“How can I define what makes me happy and what makes me sad, what is good for me?” In 2012 Benjamin Bolland was finishing up his undergraduate degree and working on a new start-up. He found that his moods were constantly changing and wondered if there was something he could do to make sense of…
Cliff Atkinson is a consultant who helps people tell their stories and showcase their data in clear and understandable ways. It’s no surprise that when he became interested in understanding himself he turned to his experiences with visual storytelling. In 2012, at a New York QS meetup, Cliff spoke about how he’s embarked on a…
Matt Dobson is working on automatic affect recognition, which basically means quantifying emotions beyond self-reporting. In the video below, Matt walks through the current technologies available to passively detect emotions, helpfully explaining things like galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, and speech tone. He also gives some hints as to where the future of emotion tracking…
I had to post one more breakout session description for next week’s conference, because this project is so fascinating to me! Check it out, from brain researcher Matt Keener: Our brains sit at the apex of primate evolution, making it possible for us to think, feel and be self-aware, all made possible through the unique…
You’ve all heard the buzzwords being thrown around these days, “social media”, “social networking” etc. With the explosion of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other social services it seems like you can’t go anywhere online these days without being bombarded with buttons yelling at us to “Share this!”, “Like This” or “Send this to a friend”. Why the…
Julio Terra, a grad student in the Interactive Telecommunications program at NYU, built MoodyJulio after increasingly noticing the role emotions were playing in his life. He wanted to correlate his emotional responses with physiological metrics, activities, and people in his life. It’s like a work in progress to see his emotional landscape in HD. Watch…
Jessica Charlesworth’s blog has a fantastic title: The Future of Self-Knowledge. Jessica is a designer and researcher based in London, England. She has developed several interesting tools for taking a somewhat quantified, analog peek into your future. Crowdsourcing Your Future is a postcard that you send to your friends to have them predict your preferable…
A poem on the unseen struggles between self-tracking and self-worth.
How do you feel in different places? The precise correlation of location and emotional arousal is the topic of Christan Nold‘s long running biomapping project. The project used a simple galvanic skin response meter, which gives a reading of how excited you are. A GSR device is simple. Here’s the Lego version. These GSR readings…
I want to become more rational. So do many people I know. But shouldn’t the quest for more rationality itself be conducted rationally, so that we can avoid damaging mistakes? We probably all know people whose Spock-like anti-emotionalism does not seem to correlate with very good decision making, people who show outward signs of being…
