Numbers that matter

Yesterday, I went out on a date. (Really, I assure you, this post is relevant to my residency.) Over beer, my date told me an incredible story about how his (now ex-) boyfriend pursued him incessantly at a time of his life when my date didn't realize he liked men. The guy sent him flowers and txted him invitations to lunch. Then they broke up. Then the guy got a women pregnant. Then the women gave birth on my date's birthday. Then the guy gets into a car accident and gets killed.

Ok, I guess that story is only peripheral to my point, which is this: the stories often told when visualizing statistical data are kind of like shorthand stories that describe aggregate experiences. Data visualization of human behavior points to the triumphant popularization of social science, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

But there are so many interesting personal stories out there, stories of intense significance, that get lost in aggreggate, social data. The artists that I've met in Manila recently have waxed ecstatic over Jonathan Harris and his evocative but---ironically enough---affectively distant project on emotions collected over the Web, We Feel Fine; what I found more interesting was the Whale Hunt, his 2007 experiment in storytelling.

Numbers. Numbers provide the basis for data visualization. What kind of "important numbers" can we extract from individual lives? In the Whale Hunt, Jonathan Harris experimented with trying to quantify the perception of time and linking it heightened emotions. He subdivided time into elastic but well-defined intervals that became shorter and shorter as the experience becomes more heightened.

How do "individually important numbers" relate to "social/aggreggate important numbers"? This is still the avenue I seem to be stuck on when trying to realize the vision of "data visualization for advocacy".

But does it have to be that?

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