We spent this week looking at our digital footprint. I began by tracking my key strokes with Backtrack. I was also able to export my gmail from 2007 to 2009 using a Python script. Finally I was able to export single folders from my gmail to google drive where they could be downloaded as a text file. For this final example I chose the folder with all the Rhizome newsletters in order to detect art-speak.
BackTrack picked out a lot of background processes which would take a while to filter through. In the end I used my computer in the past week for very little except reading articles, browsing github, and testing Unity Games, so it wasn’t very coherent or telling beyond just those activities.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get Processing or Excel to read the eml filetype generated by the Python script. It was very powerful even if it did stop after two year which was 2 gigs of emails. It can be set to run between certain dates so if one were to pursue it I would suggest doing year long increments to keep it from stalling or crashing. According to a classmate I can make a change to the visualization Processing sketch to accomodate the eml file type.
The Rhizome email export proved to be more interesting in a predictable way. My favorite words – hacktivism, byob, humlab, topophobia, posthuman, gilgamesh, googlegeist, queercore, burpology, grunwald, collegium, & autopoiesis.