Ah end of the year, start of the next. Reflecting backward / resoluting forward. Last year, I had several months of my Odyssey Road Stats to bring forth as a numerical summary.
I was envious super impressed with Dean Shareski’s My Year in Numbers video – it totally was more watchable and fun then reading a blog post or a report. His idea was inspired by the data-rich, mathematically sound, and elegantly presented Annual Report by Dan Meyer.
And then Audrey Watters anted up with her own impressive video production of her year numbers.
Something cool is happening here.
What could I do?
The year is over.
Where are my numbers?
Ahhh, with some help of the beta version of a novel semantic analysis API protocol for life stream relational meaning mining, I was able to pull together my own Year in Numbers.
Where’s your numbers?
https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/286249771482624000
@cogdog smartass indeed
I avoided watching or reading the various year end summaries as they appeared in my RSS feeds the last few days, yet, for some strange reason, or perhaps it was the “novel semantic analysis API protocol for life stream relational meaning mining” methodology, I clicked that play button.
Believed the first few numbers but then wondered to myself, “Where are the photographs, especially the gigapixel images from those mountain peaks?”
The end of year summaries actually make me feel jealous. I guess that is the frustration. Your video brought some balance into my thought and I went back and viewed the productions by Dan, Dean and Audrey and marvelled and wondered at what they had achieved. Dedication.
Have a good 2013 Alan. Love the snowman as well. Something I have never actually done… build a snowman. I have made plenty of sand-castles however. Promise not to count the grains of sand.
Best wishes, John
Thanks John- I’d put building sand castles right up there with snowmen as important things to keep doing past childhood.
And also thanks for all your faithful reading and connection over the years, I will make it over your way sometime to meet you in person!
2012 was pretty good to me as well but would you be able to share some of the lotto winnings?
@Ben – look underneath that tan rock with the moss out behind your swimming pool.
As I was making mine, I realized an apparent contradiction given I have written more than one post about our over obsession with metrics, not only in education but data in general is overrated, overused and over thought.
That said, they aren’t totally useless or irrelevant, but my thought is more about how do these numbers and data tell stories? Numbers alone can be pretty mundane to me but I’m still interested in using them to tell stories. But as you and I both know, all we are, is stories.
I agree Dean, and hoped you did not see my chepa shot as a criticism of what you did, which I thought was brilliant because you wrapped your numbers in your own personality and sense of playfulness with your public self. Numbers do matter- I spent a year collecting the dates and locations I passed another 1000 miles on my travels, and the numbers of boxes of pretzels I ate.
It’s the trumping of numbers alone? I saw some “guru”ish type person tweet something about thanking for the twitter followers. Stopping there would have been nice, but this person went on to parade The Number. Its that sort of stuff I see as transparent.
I don’t know, of course there are places to look at stats and charts and graphs and stuff.
Story on!