The term quantified selfie was, to my knowledge, coined by Maureen O’Connor in 2013 . Writing in New York Magazine (Heartbreak and the Quantified Selfie, 12/2/13), O’Connor discusses the Tumblr blog of journalist Lam Thuy Vo and the work of designer Nick Felton in the framework of a larger cultural trend in which the narcissism of social media and the ubiquity of Big Data collide in a new form of self-portraiture. These data portraits often co-opt, parodically or otherwise, the visual semantics of post-Tufte infographics for the purposes of generating content for Millennialist online sharing.

The self-portrait I created consists of a force-directed graph of my email since September, 1993. In layman’s terms, imagine a “big bang” of a universe of personal and professional e-mail sent and received over 20 years; the different people in this universe have different mass and gravity, causing galaxies of attraction to form; those in constant dialogue with one another, or whose language is more familiar, or loving, have stronger bonds of attraction. The five or so primary e-mail addresses I’ve used over the years appear in the center of this star map, with the several thousand people I’ve corresponded to surrounding them in clusters of sentiment and carbon-copy.

Self-portrait, 1993-2014 was produced in the summer of 2014 with the generous support of the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

artwork at bitforms

detail (PDF)