Mapping human feelings

[congeries]

"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."


Картинка - принт-скрин проекта We Feel Fine (я немного помучился с их программой, но потом как-то всё заработало). Вот тут объясняются другие возможности приложения. Интересно, что я узнал про этот проект не прямо, а криво, случайно забредя на сайт фестиваля SunDance, где он тоже представлен, причём более трёхмерно-пространственно:

"Artist Sep Kamvar looks at an image which includes the likeness of President-elect Barack Obama, part of the installation made in collaboration with Jonathan Harris. The installation includes a computer program that takes sentences with the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" from internet blogs every few minutes and visualizes them onto a screen along with images from the blog. The sentence along with the Obama image reads, "I feel like it was maybe April or May".