I was feeling a bit. stuck and quite overwhelmed when thinking about approaching how I was going to collect my data. I have had no real experience collecting data before, and I think the concept makes it seem like a huge thing. After speaking to Emma she gave me some recommendations of things to read and some different methods to consider when beginning my research. I want to break down the information that I want to find out, and then decide how I am going to do this. My main aim is to communicate the hypocrisy that sometimes comes with online activism, when there is a lack of real life changes. In an ideal world, I would be able to record how many people share posts about global warming, or have donated to climate change- and to see of those people who still; buys fast fashion, buys new denim, uses single use plastic where it is not needed, takes multiple holidays a year, and drives everywhere by car (as examples). I was thinking a good way to collect this data would be on twitter maybe, but this seems like it’s going to take a very long time to record. To get me into the swing of things, before I begin to approach the ideal data I want to collect, I’m going to start off a little smaller. I am going to do this alongside reading ‘The News: A user’s manual’ by Alain De Botton, and ‘Information is Beautiful’ by David McCandless, as I think this ebooks will help me develop my data collecting technique.
The first set of data I want to collect is a how many adverts I see for fast fashion brands, compared to how many adverts/promotions or encouragements I come across for sustainable brands and global warming in general. I think this will be an interesting visualisation of how saturated people’s timelines, feeds and general lives are with adverts for companies that are not sustainable. I’m going to collect this data using an app called reporter. I also think it will be useful to for the data into categories such as; instagram, twitter facebook, real life, and the timings of each. I’m going to try and record this for a week.
After attending a talk with Hattie from Farfetch, she also said studying fashion trends within pop culture can be very useful, watching shows on Netflix can give a really good indication of market trends etc, so this might be something I can communicate in my data collection.
