http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/moodstats
Moodstats is a program made by Toke Nygaard and Per Jørgensen in 2000. It’s a personal diary where you can record notes on the day’s events and the changes in your mood, creativity, stress, and three more customizable variables. The data can be displayed either as a line graph or a stacked column chart.
The data visualizations that this application produces are good examples of what Johanna Drucker would characterize as an observer-independent, realist visualization of qualitative experiences. It is analogous to her example of a “standard map with a nuanced symbol set,” except the symbol set isn’t even nuanced. The programmers did not see data as capta when they made this program, and the structure of the visualizations is not based on interpretive, co-dependent relations of observer and phenomena. Each variable is rated on a scale from 1-10, a reductivist approach that eliminates uncertainty and ambiguity, and the axis for time is linear and homogenous. The parametrization of data is scientific, and the graphic design reinforces the cuteness of how silly it is to represent your mood with such precision and certainty. Still, the rhetoric of objectivity is attractive when considering the possibility of finding patterns in your mood and identifying triggers to mood swings. Sometimes you want a detached observer or method of observation to get a more authoritative perspective on emotional matters.
Looking at the experimental graphical expressions of interpretation in Drucker’s article, it is clear that they would be much more effective at representing a person’s daily mood changes. Crises and their self-conscious interpretation would be more apparent and revealing if they were shown “as a factor of X.” The subjective experience of time could also be represented by expanding, contracting, and warping the timeline. However, maybe it would be hard for a computer program to make graphical expressions automatically. It seems like producing graphical expressions involves a lot more thought and work than regular graphs and charts (which isn’t to say that data visualizations are easy to make). The word “expression” implies human subjectivity, and the visualizations in the article look sophisticated and for lack of another term, artistic. Can graphical expressions be made in about as practical a manner as realist data visualizations?
At the end of her article, Drucker refers to Edward Tufte’s book “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.” She contrasts that model of information design against the humanities approach to graphical expression that she proposes. Just to put this program into context, Tufte’s book was originally published in 1983, and it become popular at the turn of the century. Maybe the design of Moodstats would have been different if it was made after Drucker’s article was published.