#wefeelfine

[co-hereandthere]

Working with the WeFeelFine API 

[cruber]

We feel fine!

Questo `un affascinante esempio di design applicato alle nuove tecnologie, semplicemente ( si fa per dire) incrociando i dati che navigano su internet e sui social network We feel fine offre una mappa degli stati d'animo del mondo.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

autor: Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, May 2006

source: http://www.wefeelfine.org/mission.html

application source: http://www.wefeelfine.org/wefeelfine_pc.html

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.

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.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

[umm-lex]

map of all of social networking using the idea of feelings

[lawrencecreative]

GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION YEAR 1, TERM 1, CONTEXTUAL STUDIES TASK 4; REFERENCING TASK.

In this task I am exploring quotes from various sources concerning data visualizations; the first two quotes concern Florence Nightingale and data visualization and the last one concerns a project called We Feel Fine, exploring human emotion on a global scale; presented in a stunning graphic.

These sources can all be regarded as reliable as they are from direct sources which present no reason to hold bias opinion.

 She can also be rightly considered as one of the pioneers of medical statistics [2]. Florence Nightingale embraced the ideas of her contemporary Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian statistician and founder of social statistics [3]. She went even further than Quetelet, insisting that statistics should be used and understood by politicians and officials as a rational means for decision making. To this effect she designed original diagrams which illustrated in a dramatic way the needless sacrifice of human lives and the simple means to prevent it. These diagrams were published as part of the many reports and proposals that she prepared on various issues including health care, education, child labor, work houses and crime. Florence Nightingale also coined the name of 'applied statistics' which she introduced into the curriculum of higher education, by exerting her influence on Francis Galton and Karl Pearson [4]. She pleaded 'for some teaching how to use statistics in order to legislate for and to administrate our national life with more precision and experience'. Her objective was realized shortly after her death when in 1911 Karl Pearson was nominated as Galton professor of Eugenics in London, where he founded the first department of applied statistics [5]. The legacy of Florence Nightingale to the field of statistical diagrams deserves to be discussed in detail. It exemplifies the use of diagrams as objects of thought and imagination and as an instrument of the mind. Her significance for future generations derives also from the dramatic circumstances in which the diagrams were designed and from the revolutionary effects they have produced. 

The usual thing around Florence Nightingales time was just to produce tables and table of figures, I mean absolutely really tedious stuff that unless you were an absolutely dedicated statistician its really quite difficult to spot the patterns quite naturally. But visualizations they tell a story, they tell a story immediately, and the use of colour and the use of shape can really tell a path and story. And now of Corse we can make things move as well. Florence Nightingale would have loved to have played with, she would have produced wonderful animations I’m absolutely certain.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. 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.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. At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

 Lewi, P. (2006) Speaking of Graphics. Chapter 5 Florence Nightingale and Polar Area Diagrams [Internet], February 11 2006, (11), pp. 4. Available from: <http://www.datascope.be/sog/SOG-Chapter5.pdf> [Accessed 20November 2011]

 This quote speaks of another of Florence Nightingales passions, statistics, speaking of how she embraced the ideas of Adolphe Quetelet who was influential in introducing statistical methods to the social sciences. Nightingale produced some of the most influential coxcombs graphics, which are widely regarded as classics in data visualization. This quote lead me to think that Nightingale was partly responsible for a surge in data visualization from then on, and for some of the fantastic diagrams we see to day from designers such as David Mccandless.

   2.     David Spiegelhalter (Senior scientist, Biostatics unit, Cambridge University) speaking on

The Joy of Stats. (2010), Wingspan Productions for BBC 4, 2010. [DVD]

 Spiegelhalter puts Florence Nightingales work into perspective of the time it was produced, graphs had not played a large part into statistics until this time. By using shape and colour she was able to easily tell a story without having to read reams and reams of tables. She pushed data like this to be used for and by politicians in order to aid health care and other situations. He also comments upon how data is no presented in fantastic ways such as animation. This leads nicely onto my next source.

3.    Harris. J, & Kamvar. S, (May 2006), We Feel Fine, Mission, [Internet], Available form: < http://www.wefeelfine.org/mission.html> [Accessed 20 November 2011]

 Harris & Kamvar speak of the reason for creating the We Feel Fine graphic, how it is done and what the outcome is.

They present it as an artwork created by everyone, data is gathered from blogs, tweets, facebook about posts which contain the words ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’ this is then presented in a fabulous graphic of particles. The graphics could be viewed as unethical, ‘spying’ on peoples feelings, however to counter this the moment that the post is made those feelings become public and free, that is one of the brilliant but scary things about the internet. My view of their work is that it is a fascinating exploration of Human emotion and should be regarded as a work of art as well as statistics. 

[technologg-blog]

[tofuforlunch]

[diam0ndprincezz]

[livinglines-blog]

I just came across this awesome website called "We Feel Fine." I can hardly describe it other than it is just plain awesome. The two creators, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar describe it as "an exploration of human emotion, in six movements." The six "movements" in which they explore emotions are: madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics, and mounds. You really just need to check it out for yourself, here.