Tracking personal activity at AAG: A cautionary tale of big data and lack of sleep

At FloatingSheep we are always seeking to push the envelop in terms of user-generated data, and so when it came to our attention that someone we know was sporting a Nike Fuelband, we couldn't resist taking a quick look at the data. For those of you unfamiliar with the Fuelband, it is a bracelet one wears to capture activity and exercise and "precisely" measure caloric consumption. Even better, it awards "points" so that you and your cyborg friends can compete for bragging rights. To be honest, we don't quite understand the appeal, but have little doubt everyone will be sporting these things in the near future as we bow down to our digital overlords happily greet each new consumer product as it arrives.

In any case, a well-known friend of the sheep (FOTS)[1] was sporting one at the recent annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers two weeks ago and was kind enough (or suffers from some sort of twisted exhibitionism) to share the data with us so that we could share it with you (see below). This FOTS was kind enough to also add yellow ellipses during his/her sleep periods and a handy counter of the daily ration of sleep (in terms of hours).

To provide a bit of a base line, the days before the conference (which began on Tuesday) are also included.  Note, the conference was in LA (Pacific Time) but the data is presented  in Eastern time, so the activity is actually three hours later than indicated in the chart. The big takeaway here is that this FOTS had only 13 hours of sleep from Tuesday to Sunday (mostly between 4 am and 8 am) until s/he boarded a plane and collapsed on Sunday. Given the crude nature of the data, other patterns are harder to distinguish but peaks in the late evening or early morning suggest dancing or other activities.

While just looking at this chart makes us tired (as well as giving us a headache) it does allow for some preliminary observations:

• There is an important late-night component to the AAG (and academic conferences more generally) that deserves further study...sounds like a good field opportunity for auto-ethnography;
• A cost saving measure for certain conference attendees (such as this FOTS) would be simply to not get a hotel room and stay up the entire time; and
• Some people are having a lot more fun (or more precisely, activity) at the AAG than us.

We have no doubt that we'll be seeing more of this individual daily monitoring data in the months/years to come, and are placing bets on how long before it becomes smoothly integrated with GPS (the technology is already there) in order to produce spatial activity maps for everyone [2]. No more bragging about going to the gym (and then hanging out at the refreshment bar) or calling in sick so that you can go skiing. The data will know!

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[1] But if you think you know who it is, feel free to leave a comment.  Chances are that you are right.
[2] Think Hagerstrand's space-time prism on steroids. 

SheepCamp 2012 Post-Mortem

Now that the Inaugural Workshop on Big and User-Generated Geographic Data (aka SheepCamp) has officially wrapped up, we'd like to extend a big thank you to everyone who made it to Lexington this past weekend to teach each other, learn from each other and begin forming some lasting collaborative relationships.

Apologies to Notorious B.I.G.

For those of you who did NOT make it to Lexington, we'll be reflecting and rehashing many of these discussions as part of our bi-weekly Twitter chats, organized by Alan McConchie under the hashtag #geowebchat (http://mappingmashups.net/geowebchat) on Tuesday at 3pm EST. Twitter conversations from earlier this weekend are grouped together under the Twitter hashtag #sheepcamp.  Also, a semi-permanent pdf version of the tweets from the weekend.

There was lots of good and serious discussion over the weekend working on a research agenda for the geoweb, a repository of tools for collecting and analyzing big and user-generated geographic data, planning for an AAG symposium and possible grants.  But we were also sure to keep tongue firmly in cheek (as is the fashion of the Floatingsheep crew). This includes trying our hand at memes (see above and below), as well as taking a stab at more mainstream book publishing (from Monica's lightning talk):  

We'll be posting  videos and slides of willing participants from the weekend's lightning talks in the coming weeks. Otherwise, we hope everyone enjoys the spatially and temporally distanciated experience of SheepCamp, and that maybe you'll all be able to join us at future iterations. If not sooner, see you all in L.A.!

The Last Night of SheepCamp, Taking a break

The FloatingSheep Advice Animal Meme

Big Data and the End of Theory?

The Guardian just published a short post by Mark which looks at the discourses surrounding 'big data.'

In it he argues that:

Gender, geography, race, income, and a range of other social and economic factors all play a role in how information is produced and reproduced. People from different places and different backgrounds tend to produce different sorts of information. And so we risk ignoring a lot of important nuance if relying on big data as a social/economic/political mirror.

We can of course account for such bias by segmenting our data. Take the case of using Twitter to gain insights into last summer's London riots. About a third of all UK Internet users have a twitter profile; a subset of that group are the active tweeters who produce the bulk of content; and then a tiny subset of that group (about 1%) geocode their tweets (essential information if you want to know about where your information is coming from).

Despite the fact that we have a database of tens of millions of data points, we are necessarily working with subsets of subsets of subsets. Big data no longer seems so big. Such data thus serves to amplify the information produced by a small minority (a point repeatedly made by UCL's Muki Haklay), and skew, or even render invisible, ideas, trends, people, and patterns that aren't mirrored or represented in the datasets that we work with.

Big data is undoubtedly useful for addressing and overcoming many important issues face by society. But we need to ensure that we aren't seduced by the promises of big data to render theory unnecessary.

We may one day get to the point where sufficient quantities of big data can be harvested to answer all of the social questions that most concern us. I doubt it though. There will always be digital divides; always be uneven data shadows; and always be biases in how information and technology are used and produced.

And so we shouldn't forget the important role of specialists to contextualise and offer insights into what our data do, and maybe more importantly, don't tell us.

You can check out the full piece here.