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Category: Project

Description: Sporadically, individuals ponder a daunting question: Who am I?. Unfortunately for us, as scientists, they mostly do so lying in bed, unable to sleep at three in the morning, making observation of their responses inconvenient. In this work, I prompted individuals to provide self-authored self-descriptions that would not be conceived and lost in a haze of insomnia. I make available a sample of 611 self-authored self-descriptions from a United States demographically-representative sample of adults. Here I describe the motivation and procedure to produce the data. Further, I present the structure of the data, suggest how it might be used and call for more free and open data to be produced in pursuit of greater understanding of human selves.