Meta Life-Change

by phil on Thursday Apr 10, 2008 12:18 PM
personal projects

A couple months ago I stumbled upon the most fascinating discussion thread on the Internet. Jeremias from AskMetaFilter asked the community the following question:

"Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?"

The result is over 200 amazing stories. Many of these stories are of high literary value and deserve to be published in a book (which I'm currently working on). I decided to analyze and transform that entire thread into an infoviz (Information Visualization Project).

Here is a link to the project: Meta-Life Change. Just click on any of the underlined words, such as "lost confidence in authority" or "withdrew from others" and you will see the page re-arrange itself to show you how many stories were related to that story.

My goal with "Meta Life-Change" is to find patterns, make connections, and simply geek out on life-change. I condensed each story into a two-sentence cause-n'-effect summary that you can interact with.

What I've discovered is that, at least in that community, the most frequent cause for life-altering experiences was reading a book. And the most frequent result or consequence of a life-altering experience was finding a lifelong passion.

If anybody reading this wants to submit their own story to be included in a book or re-published on the Internet, please visit this story submission form

Comments

ray said on April 18, 2008 4:21 AM:

Hi there,
I came here by searching for 'ignorance is bliss' and found some of your entries really stimulative in the sense of thinking and reasoning.

Keep it up!
Best regards!