Little Data: counting the small things in life

Data. What does this word mean to us? Big data, data analytics, the data economy, a thing to be harvested, made sense of, monetised. But what if our data came from the more mundane aspects of life and in the process allowed us to reflect on what it means to be human?

Dear Data is a book based on a year of postal correspondence between Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, information designers who decided to capture their personal data and use it to illustrate postcards sent between their homes in London and New York.

Watching time

Personal data ranges from the number of times they said thank you throughout the day to counts of each time they complained to someone. One week consisted of watching time: Posavec noted the number of times she watched clocks and what type of clocks she looked at: phone, laptop, oven, microwave, watch, car. Meanwhile, Girogia noted her reactions each time she looked at the time, ranging from “Oh ok, I’m fine” to “F**k, I’m late!”.

Literary curator Maria Popova perfectly describes Dear Data as a book that "reclaims that poetic granularity of the individual from the homogenising aggregate-grip of Big Data".