Had a good conversation with Eric Manalastas, a psychology prof at UP. I told him what I was trying to do, which he then described as an attempt to "make concrete the subjective experience", which in turn kind of reminds me of the discourse in the field of knowledge management of "trasforming implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge". He showed me some fascinating graphs of mood swings (x-axis = time, y-axis = spectrum of negative/positive affect) from the psychology textbook he was using for his class, and they were exactly like one of the visualizations I had been working on. I felt a kind of vindication about it.
Perhaps visualizing the subjective experience can help us realize that whatever it is you're feeling, you share it with other people. He brought up the notions of "pluralistic ignorance" and "false uniqueness".
if a behavior is positive, people think it's unique
if a behavior is negative, people think that "everybody does this" "everyone else is having sex like i am" voting: "I'm the only one who bothered to vote"
Shift work and the evolution of the 24-hour day
Another area that could benefit from visualization is the labor market. One could visualize the amount of sleep that workers get, correlate that with well-being, maybe compare that with sleep patterns in other work areas or in other countries. I asked him if there is data available for the Philippines, and he said that it was easy enough to collect it ourselves/myself. Diary methodology.
Eric had another astute observation. Because of the call center phenomenon, patterns of consumption are changing. Visualization of how daily life has changed because of shift work could have policy implications, or at least make a compelling case for businesses (and government services!) to cater to the night shift. After all, night-shift people need the same kind social resources that the diurnal population needs during the day.
Visualizing data related to labor migration
More insights from Eric. Obviously, when members of a family are forced to large amount of time apart, the dynamics of that family change. But it's not just the length of time that matter; way they synchronize "together" time, when during the year it happens, the certainty (or lack thereof) in knowing that it's going to happen again... all of these matter.
I definitely need to have conversations with migrant labor specialists.
Visualizing how other people perceive reality
Back to turning subjective experience into explicit knowledhe. Eric suggested that people perceptions of the "out group", the Other, is an interesting phenomenon.
Ask Christians, "How big is the Muslims population?"
Ask heterosexual people, "How big is the LGBT population?"
Still to develop
It was getting kind of late, so neither of us could figure out how exactly this could benefit from visualization, but Eric pointed out that there's a lot of interest right now about the "short collective memory of Filipinos". People seem to forget their political stances, for instance.... Maybe we could visualize that fuzziness of memory... something about improving our historical memory...
visit the invisible, visible website for the schedule of events and for more information about this residency
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