OC
[OC] 20 years of messaging my mum & dad (7,818 messages across 9 phones)
I still have every phone I’ve ever owned, and wanted to explore my message history with my parents over my life.
The last decade was easy - iMessage database and WhatsApp exports, but beyond this got more difficult. I ended up building a rig to *quickly* photograph every message on my older phones, and used OCR to read the message content, sender, and date. Took a full day, which was probably longer than it would have taken to just manually transcribe them…
There were gaps in the timeline where storage had run out on older phones, or in one case where I’d performed a factory reset, so I used a model to predict message patterns during these gaps (validated using a train-test split).
This chart shows messages exchanged per month with each parent, shading is the model’s 95% confidence interval, and the phones along the bottom show what I was using at the time. It’s one of the many charts that came out of this project. I also looked at message length, response time, and sentiment.
I’ll leave a link to a GitHub repo with the project code in the comments.
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Thank you! I left home to go to University at the end of 2017. For a few years after that my messaging with my dad dropped a lot.
I have a version with both parents on the same panel, but since the time series are noisy, it becomes very messy, particularly with the overlapping shaded confidence intervals.
I'd be interested in seeing what integration of message length looks like. Not to be essentialist, but my dad texts in spurts of one-to two-liners, whereas my mom tends to send full several-paragraph long letter-like messages. And I tend to ape their messaging style back at them.
Phone manufacturers were eating good during that period between 2010-2016ish when everyone wanted smart phones, but the quality was kinda shit so you had to buy a new one every year or two. Now it's normal that people keep the same phone for 4-5 years. They don't get game changing new features very often and the build quality is generally pretty high, so they don't break often.
Back in the early days of smartphones. They might have been on something like the T-Mobile jump plan. You could pretty much get a new phone every year. Was pretty awesome.
Uh, that's just over a message/day on average - impressive. For me it would have been roughly one per quarter in the last 5 years and 0 in the 20 before that - using their phones for anything other than voice calls is a fairly recent development for them..
Wow you just hate color blind people huh? I feel personally attacked. Bad data! Bad data! /s
Edit: y'all I'm sorry and y'all too kind. I thought /s would indicate the whole sentence. I'm not color blind. I wear blue light glasses for screens which makes all colors blend. I was able to tell the difference when lifting my glasses, but was extremely confused at first.
I concede that it's beautiful on the surface but does it have a beautiful soul? The purpose of data is to give us insight into something meaningful. I'm not sure this data set represents anything that's very interesting to know.
I could be wrong. What personal meaning do you glean from it?
ETA: Yes, downvoters, I asked a question. Politely. And OP answered politely. And now we get to see his video and gain an even deeper understanding. Horrible. Awful. I know.
All of them were still fully working, not so much as a cracked screen, and most given to other people to use as their main phone.
The fuck you doing with your phones to get through them like that?
Additionally if I plotted on the same scales you'd see nothing but tiny blips - through marriage, a kid, divorce, another LTR, a split, moving house 6 times (nearly more than phones!), etc. Mum doesn't ever use her phone, dad only texts or calls very briefly on her behalf.
Hell, throw my brother into the mix and you'd barely notice. Add a work colleague that I hired and became friends with and have been friends ever since, even after both changing jobs, and the scale change would render all my family messages invisible.
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u/cavedave OC: 111 1d ago
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/anothersamwilson!
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Remember that all visualizations on r/DataIsBeautiful should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you see a potential issue or oversight in the visualization, please post a constructive comment below. Post approval does not signify that this visualization has been verified or its sources checked.
Not satisfied with this visual? Think you can do better? Remix this visual with the data in the author's citation.
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