Life is made up of gestures, sayings, emotions, and sounds. Note them one by one and you see them as individual elements, granular aspects of our day-to-day.

On a minute level, they may not say much. But look at them together, draw them out, and they can begin to tell a story. (When we say “draw” here, we mean literally draw.) 

That’s exactly what two whimsical data scientists did in a new book, Dear Data . It’s a collection of whimsical postcards Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec exchanged over the course of 52 weeks.  Each week, Giorgia and Stefanie would assign themselves a small-scale data collection project— to track their “thank yous,” or their desires, or their productivity, or the frequency with which they checked the time— and then exchanged their findings in hand-drawn postcards.

This week, Giorgia and Stefanie took us down the rabbit hole of three postcards: “thank yous,” “complaints,” and “sounds.” You can check out the images here along with the original music made by Hannis Brown featured in the episode.  

Now it’s your turn, dear Note to Self listener.  Have you been collecting data about your life? No topic is too small or too large. We want to see your homemade data visualizations.  Share with us a weekly visualization of the times you walk your dog, or boxes of mac and cheese your kids eat, or the strange sounds your car makes, or the times you text your spouse, or the places you daydream of visiting on vacation… or anything else.

We’d love to get a postcard from you; our snail mail address is: Note to Self c/o WNYC, 160 Varick St., New York, NY 10013. You can also email a photo of your postcard to notetoself@wnyc.org; or share it on Twitter or Facebook.