Becky Hurwitz

(warning: this is causing my browsers to crash on mac 10.6.2; they are loading fine on windows)

We Feel Fine
by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

wefeelfine.org

This piece is beautiful.  An interactive visualization again of blog post data including statements relating to emotions.  This is a constantly changing data set, refreshing every 10 minutes and gathering information from blogs on LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySPace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.  The data set includes basic data associated with each post snippet like author’s age, gender, location, date of post, the weather in that location (sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy); and a more abstracted field based on processing the blog text — feeling.

The filters really do give you a lot of control over how you see the data and are rather intuitive.  This visualization, unlike The Dumpster, does not feel impersonal.  There are a lot of blobs bouncing around the screen just as with The Dumpster, but the ability to choose filters based on feeling, gender, age, weather, location, and date, somehow make it easier to relate to the authors of the blog quotes.  They are a member of a group of people that I define and can related to — 30 something women living in California, posting on a sunny day.  I think also, maybe because the data set is so much larger or maybe because the authors of the mined-blogs are inclined to write different kinds of content, the snippets do not seem petty or fleeting expressions as in with The Dumpster.  These snippets feel weighty — sincerely happy, sad, depressed, hopeful.

It’s a beautiful visualization.  Even though my blog is not a part of this, exploring it, I feel like part of the thousands of people online working, surfing, shopping, whatever, and also feeling.