Personal Data Externalization

The process of representing internal experiences — thoughts, emotions, behaviours, bodily states — in some external medium such as a drawing, written word list, spreadsheet, physical artefact, or tracking log. Drawing on Larkin and Simon's distinction between internal and external representations, externalisation is a core practice in personal informatics and in reflective design, where the act of creating the representation is itself a mode of sense-making. For accessibility, externalisation is particularly important for users whose internal experiences are ambiguous, fluctuating, or hard to articulate in words — including neurodivergent users, people with chronic illness, and people navigating invisible disabilities — because it supports reflection without requiring a single categorical answer.