Old Memories I didn't know I had / by Sebastian Morales

Going back into memories while revisiting old data which I didn't know I was sharing. 

You can download your own data here

You can download your own data here

There is all kinds of data you can download, from you search history to your entire email, from your pictures to every single move you have done (location). Select the data you want to get and simply download it. This step might take several hours or even days (for me it took a little under 1 day to process).

Different types of data come in different formats, location for example comes as a JSON

Interestingly enough, the last entry for my location was back in 1398884229139, that is April 30, 2014 for those of you who don't keep track of time as ms after 1970. 

What happened then? Why did it stop logging/tracking? 

Let's take a look at the map.

It looks like I left home around noon and walked very slowly to what seems to be my girlfriends (at the time) dorm... Then radio silence.

I decided to check my email to see if there was some evidence of what could have happened.

Well there you have it. Got an iPhone and the tracking stopped logging. 

Before I jump into other things however, i wanted to share some days.

Churros!

Like the day we traveled almost two hours just to get some good churros! Then somehow eneded up going twice to the same restaurant up in the north side. 

...or the day that I was trapped in the US (waiting for my OPT) but Christmas was still happening and all my Muslim and Hindu friends showed up, went to target, bought some frozen Pizzas, had a "family dinner" and ended up at one of the best Blues clubs in the city. 


Thinking about other interesting ideas that could be hidden inside of the massive amounts of data I decided to take a closer look at my email. In this case I was using immersion, a tool developed by the MIT Media labs to portrait your networks of emails.

Screenshot 2017-02-23 12.52.14.png

It looks at whom you are sending and receiving emails from. It actually looks at the From, To, Cc and Timestamp sections of every email. If a particular email was sent to multiple people, then connections start to form among those people, the more emails, the stronger the connections and the bigger their bubble. Take a look at the image above for my last year or so. If you feel like your bubble should be bigger, send me an email (or a hundred). 

For privacy reasons, the Immersion project won't look into the content of the emails, but DanO will. I decided to take a look at the email word count code he made available:

After logging in, it will start analyzing in batches, I am not exactly sure how this works exactly but here some results. Clicking next again will add another batch of words the already listed. The list keeps going for what feels forever but here are the first 50 words. 

Over 300 000 words are listed in what looks to be almost 2400 emails. Not sure about this but judging by the appearance of "www", more important "mailto" I am assuming this represent one appearance per email.

What does this all means?? No clue... but I am reading the secret life of pronouns... maybe something will be revealed. 

 

edit.

Screenshot 2017-02-25 22.25.04.png

I have been thinking about the 14 "the" I write in an email and really find it impossible to believe that my average email has those many "the"s. I am starting to believe that the "mailto" word only appears on replies and forwards, but not when you first send or receive an email. I believe this is true if the code only looks at the body of the email, then the body would only include this information if it had been recorded in the chain.