How To Read The Data:

On the top most panel, you can see my self-illustrated images of my mood and the weather forecast for the day. There are four moods that I've recorded: happy, sad, tired, and anxious. During the seven day period, there was only two types of weather: gloomy and sunny.

On the chart below the top panel, the brown dot displayed is the amount of coffee I've drank during the day. The orange dot is the amount of time I spent on homework. The data is separated into 3 parts of the day: morning, noon, and evening.

Data That Was Tracked:

Ever since I came back to school, my mood has been very irratic. I am still slowly adjusting to the life of a full-time student and wanted to see if there's a correlation between my caffiene consumption, mood, and weather. I usually drink only a cup of coffee in the morning to start my day, but I have noticed that I've been drinking more of it lately.

Pattern I've Noticed:

On gloomy days, it seems that my mood is more towards the negative side (sad/anxious/tired). I've also noticed that I spend a lot of time doing homework each day. On the otherhand, it seems like my caffiene consumption is pretty consistent, about two cups a day.

I decided to collect data on my caffeine consumption, mood, weather, and amount of homework in hopes to see how each factor affects my mood. As seen above, I collected data for seven days and noticed that I'm happy 1 day out of 7, which is such a sad realization. This project allowed me to reflect on my personal well-being and it helped motivate me to take better care of my mental state. I used to be happy all the time and my body was better at taking on stress. I reflected further and observed that my food intake is not as healthy either. This may have attributed to why I'm always tired and anxious.

The most challenging part of my design was translating my chart idea into code. I made sure to write out the numbers on the array and convert it into index # before I started coding so I am not confused later on. The animation was difficult to figure out as I wanted my highlight bar to slide down vertically so that viewers understand that all the data seen is from one day. Everytime my highlight bar moves down to a new date, I wanted my face and the weather icons to change accordingly. I thought that it was a great way to represent my overall mood of the day. After trying out different things, I learned that it was the easiest to time the highlights by seconds and utilize the second() function. During this process, I had to use a lot of if statements to parse the data from the array. Overall, this project took about 12 hours of coding and testing and I'm proud of what I've made.

What was gained or loss through the process of data visualization?

Data visualization allows creators to represent thier collected data in a meaningful way. There's a big opportunity for creators to create a fun, but educational design. However, the data visualization design will influence how one intrepret the data. I've realized that although my data visualization looked pretty good, it was really hard to intrepret without the keys. So, the next time I have to create a data visualization, I'll make sure to test it out with others to learn whether they understand my chart without the keys or not.