends (and people we admire, stan, etc.) are. But it’s still worth carving time out to be alone.
That said, intention matters. You can’t just go around being alone and think life will magically improve. (I mean, you absolutely can. Please report back if that’s working for you.) Loneliness and being alone taste similar on our tongues, but desire distinguishes them, separating them into bitter and sweet. Loneliness, a literal epidemic that kills people, grows out of our very human need for connection, while being alone is a conscious decision, a gift to yourself that leads to relaxation and renewal.
So get out there (or indoors—wherever your happy place is), and spend some time with your thoughts. Do your best impression of a brooding artiste or movie critic or chef or poet or philosopher. And be sure to do it alone.
Title = stretch reference to an early Sufjan Stevens song because he’s my favorite, and what’s the point of throwing words into the internet void if I can’t make inside jokes (to myself) here?
2
DATA, PICTURED
I recently rediscovered The Pudding, a site dedicated to visualizing data in compelling, well, visual data stories. And then I found that they combined two of my favorite things, data visualization and photo privacy, into a compelling visual data story!
I care about our collective right to privacy, and I don’t love that the combination of cameras everywhere + facial recognition software + AI + neural networks + laws written pre-internet-and-smartphones have come together to mean that we are always known, rarely anonymous.
It used to take a lot of time and manual labor to compile and make sense of giant datasets, but it’s pretty easy now. Raw data + someone who knows how to organize it into coherence + data viz software = a legible story.
(I’ll stop writing sentences in the form of equations soon, I promise. They’re just happening. They’re how my fingers are thinking right now (math fingers!), so I’m going with it.) (As you can see, I’m such a nerd, but I like that about myself, so I’m gonna leave this nerdiness right here so you can enjoy it too.)
Back to The Pudding: they visualized the story of a photo of Lenna, a woman whose photo was published in Playboy in 1972. The photo has been used since the early days of the internet (in the ‘70s) as, essentially, an open-source test object. But even though Lenna herself has tried to have the image removed from datasets, it continues to circulate and be used without her permission because if there’s one thing the internet has taught us, it’s that we don’t own ourselves—the internet does.
3
INCONSISTENT ENGLISH
I’m not going to attempt to cover the complexities and wonder represented in this essay about the history of the English language and its many spelling oddities, for you’d find yet another multi-paragraph epic here, so I implore you to read it yourself. A summary by me won’t do it justice.
I will, however, wax poetic, albeit briefly, on one of my favorite bits.
Did you know that spelling sticks once words are frequently printed and literacy increases? A confluence of events occurred at a point in history when a larger portion of the population began reading and writing—the advent of the printing press. This is why we don’t often see phonetic spelling in English—once you get accustomed to reading a word comprised of letters organized in a particular way, even if those letters aren’t organized in a logical way, you easily identify the word with the spelling you’re used to seeing.
Take “diction,” for example. Phonetically, I’d spell it “dikshun,” but that’s harder for you to read (assuming you, dear reader, are fluent in written English), even though it’s technically spelled in a clearer way. That’s because you know the shape of the word printed on the page, which means that reading is as much about the visual art of words as the sounds produced when we read them.
4
NOT SO FAR FROM HOME
One of my favorite books is Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (she’s one of my very top favorite authors), and I’m just going to derail this post immediately to tell you to read the Carry On trilogy, also by Rowell, which was first featured as pretend fanfiction inside Fangirl. (It gets real meta real quick. Don’t think too hard—just go read.)
In Fangirl, the main character writes amazing fanfiction (i.e. she’s a really great writer), but when pressed to write an original piece for a college class, she’s terrified of having to imagine and construct an entire fictional world for her characters. When she shares her fears, her professor tells her she doesn’t have to build a new place from scratch—she can start with what she knows.
It turns out that most authors start with what they know—they write their stories in real places they themselves have lived.
5
BRANDED BOOK COVERS
Repetition can make for compelling design, and this plays out in the world of branded book covers. When publishing houses issue a series of books by a single author with similarly designed covers, they create cohesion, telling us a visual story at a macro level so we can look at an author’s published works and see them in harmony.
Plus, when you buy a set of books that look analogous, they look dang good on your bookshelves.