AMY E MARTIN // Thesis

So I have approximately eight hours before I check my email. Inside my mind, I've been collating the emails I need to send as soon as I can but there are only two--one family-related and one school-related. I'm kind of surprised but I suppose email is more often self-replicating than it is necessary communication.

That's pretty much it for now. I plan on counting the emails I received over the week in groups such as work, personal, mailing list and commercial (I'm assuming the majority of emails I get are commercial even though I never willingly sign up for those lists. I just buy a lot of things online and apparently companies feel that gives them the right to harass me once a week for the rest of my life) and I'd like to make a qualitative illustration about emotions over the week.

Although I'm looking forward to sorting through my inbox, I think I will miss not having to bother with it. That may change my personal email habits moving forward but regardless, I will probably conduct this experiment again in a few weeks with more quantified results (throwing a quarter into a jar every time I think of email, for example).

Labels: design explorations, everything else, random ideas

12.07.2009 // 0 Comments // READ FULL POST...

I don't have any yet, but that's one of about a bajillion places I'm starting with in my investigations for my thesis. Email is a deeply researched topic. On the one hand, that is fantastic because there's a huge amount of data to pull from. On the other hand, it's daunting. A few hours of basic research led to sixty relevant and/or interesting articles... many from academia or the internal research groups of large corporations. It's great that all this work is done but it also makes me wonder about my ability to contribute to it.

I can, however, live with that low-level anxiety and live with the aftermath if I don't contribute anything mind-blowing. What I wanted to talk about specifically was all the kinds of email data visualizations that people have come up with. The primary ones that I knew about before going into this project are Christopher Baker's personal email map and the visualization aspects of Remail. I get those, what they're doing and why, but I can't replicate them. Nor can I replicate them with my own data.

So. Quickly searching for "gmail api" brought me to mail trends. I started it half an hour ago and it's still processing all my gmail. I have 55,783 messages. I'm not entirely sure when I started using gmail exclusively for everything but I certainly have not used it since I started using email in 1995. I remember a time when nearly all my email was directed to me personally and almost entirely from strangers. It was also on a pc and maybe in Eudora. Or maybe it was in Pine, sorted with procmail. A handful of Elm messages from University. I wonder what my total number of emails sent and received would be. 100,000? 500,000? Strange and unfathomable.

Labels: everything else, random ideas

10.14.2009 // 0 Comments // READ FULL POST...

My bedroom is sparse. It contains a bed, two small, plain bedside tables, two other very plain tables and a coat rack. It is also my favorite room in my apartment. It is a simple room and because of this I'm able to keep the room very tidy. Because I can easily keep the room tidy, the space itself can breathe in a way that my other spaces do not or can not. Although simplicity (or minimalism in how I'm thinking of it–a lack of brick-a-brack and possessions) isn't always so easy or possible, it's how I best enjoy my personal space. So simplicity in this sense is purely an aesthetic choice. In my thesis project, however, this is not the case.

Simplicity, I intuit, is a necessity. I could be wrong as I feel I haven't done enough research (and will likely always feel that way) but I find resonance in the idea that too much information erodes attention.

We presented our nascent thesis ideas today and it was pointed out to me that the reasons for choosing simplicity as a goal were unclear. It isn't exactly that simplicity itself is the goal but rather, the goal is attentive focus through whatever means exist or can be invented... or barring full focus, the lack of distraction. That being said I don't *think* it will be too difficult to draw a line between simplicity and deeper focus. And in that light, I think I should rewrite the above sentence to say that I find resonance in the idea that too much information from too many sources erodes attention.

UPDATE: I dreamt about this topic last night (of course, my dreams have turned from the Wikipedia randomness of the summer to school stress) and I think even using the word "simplicity" is inaccurate. What I think I really mean is clarity and simplicity might be one strategy for achieving clarity. The best visualizations, for example, do not remotely approach simple but are always very clear.

I also had a dream that I cursed all the way through my thesis presentation so I should work on NOT doing that so much.

Labels: everything else, random ideas

9.02.2009 // 0 Comments // READ FULL POST...