When I think of “big data” I think of atoms. Atoms can’t be seen by the naked eye, hard to interact with but are literally everywhere. They make up all matter, data is the same. All things we do online and beyond that with other devices are full to the brim of data. It’s sporadic and can be hard to “crack” Beyond the three v’s in “What makes big data, big data” there is so much to the data and even use of the word that makes it all seem limitless and not even graspable. It induces a feeling of overwhelm and brain numbness for me.

Big data, small data, tables and graphs, it all looks mathematical and access to it is intrinsic to finding out more and more, and in a lot of ways knowledge is power, especially when it involves ourselves and others.

I enjoyed looking through my Spotify listening history, similar to when I scroll on social media, I found myself stopping and really investigating why and when I listened to specific music. The process of looking back at what I had listened to over the months gave me a really clear understanding of what I’ve been doing, even more so than reading my journal! The albums, singles and podcasts I listen to are always diverging. I could stop and see what I listened to mainly in July for example and know exactly what things I had on in that month, at least vaguely. I feel like my Spotify playlists and liked songs are an extension of me, my mood, my engagement with the world and the things I do with my spare time.

For the form of this experiment, I made a little collage of things I did to get the data as well as miscellaneous things I associate with listening to music, like my car. I found the process of accessing my own data from places quite difficult, I tried getting all of my youtube data from google but that ended with me clicking ‘next’ and a pop up box saying I’d receive an email in a matter of days/weeks. I did the same with my google maps time-line, that was also a bit of a headache.

I want to go into my future making, being more aware of the abundance of data being used and stored in the cloud and beyond. I want to use that to my advantage when researching and generating ideas for other work. I look forward to my email from google about my youtube data, If it ever gets to me.

Matthew Brehmer (2023) Visualizing The Weird And The Eerie https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01763v1#:~:text=https%3A//doi.org,to%20learn%20more