It might have become clear through my past project that I am a crafty kind of girl.  I like to make stuff, and I have tried pretty much everything.  One craft that I love in theory is scrapbooking.  Not the traditional kind of scrapbooking, but more along the lines of what Ali Edwards does.  She calls herself a life artist, and she talks a lot about being moved by the process of what she does.  She wants to tell the story of her life.

She often illustrates the way she tells her stories for her readers on her blog.  There is something about the aesthetic of what Ali does that makes it appealing to me.  One yearly project she does is called the “Week In Your Life” project.  It’s just what it sounds like.  You document all the aspects of your life for a week.  And, you keep track of the pieces that you want to remember.  Sometimes it can be a breakdown hour by hour, and sometimes it can focus more on the pictures you take throughout your day.  Last year, I used one day in my week to document what our house looked like at that moment in time because I knew it would change over the next year.

And, I got the sense that was what the Feltron reports do for Nick Felton.  These reports allow him to tell the story of his life as a way to keep track of the information for the future.  They seem to be his scrapbook.  In order to understand a little more about the purpose of the reports, I looked for reviews, and I found this one.  And, I was really glad I did.  I had trouble getting onto Felton’s site at times, and this author pointed out the way the report for 2009 shifted from the previous years.

It was through this review that the connection between Felton and Edwards became clear to me.  They are both interested in the process. And, I have to wonder what a scrapbook would look like if you asked other people to scrapbook your life, which is in essence what Felton did in 2009.  What parts of the story would actually be recorded?  What information could be wrong?  How many people would participate?  In Felton’s case, he only had a 31.8% percent participation rate from his encounters.  So, what was missing?  What information is wrong because the data was off?

I thought this was an interesting visualization of what we have been talking about throughout the course concerning what information is digitized and how that can skew results.  I don’t think I would ever write an annual report about my life.  But, I do think it would be a fun project to do with my students one semester about our course.  What information would we track?  What visuals could we create to represent what we learned throughout the semester?  It could be a really cool project!

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