Representations of Personal Data:
My Knitting Habits

Taking my knitting progress over the past year and organizing it into a pattern that other people could potentially knit and I can add to as the year goes on and I continue knitting.

Data Collection

For this project, I wanted to collect and represent data that I felt was important to who I am and what I do. One of the first things that came to mind was my knitting hobby, as I generally knit at least a few rows every day and there are many different pieces of data about my knitting I could track. Over the course of a week, I watched what I knitted and recorded data about how many inches of knitting I produced each day, what yarn weights, colors, and needle size I used, what clothing item(s) I was working on, and what type of pattern I was knitting (i.e. was I working on plain knitting, combining different yarn colors to make fancy patterns, crossing stitches over to make cable patterns, etc.).

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Initial Sketches

I began thinking about how to represent my data before I'd even collected the data, debating between collecting data about what I read over the course of a week and what I was knitting over the course of a week. I eventually settled on representing my knitting data and started thinking I might represent it by knitting an actual piece using the colors and yarns I was knitting with during the week I recorded my data.

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Mid-Point Sketches

I found that I wouldn't have the time or materials to create an actual knitted piece before this project was due so I started playing around with hand-drawn visualizations, thinking about how to represent what I knit in a week compared to the whole article of clothing I would eventually finish, and how to visually show the patterns and colors I was knitting with during the week as well as how much I worked on each different project. I tried representing this in a sweater but since I wasn't actually knitting a sweater I decided to change to showing individual project.

Incorporating "Show Your Work"

After reading Chapter 8 of the book Data Feminism called "Show Your Work" I wanted to incorporate this lesson into my representation. This led me to think about the disparity in price between handmade objects and machine-made objects. When iterating on the designs I'd drawn previously I decided to add store and handmade tags to show how much the item would cost if I made it by hand and paid myself minimum wage (tracking how long it took me to knit a certain amount as part of my data collecting) and how much that item generally cost in stores when mass-produced by a company.

Critique, Iteration, and the Final Product

I was chosen as one of the people to present my progress on my project during class on the final Wednesday before the project was due. I grabbed my sketches and presented my current work to the professor, TA's and the class, asking them where they thought I should go from what I had, how I could incorporate more of the data I collected into my representation, and if there was anything they wanted to see more of in my final product. I got lots of helpful answers, ideas and critiques from this experience. Some of the feedback I received included:

Think about how you can incorporate past knit projects, how you felt about them, who you gave them as gifts to- some or all of this information could be used in your final representation.
The wage/work commentary is really cool - can you expand on this and include more information things about yarn price, tool price, complexity, etc.?
Think about what you knit each project for - skill improvement, relaxation, distraction, stress relief, etc. Could the purpose of each project be incorporated into the representation somehow?
Instead of fitting each project you worked on over the week into a sweater, maybe use a scarf to show progress on each pattern over a period of time.
Instead of a hand-drawn visualization, you could possibly write up an actual knitting pattern

I considered creating a knitting pattern while thinking of possible representations early in the project, but left the idea behind once I changed ideas from knitting a representation to drawing a representation. After the critiques I returned to the idea and decided to incorporate the scarf suggestion and the pattern suggestion to write up a pattern that would show a knitter how to knit a scarf that showed my knitting habits/data for the week I recorded data and instruct them on how to knit a scarf that showed their own knitting habits by revealing the rules that governed how mine appears. The result was the Knit My Data Scarf Pattern, shown below.