Visualizing Human Emotions - We Feel Fine
April 25th, 2007 | by Neal Levene |
We Feel Fine provides several visualizations of human emotions inferred from text that is posted to the Internet.
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.
1) Madness
2) Murmurs
3) Montage
4) Mobs
5) Metrics
6) Mounds
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.
Their database has several million records, and they collect about 20,000 per day.
The site is interesting. It contains some interesting data concerning sentiment of those people who write to the Web. Some of the features are oriented towards the site’s artistic goals, such as the way in which the particles are attracted to the mouse pointer. This has an artistic impact and encourages you to play with the data. At first, I was trying to figure out the data meaning behind those data points attracted to the cursor. There is something compelling (interesting, thought provoking, strange, and disturbing) about the site. I guess I feel happy that I spent some time with the site.
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