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CHAPTER
6
Diaries

6.1 INTRODUCTION
A diary is a document created by an individual who maintains regular recordings
about events in their life, at the time that those events occur (Alaszewski, 2006).
These recordings can be anything from a simple record of activities (such as a sched-
ule) to an explanation of those activities to personal reflections on the meaning of
those activities. When you are asking people to record information that is fluid and
changes over time, such as their mood, or about multiple events that occur within the
day, diaries are generally more accurate than other research methods (Alaszewski,
2006). Many people keep a diary and do not even realize it. Informal diaries are kept
online and are known as blogs. Many people now send out tweets using “Twitter” or
status updates using “Facebook” and both of these, where individuals record what
they are doing, as they are doing it, are in fact a form of diary (although not primarily
used for any research purposes).
The diary method used in human-computer interaction (HCI) has been adopted
from other fields, primarily sociology and history (Hyldegard, 2006). For instance,
diaries in history have been used to understand the feelings, experiences, and sto-
ries of both famous and unknown figures. Personal diaries of world leaders give
insight to historians, while personal diaries of unknown individuals allow a docu-
mentation of the lives of those who are often left out of the official record of history
(Alaszewski, 2006). In sociology, diaries are used to understand what individuals
experience but otherwise seems ordinary and unremarkable to those individuals,
and might be hard to understand by outsiders (Alaszewski, 2006). Other fields, such
as medicine, also frequently use the diary method for research. While the focus of
much experimental research in medicine is on measuring objective data that can be
observed, other data which is not objective, such as the individual's feelings of pain
or fatigue, can best be understood through the use of a diary (Alaszewski, 2006).
One form of diary is a time diary. A time diary focuses on how individuals utilize
their time in different activities. The major difference between a general diary and
a time diary is that general diary entries may be on an infrequent or nontemporal
basis, whereas time diaries have a time focus. Individuals are asked to record entries
on a regular basis, record entries when events occur and note time information, or a
combination thereof. Because much of the research in HCI focuses on how long we
spend in some software application, how much time we spend on a website, or how

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