Steven Soderbergh, one of my favorite film directors, has been cataloging the movies, TV shows, and plays he has watched, along with the books and short stories he has read over the period of a year and then publishing the list every year since 2009. He just published his Seen, Read 2014 list in early January — and the FiveThirtyEight DataLab turned it into an eye-catching, informative graph.
I’ve tried a couple of datalogging and visualization services to try to reproduce some of this for myself — Daytum and Reporter, both of which included the formidable data visualization talents of Nicholas Felton. Neither of them really worked for me long term and I stopped using them regularly, which obviously defeats the point of fastidiously logging all manner of details of your life. In early 2014 I decided I would just track a handful of things, and do so in the most basic way possible — by entering them into a list I kept on a writing app on my phone.
Read on to see the results of my media consumption for all of 2014 with a pretty graph and everything!
Continue reading →