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How do you feel?

04.Jul.2007

We Feel Fine is a social/technological project made by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. The application crawls through a large number of blogs’ new posts and searches for occurrences of the words “I feel” or “I am feeling”. Then it tries to capture what’s the feeling an creates a huge database of feelings. Other informations may also be gathered like geographic location, age or gender. Now what can you do with all this information.

The first option is to present it in a spectacular way. Using the processing language, they’ve built several dynamic visualizations, or like they’ve called them, movements. Madness is the first and the most artistic one with hundreds of colored circles, each one with a particular feeling. But they didn’t stop there and created all sorts of visualizations, including graphs of the most popular feelings and other demographic studies. A really great use for the processing language capabilities.

And the second option was to organize the information and try to create charts using the authors contextual information. Using this charts you can ‘figure out’ which are the most happiest cities or the loneliest ones. You can check here the findings. There’s also an API for those you also want to use all the information.

And this proves the web isn’t another machine cold place.

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