The Refresh was started by two ladies studying data and media in graduate school. Beyond being excited to create a space for writing that is deep, diverse, personal and informative, we are also interested in how data is used to shape content development.

In that sense, this space is an experiment, too. We’re listening to see how you respond and whether the stories we tell meet your interests. In fact, we started doing that even before there was content.

Huh?

Well, media companies like Netflix don’t simply warehouse content like these 7 Great Lady Led Comedies. The company is engaged in an effort to measure user preferences and build original content around those leanings.

We’re not producing the next “Orange is the New Black” or “Bojack Horseman,” but we want to attract a vibrant community and create content that appeals to the people in it.

First, we analyzed the “audience” of each of our personal Twitter accounts using DemographicsPro, which gave us categories for occupation and interest, and told us how many of our followers belonged to those categories.

We combined the data from the individual DemographicsPro reports and averaged them. Then we used Google Fusion Tables to turn that combined data into visualizations, like this wheel of awesome that represents our followers’ top interests. The list on the side is not in order, the topics are many and we’re not really sure why there is a “pets/animals” category as well as one for “cats” and another for “dogs,” but it’s interesting to hover over the topics and see the breakdown. The top 10 interests of our combined audiences are news, books/reading, politics, music, comedy, technology, art/culture, fashion, TV/film and charity.

We had a few ideas about topics to focus on after reviewing these numbers: like Books for Ladies Who Love London or tech that is relevant to our times. After having a look at other demographic data we also had a hunch you would like pieces about cat care or delicious fall food.

But Twitter is only some of the picture. We wanted to see the people who would become our people were thinking about on other networks.  We sent out a general survey and learned that arts and books are indeed your cup of tea. But through the survey, we also learned technology is not a main increase across the board (don’t worry techies, we still love technology and will keep writing about it. We’ll just include other topics as well. More is more).

The final piece of our analytical puzzle was combing thorough data from WordPress and social media. We learned that personal essays – although they may not fit neatly into pre-defined categories -get a good number of views in relation to the other posts. That bodes well for the future, because if you haven’t noticed, we’re into them.

Social media, the wave of the future circa 2009, hasn’t told us much because we’re in our early days. The more we interact with you, readers, the more we’ll know what content gets you happy or curious or fired up. So give us a follow on Twitter @refreshweekly or find us on Facebook. Join the conversation. We’re known to respond to your tweets with GIFs (if by “known to” we mean “one time, because there weren’t enough users to respond to everyone with GIFs all the time, which is obviously the millennial dream”).