_We Feel Fine

So much of online content veers towards the personal; updates, reactions, comments, likes (or dislikes) are full with emotion. Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s We Feel Fine is a data-driven project designed to document, highlight, and visualize emotional data. In 2005 Harris and Kamvar began to cull blog posts that included the phrase “I feel…” or “I am feeling…” From these, they created a dense archive of online emotions tagged with basic metadata related to the poster, including their gender, age, location, and local weather conditions. By 2009, Harris and Kamvar had recorded nine millions feelings from 2.3 million blogs, with 15,000 – 20,000 entries added daily.

We Feel Fine features a kinetic, interactive design, with an array of search metrics. Visitors can begin by picking at a feeling at random, or they can browse the site methodically, searching by custom meta-data or by one of the thousands of listed feelings. From there, the data-set has six possible visualizations, each revealing a different aspect of human emotion.