Where journeys end

There's a bit of a theme this week: migration and movement. It's not a perfect fit with everything that follows, but I don't know what you expect from a weekly newsletter about data visualization. If I could perfectly tailor content to themes every single week, I'd probably figure out some more lucrative outlet for that skill, right?

Chapter 1
A long walk and a short peer

Instead of honing my theme-making craft this week, I decided to take a walk. And, happily, I live near one of the best places in the world to take walks: Manhattan.

I've gone for long walks across the borough in the past. Once, my sister and I walked from the top of Central Park to the tip of the island. Another time, I walked from The Washington Post's office in Greenwich Village back to my apartment on the Upper West Side. But this time I decided to go even further, starting at 125th Street in Harlem and heading to Battery Park all the way to the south.

So I did, my watch and phone tracking my progress as I went. Although — as is almost always the case — I forgot to start tracking my walk until I was already a few blocks in. (The walk began at the circle on the map below.)

You can see a few spurs and shifts in course on my route. Before I explain those, though, I'd like to take a moment to marvel at what technology now offers us: about as thorough a catalog of our activity as is imaginable.

Back in college, in that long, hazy era before smartphones, I used to imagine how cool it would be if you could see everywhere you'd ever been indicated in the world around you. A set of overlapping paths on the ground, for example, muddied and thick in places you spent a lot of time or isolated and lonely in places you'd only been once. I tried to think about how such a device could exist; little did I realize that in a few decades' time, I'd be carrying one around in my pocket.

So I know, for example, that my route from Harlem to the Battery involved my taking about 16,000 steps. In total, I traveled just over nine miles over the course of about three-and-a-half hours, including those little spurs and detours but excluding the destinations to which those detours brought me.

I mean, I was walking in Manhattan! What, I wasn't going to stop and enjoy myself? So I stopped at the Frick Museum (which I hadn't seen since a relatively recent renovation) and at the Nintendo store (for the kiddos) and to eat (because I am a human being) and to grab a beer (uh, for some other noble purpose, no doubt).

You can see those stops both as spurs on my route and as places my pace suddenly slackened when I overlay speed data onto the map. (All of this was extracted from my phone using the Health Auto Export app, FYI.)