Information as Art: A New Look at Stats

In August of 2005, the We Feel Fine project began harvesting data from weblogs. In this metrics of feelings, the system scans the Internet every few minutes for new blog posts sentences that include the phrases, I feel and I am feeling. Whenever possible it also gathers from the blog additional identifying data: the age, gender, and geographical location of the blogger who wrote the sentence.

The database now contains several million human feelings and grows by 15,000+ daily.

Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar have organized the data into “six movements” — each artful, entrancing, and compelling in it’s presentation of humanity. They describe We Feel Fine in this way.

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. . . .

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.

Click the image below to go explore how we’re feeling.

The people who wrote these sentences are our readers. They are also us.

What do you think of how we’re feeling today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss