Chart 028:The Social Events of January 2008

Like Paul Druecke's project, A Social Event Archive, the main question, before the other main question, is this: What is a social event?

I never came up with a concrete definition. A social event has to have the element of interacting with another person. That's pretty broad. I limited it in uncertain terms: did I know that person? how long did the social event last? In both regards, a wrong phone call or a call from a telemarketer do not make the list.

For the purposes of this chart, which is the first timeI've seriously confronted this data, I consolidated a bunch of social events under the heading "hangin' out." This included iChat conversations with my long distance girlfriend, playing Mario Kart Wii on-line, watching TV with my roommate, and a few others.

One of the results of this chart is immediately seeing, to me, glaring inaccuracies. It seems that on the 19th and 20th, all I did was play Scrabble. That's partly true (those were the dates of the annual Twin Cities Redeye Scrabble Tournament), but I do know that I had at least two meals with fellow gamesters between sessions of Scrabble play, and that there were some "hangin' out" time in the few hours when we weren't playing.