I've always wanted to have the diligence and lack of self-consciousness that would allow me to keep a diary (or a personal blog, for that matter). I would love to be able to reflect back on my days from last month, a year ago or 15 years ago. However much I've tried since childhood to keep a daily diary, I've never succeeded because I've always felt so self-conscious writing down my thoughts. That feeling plus a little bit of inherent laziness made it so that all of my attempts lasted no longer than 30 minutes for every five years.
I propose to develop a system that keeps a kind of unconscious diary, by capturing everything I type while on my computer (where I spend a large part of my day thinking and communicating), and performing a word analysis at the end of every day. From the analysis, I want to compile a top 10 daily word list, to keep record of the most frequent words used, and then a top 100 daily word list, to hopefully glean what kinds of general feelings or issues I had been dealing with throughout the day. Last.fm inspired me with their running charts, to go a bit further and also keep weekly and overall running word charts, to track how I progressed from certain discussions, events, and perhaps life phases over time.
The data will be written to text files and perhaps uploaded to a blog for keeping public record; this last detail I'm still working out. How much of myself I want to expose to everybody is still up for questioning. Also, whether or not I want to parse out groups of characters, such that would describe passwords and other private and irrelevant data is another consideration on my mind.
Showing posts with label analysis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label analysis. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
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