What I’m referring to as “personal data mining” here is not finding personal information about yourself or others, but looking back at things you’ve done (blogging, bookmarking, anything else) and trying to find meaning through visualization or other reconfiguration of the material.

I see this particularly with del.icio.us where several tools have appeared that help you to do this. One from a while back is extisp.icio.us – which describes itself as “extispicious, a. [L. extispicium an inspection of the innards for divination; extra the entrails + specer to look at.] Relating to the inspection of entrails for prognostication.” Other tools try to extract hierarchical groupings or provide scripts to get a list of your favorite interests (kind of a weird thing to extract when you think about it).

It reminds me of the archaeology class I had where we learned the value of trash pits for finding out how people lived. If I just think about my own garbage you could tell quite a bit about me if you took a careful look it’d be easy to find out – what I study, what kind of food I eat, junk mail, magazines, when I have a cold (like now, lots of tissues). The problem is that there’s not a good (well, easy) way for me to learn from my trash, or the paper folders I have, or the way I organize my closet–physical stuff. It doesn’t have a time stamp or metadata I can call upon to re-envision it, but many of the things I do on my computer can be re-envisioned this way.

Data mining is generally a many-to-few communication, but with personal data mining (perhaps self data mining is better – but that just sounds wrong) it’s un-reflexive self over time to analytical self at fixed points.

Since nothing is really new, I’d be interested to know what the related phenomena or antecedents to this sort of thing are?