I came across a website that has the possibility of wasting many hours. (Update: Time wasting confirmed!) Mesmerizing, addictive, and at times informative, We Feel Fine (http://www.wefeelfine.org) is a unique experience. Essentially the designers of the site wrote a program that “scans all blogs every few minutes for sentences that contain the words that contain “I feel” or “I am feeling”". In the main area of the site the feelings are represented by colored dots that spin, swarm, and converge (you have to see it).
We Feel Fine - Madness Display
We Feel Fine was conceived and created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. I will hijack their Mission Statement and let them describe their project in their own words. Whatever you read you have to visit the site. It is a great experience.
From the We Feel Fine Mission Statement:
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
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 right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.
- Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar
May 2006
So, what next? Go and visit this awesome site! And tell your friends, they’ll thank you for it.
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