After my first round of data collection I was excited for the next one. I realized I could be waaay more creative than I was letting myself be the first time around. The first time I tried to record data I decided to write down everything I ate for a few days and in the end I was reminded of a very difficult nutrition class I almost didn’t pass and a sad feeling that I should be eating more. But this time around I was excited by the topic and pleasantly surprised with the results I found.

Call me an edgy feminist but I think that women apologize too much. Especially me. I’ve tried to be better about saying “I’m sorry” in the past few years but I didn’t think I was making a lot of progress. My data collection topic for this week was to write down every time I apologized, who I apologized to, why I was apologizing, if my apology was warranted, how I apologized and if they cared.

I was surprised by my results to say the least. Surprised and proud. I apologized far less than I thought I did and most of the time my apologies were thoughtful and directed towards my friends who would care about my actions the most. I noticed that Saturday seemed to have two outliers, this was due to the fact that I was in New York and bumped into random strangers on the streets. (In my defense, people have a tendency to just, stop walking randomly to look at the billboards, but I guess I could have been paying more attention to avoid hitting people.)

Next came the part I was really excited for, visualizing my date. I wanted to make my data look more like the Dear Data projects I’ve seen online, and this is what I came up with:

I’ll admit that the final product took me three different attempts to get right. Doing things by hand is a lot more difficult than doing them on Excel and being able to hit Command Z whenever I make a mistake.

That being said this process was a lot of fun. Everything from the topic to the execution had me learning something and enjoying the process. I’m excited to visualize more data in the future, hopefully my next data set will have a lot more data to add a lot more interesting visuals to.