Pen Pal Experiment: Two Women Swap the Data of Their Daily Lives | Short Film Showcase

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I'm Georgia. I am Italian, but I live in New York.

I'm Stephanie. I was born in Denver, Colorado, but I've lived in London for the past 13 years.

We met each other in person twice. When in September 2014, we decided to collaborate on a year-long project to get to know each other through our data.

Their data was conceived as a new type of correspondence through creating and sending hand-drawn data postcards across the ocean to each other. We collected personal data around a shared topic in order to investigate and reveal aspects of ourselves and our days to share with the other person. By counting and reducing, in a way to data, even the most shameful personal revelations somehow felt not so shameful anymore.

The data, as we gathered our weekly data, was much more labor-intensive than just deriving standard metrics through using technological devices. The very first week of Dear Data, we chose a pretty cold and impersonal topic: how many times do we check the time in a week?

We discovered something about the other person's days through the context of my data collection. Why was I checking the time? What was I doing? Was I bored? Was I hungry? Was I late?

I finally realized during our week of gathering data on the urban wildlife we saw around us, that each week isn't a scientific comprehensive survey of every single animal I passed by or every emotion I felt, and so on, but a record of Georgia and I noticing and marking our awareness.

Some weeks we noticed more, and some weeks we noticed less, and that's an indication of our personalities and our lives as well.

Drawing with data, when the drawing is the final output, can be painful. It's laborious, demanding, and it's frustrating. My week 24 is a perfect example—a week of doors—to give the other person the idea of the pace of our days through the internal and external environments we entered in.

Often during the project, the act of counting became something that was emotionally charged. In week 29, Georgia and I ended up tracking moments when our partners inspired love or inspired annoyance. This card became like a love letter to my husband.

I like how instead of giving someone flowers, now you can give a data set. Once the visualization was complete, each week we would drop the postcard in our post box and wait with our fingers crossed.

We learned to pay attention, to live in the present much more, to be more aware of our surroundings and of our behaviors with new lenses.

Finally, we both realized that data is the beginning of the story, not the end, and should be seen as a starting point for questioning and understanding the world around us instead of seeing it as the definitive answer to all of our questions.

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