Pretty Colors

A holiday special production from Hipster Data Science.

( update I made this into an #interactive website http://hipsterdatascience.com/messages/ )

Have you ever wondered what shape your friends are? Err, I mean what shape your friendships are. I have, so over Christmas break instead of spending time with my friends I spent all my time sitting on a couch writing scripts to visualize how often I talk to my friends.

Here is a visualization of every text or instant message I’ve ever sent to a certain human from the day we met until the day I wrote this, 58,215 chats.

Each row is a year, each cell is a day. The coloring of the cell indicates how many messages we sent to each other that day. Empty cells are days when we did not message each other.

The first time I made one of these graphs I was pretty elated. It felt like I was seeing something that no one had ever seen before. A story that was previously only accessible by querying my feeble memory was squeezed right out of a pile of logs. Obviously I couldn’t just stop with one, I needed to see what this looked like applied to all of my human friend people.

Not coincidentally, I’ve been archiving the majority of my digital messaging since 2007 for just such a project. ~800,000 messages in all.

For the scientists: y axis is number of messages in a week 0–5000.

Here are the heat maps for the 25 most contacted people in the dataset, which represent 70% of all messages. The axes are not listed here but they are the same as the above heat map, each row is a year with 2014 at the bottom.