Tracking Change in Data-Driven Autobiography: Nicholas Felton’s Annual Reports, 2005–2014

This article examines Nicholas Felton’s self-tracking project titled Annual Reports, which he carried out from 2005 to 2014. In each instalment, the author offers a visually appealing presentation of a selection of data pertaining to specific aspects of his daily life, such as work, food, drink, travel, music, photography, etc. This article aims to examine this work as an instance of data-driven autobiography—an experimental form of autobiography whose structure and content are determined by the empirical data that has been systematically gathered—and to consider its capacity to register various aspects of change in its author’s life, such as his work–play ratio, food and alcohol intake, and reading habits. The analysis is embedded in the context of a critical discussion about the quantified self (QS) movement and its positivist outlook on the possibility of enhancing one’s self-knowledge through a close engagement with personal data. The article argues that while Felton shares the belief in the revelatory nature of data, he resists the naivety associated with so-called dataism.