Digitally speaking

The coolest I’ve found yet (thanks to David Patman) has been the We Feel Fine project defined as “an exploration of human emotion, in six movements. This project searches weblogs across the world for words associated with the statements “I feel” and “I am feeling” and records the feeling associated with that statement”. To quote from their website:

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel about right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentines’ Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

There is a stunning graphic in which you can see, in real time, groupings and clusterings of feelings as they occur. Interestingly, you can filter your searches by feeling, gender, age, weather, location or date, and then view your search in a variety of visually interesting ways.

When I looked at it at 8:55 on Tuesday morning the 3rd of July I could see that in Britain the dominant feeling was “better” (circa 130,000 people) followed by “bad” (93,000 then) “good” (77,000). By clicking on individual nodes, you can even gain access to the original text. By doing this, you can get a great deal of detail about the context, as well as the feeling tone. The creators Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar should be highly commended for this work.