i was listening to a few npr podcasts this evening and on benjamen walker’s “theory of everything”, he interviewed johnathan harris, who started wefeelfine.org which is truly an amazing work of internet surveilance. According to the project’s mission…
“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 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.”
when explaining the concept behind the particle interface, harris explains “i’m often struck by this realization, especially living in new york city, when i often find myself traveling down an escalator in the 53rd street subway station at rush hour, and you see literally an ocean of faces passing by… maybe 600 faces in the space of 30 seconds. these people are moving in the opposite direction from you and you’ll probably never see them again and they’ll never see you again. really, your life doesn’t matter much to them and their life doesn’t matter much to you. but to each of those people, they are the center of their own universe, and to me i am the center of my own universe and i can only see myself in relation to those other 700 people.”
each particle on this interface can be compared to each person in that subway station… when you click on a particle it expands to become the primary focus to reveal more information about the sentence and the post as if you were to talk to an individual person in that mass of people in the subway station.
the most beautiful thing about this project is that it is using internet surveilance in a positive, artful way… mining the internet to learn more about ourselves, those around us and the world in which we live.