Graduate Studies

Digital Futures (MA, MDes and MFA)

Sana Shepko

My Sister in Data: Visualizing an online relationship

My Sister in Data is a data visualization entirely composed of the messages between my sister and I on Facebook, ranging from the first message sent to me by my sister Zoya in 2010, to the 14,256 messages sent between the two of us in 2018. Facebook Messenger was chosen because it is the platform we use most often to communicate. The project uses D3.js, a JavaScript library for data visualization, and Tableau, a visualization prototyping software, in order to explore and visualize pre-collected message history data that I had downloaded from my personal Facebook account.Chat messages are seen as ephemeral, and yet this project makes Facebook’s data hyperpublic, exposing seemingly fleeting dialogue and displaying it in a completely different context. This visualization intentionally exposes collected personal data to an audience as a way to reclaim the content that has been posted to an internet platform, where personal data is debatably not solely our own property anymore. In some ways, this is an empowerment of identity and relationships online, as well as an attempt to understand a rapidly changing social world and my own personal relationship with my sister throughout time.Each Facebook message was assigned an emotional value through sentiment analysis in the scripting language, R. Every word in a message was compared to the Tidy Text library, which categorizes certain words into specific emotional groupings. In addition to running the sentiment analysis in R, I went through the dataset manually in order to ensure that every message’s sentiment value was accurately assigned.In the visualization, the messages are shown over time. Every message is stacked according to the month it was sent, creating a dense column for each month, colored by each message’s sentiment value.The legend at the top of the visualization is interactive, allowing the user to toggle off or on messages categorized by that emotion. Hovering over a message reveals its contents.

“This thesis focuses on the ways it is possible to understand human relationships in the age of the internet through the analysis and visualization of social media data. It builds on discussions of social media by scholars such as Sherry Turkle, Judith Donath, and Daniel Miller, and incorporates theories of identity and relationships, the concept of technology as an extension of self, and the effects of personal data collection. The research includes the process of creating visualizations from a dataset composed of archival messages sent between my sister and I on Facebook Messenger. The dataset includes messages sent between 2010 to 2018, a timeframe that is marked by significant changes in our lives, including moving away from each other in 2017. I employ autoethnographic methods to reflect on my exploration of the data, and use research through design methods in order to create interactive data visualizations. This exploration and creation process is guided by the following research questions:1. In what ways can a visualization of my Facebook message data show how social media is used to maintain a relationship with my sister across changing distances and time?2. How can data visualization help me learn more about the online connection between my sister and I? ”