Tracking Personal Movement

Personal movement data is messy and patterns are often obfuscated by the shear amount of data. Using my iPhone and other devices, I’ve tracked my personal location for the past half year. I created this poster to show the key points about my own life told through my movement data.

This project was originally intended as a mapping exercise to see how I could take latitude and longitude coordinates and create maps from them. I took the data in and processed it using Javascript.

The data itself was very dirty, and the many different places I went made the data even more confusing. I knew I needed a way to present and contextualize the information. I decided that in addition to showing movement, I could also show the locations of places I visited and that would help give the movement more meaning.

I also wanted to show my daily movement patterns. I used Edward Tufte’s concept of small multiples to show my movement divided into different days of the week and times of the day. The benefit of Tufte’s small multiples is that the viewer can quickly understand each single chart, and can also make sense of the multitude of small charts.