Lay of the Virtual Land
Of course, I don’t remember where I read about them now, but I only recently discovered two interesting projects on the web: WeFeelFine and Twistori. Both of these projects use data collected on the web to paint an emotional picture of what people are doing and feeling. WeFeelFine scans blogs for their information:
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.
Twistori works with Summize to mine people’s Twitter messages and sorts them according to six words: wish, feel, believe, think, hate and love. You can click on one of the category words, and all the Twitters in that category scroll up the screen, a la the opening credits of Star Wars. Both projects reminded me somewhat of the PostSecret blog in terms, at least, of the way they emphasize the mixing of public and private that is possible on the internet. For me, there is something interesting in reading direct expressions of emotion completely stripped of context. For example, I think it’s easier for us (or me, at least) to react to just a line of text that in which someone is saying they feel lonely and misunderstood if we don’t know that that came from a teenager’s MySpace blog. Though we should be able to react the same when reading it on the MySpace page, there is often too much contextual baggage or preconceived notions (”oh, it’s just a phase,” or, “everyone feels like that when they are a teenager,” or “it will be better when you’re older”) that keep us from genuinely reacting to the emotional sentiment. So, I think these types of projects are interesting for ways they can jolt us (or me) into these kinds of realizations.
