QS: From Personal Data to Self-Knowledge

Mood, diet, exercise, cognition, metabolism, location, menstruation, productivity, if it can be expressed in numbers, it can be tracked. Tracking human behavior used to be a tool for marketers, sociologists, and the police. Now everybody is doing it. But why?

Some tracking is part of a structured effort to change – to lose weight, for instance, or to quit an addiction. But a lot of tracking doesn’t have such clearly defined goals. It is part of a broader quest for self-knowledge. So here’s the question: how can you derive self-knowledge from numbers?

This talk will discuss the advance guard of the self-tracking movement, describing its unexpected history and looking at some curious examples, with a focus on the question of how to get meaning from personal data. People doing their own self-tracking projects are encouraged to attend and raise questions or share advice.