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Data porn: what does a year's worth of conversation look like?

Designer Nicholas Felton returns with a new annual report for 2013

What does a year's worth of communication look like? For eight years now, designer Nicholas Felton has been tackling that question with his annual report, compiled from exhaustive logs of every email, text, and conversation he participated in all year. This year's version is particularly dense, laying out the messages geographically, by vocabulary, and plotting pleasantries vs. content in the final page. In the final accounting, texts made up just over 40 percent of Felton's communications, although two-thirds of the people he talked to were reached over email. The most common profanity was "hell" (245 instances), and the most mentioned drugs were Advil (38) and caffeine (26). The most mentioned writer, of course, was Edward Tufte.

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Tracking Felton's communications by time. March was a particularly heavy email month.