Visualized and Interacted Life: Personal Analytics and Engagements with Data Doubles

By Minna Ruckenstein. 2014

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A field of personal analytics has emerged around self-monitoring practices, which includes the visualization and interpretation of the data produced. This paper explores personal analytics from the perspective of self-optimization, arguing that the ways in which people confront and engage with visualized personal data are as significant as the technology itself. The paper leans on the concept of the “data double”: the conversion of human bodies and minds into data flows that can be figuratively reassembled for the purposes of personal reflection and interaction. Based on an empirical study focusing on heart-rate variability measurement, the discussion underlines that a distanced theorizing of personal analytics is not sufficient if one wants to capture affective encounters between humans and their data doubles. Research outcomes suggest that these explanations can produce permanence and stability while also profoundly changing ways in which people reflect on themselves, on others and on their daily lives.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8051fa17ef4570a75f51cc795e93d8d46ae438df

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

1. Dorien Zandbergen
2. Deborah Lupton
3. Tamar Sharon

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

1. Dorien Zandbergen
2. Deborah Lupton
3. Tamar Sharon

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Dorien Zandbergen
2. Deborah Lupton
3. Tamar Sharon

Citations in the corpus

• Exercise as Labour: Quantified Self and the Transformation of Exercise into Labour (2014, unknown): “Furthermore, self-tracking devices have been shown to tend towards individualization and the solidification of existing economic and political divides [66] (p.”
• From data fetishism to quantifying selves: Self-tracking practices and the other values of data (2017, result): “…in line with several recent ethnographically informed studies of QS (Fiore-Gartland and Neff, 2015; Nafus and Sherman, 2014; Neff and Nafus, 2016; Ruckenstein, 2014, 2015), and with appeals to counterbalance stereotypic portrayals of QSers with empirical investigations into their practices…”
• Data for life: Wearable technology and the design of self-care (2016, unknown): “…Boesel (see her blog, http://www.thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/author/ whitneyerinboesel/), Mackenzie, 2008; Nafus and Neff, 2016; Nafus and Sherman, 2014; Oxlund, 2012; Pantzar and Ruckenstein, 2015; Ruckenstein, 2014; Potts, 2010; Schüll, forthcoming; Till, 2014; Berson, 2015; Watson, 2013.”
• Self-tracking cultures: towards a sociology of personal informatics (2014, methodology): “The use of tracking devices for collecting biometric data can make people even more aware of their fleshly bodies by constantly alerting to their capacities and limitations, and this may be discomforting (Buse, 2010; Freund, 2004; Lupton, 2012a; Ruckenstein, 2014).”
• Quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self-tracking using apps (2015, background): “For quantified selfers and other self-trackers, collecting data about themselves using digital and other technologies is an important route to understanding their bodies, selves and social relations (Lupton 2013a, 2013c; Ruckenstein 2014).”