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=== Establishing a baseline ===
=== Establishing a baseline ===
[[File:Lockdown-productivity.png|thumb|An example of a timeline visualization by [[User:Gedankenstuecke|Bastian Greshake Tzovaras]]. Red bars denote an external intervention that led to a change in observations. Observations have been summed up into daily totals for each category. ]]
After establishing a personal science question and finding out how to collect observations it can be tempting to dive right into trying out any interventions ("let me drink less caffeine to see if my sleep improves", "How does diet X improve my weight loss", …). Before doing so it is advisable to collect enough data at a baseline before changing anything, as this will allow to compare the impact of any interventions against the "normal" state without any changes. Unless one has already recorded observations over a period of time to establish such a baseline, the start of a new personal science project is a good time to do so.
After establishing a personal science question and finding out how to collect observations it can be tempting to dive right into trying out any interventions ("let me drink less caffeine to see if my sleep improves", "How does diet X improve my weight loss", …). Before doing so it is advisable to collect enough data at a baseline before changing anything, as this will allow to compare the impact of any interventions against the "normal" state without any changes. Unless one has already recorded observations over a period of time to establish such a baseline, the start of a new personal science project is a good time to do so.
=== Using a timeline ===
=== Using a timeline ===
A surprisingly effective way to reason about ones observations is looking at if and how they change over time as it can highlight patterns. While there are many ways to [[Visualizing your Data|visualize]] your data.
A surprisingly effective way to reason about ones observations is looking at if and how they change over time as it can highlight patterns. While there are many ways to [[Visualizing your Data|visualize]] timeline data, for a start it might even be enough to just look at the observations one has recorded while they are in a spreadsheet, as in many cases this can already provide insights and facilitate reasoning about the observations.
If one decides to visualize the observations on a timeline there can be different strategies, depending on the granularity of the observations. If one recorded precise date & time information of events one can plot the data as it is or try to create bins that are easier to facilitate. For example, instead of visualizing each event on the timeline, one could sum them up into daily total values or averages. One does not need to be limited to creating daily bins, depending on the project and observations weekly or even monthly aggregates can be useful too.
[[File:Tweets-per-weekday.png|thumb|An example of a binning visualization by [[User:Gedankenstuecke|Bastian Greshake Tzovaras]]. Shown are the number of tweets send, binned by the day of the week, showing a drop of tweets during weekends.]]
Timelines can also be useful when a personal science project includes doing an intervention and if one recorded data as a baseline. A timeline visualization can show if observations change after starting an intervention and if observations return back to the baseline after an intervention is stopped (see the first example visualization).
=== Binning observations ===
Binning observations can be an effective way outside the use in timelines. Many phenomena are influenced not only by interventions but by rhythmic changes, either because of behaviour changes (e.g. the difference between weekdays and weekends, working hours etc.) or external factors (e.g. seasonal effects in relation to allergies). To investigate this it can be useful to bin observations according to such factors (see second example visualization).
== Discovering ==
== References ==
== References ==
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