/Interview/ The Brains Behind: We Feel Fine
14/07/2006 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar launched www.wefeelfine.org to visualise the blogging community’s feelings. Jonathan explains…
.net: What’s We Feel Fine all about?
JH: We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion. It uses large scale blog analysis to provide a glimpse inside the hearts and minds of people all around the world. It collects around 20,000 human feelings per day, often accompanied by demographic information about the author of each feeling (age, gender, geographical location, and local weather conditions). It then presents these findings in a series of playful interfaces, each of which paints a different picture of human emotion.
.net: How does it work?
JH: We Feel Fine automatically scours the internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google. We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. Once a sentence containing ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’ is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database. Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified ‘feelings’. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way. If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.
Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies, the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post’s author. Given the author’s username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user’s profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state and city of the blog’s owner. Given the country, state and city, we can retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.
.net: How did you come up with the idea?
JH: We realised that many people were choosing blogs as a primary means of self-expression. Consequently, the internet, generally considered to be a cold, inhuman, emotionless space, was now harbouring a large amount of human emotion. We sought a way to illustrate this.
.net: What kind of insight has We Feel Fine given you into the world’s blogging community over the last months? What did you find out?
JH: The main insight we have gained is how amazingly personal people’s blogs can be. The sentences in We Feel Fine are often sad and poignant (‘I feel so much of my dad alive inside of me that there isn’t even room for me’), and often quite banal (‘I feel comfortable that I don’t have a bra’). But above all, they are very human.
The most common feeling by far is ‘better’. We can’t say for certain why this is the case, but we imagine that people return to their blogs after a bout of sadness or depression to announce their reclaimed happiness and begin to communicate again.
.net: Can you explain the six individual movements? How did you come up with them and what do they mean?
JH: We decided to structure the piece around six formal movements: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds. Each of these movements expresses a different nuance of the data at hand. The basic metaphor shared by four of the six movements is that of a self-organising particle system in which each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particle’s properties (size, shape, colour) correspond to the nature of the feeling. Happy positive feelings are bright yellow, sad negative feelings are dark blue, angry feelings are bright red, calm feelings are pale green and so on. The size of each particle represents the length of the sentence contained within. Circular particles are sentences. Rectangular particles contain pictures. Any particle can be clicked at any time, revealing the sentence and/or photograph inside, along with any information about the sentence’s author. As the particles careen around the screen, they lose speed and eventually freeze as they approach the mouse cursor, allowing them to be captured and clicked.
.net: What’s your favourite section on the site, and why?
JH: Our favourite section of the site is Murmurs. It is also the simplest. In Murmurs, a list of sentences scroll down the screen, each sentence appearing letter by letter as if being typed by its author. Using a small white font, Murmurs treats every sentence equally. No sentence is on screen for any more or less time than any other. This highly-structured environment makes the contrasts between the sentences clearer. Some are short and simple, others elaborate. Some are serious, others silly, some are entirely forgettable, and others are amazingly touching. Murmurs runs autonomously, enabling the viewer to sit back and watch thousands of human feelings pass by.
.net: What’s the most interesting sentence, fact or picture you’ve across through We Feel Fine?
JH: The montages are often striking. Some of the ones that we’ve liked are
www.wefeelfine.org/gallery/montage.php?id=228
www.wefeelfine.org/gallery/montage.php?id=50
www.wefeelfine.org/gallery/montage.php?id=18
www.wefeelfine.org/gallery/montage.php?id=105
Also, we’ve found that people in New South Wales consistently feel far more awful than the rest of the world. This was interesting and surprising to us.
.net: How did you build the site?
JH: The data collection engine is built using Perl and MySQL. The communication layer between the database and the front-end is built using Java. The We Feel Fine applet is built using Processing (www.processing.org), an open source software project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. PHP is used for various housekeeping tasks on the server.
.net: What response has the site had?
JH: It has been great. Jonathan presented the site recently at the OFFF design festival (offf.ws/bcn/html/index.php?lang=en) in Barcelona, to around 2,000 people. The piece received an amazing response at the festival, and the blogosphere has been buzzing with descriptions of the project. We keep hearing from people who are amazed by the level of honesty and candour apparent in the feelings on We Feel Fine. People seem to enjoy the playful interfaces that we use to present the feelings, and they like how they can completely determine the population of feelings being shown at any one time. One blog comment was: “Thank you for bringing this into my life. It’s just amazing. I could sit and do this for hours. It feels like I imagine God would feel listening to everyone else’s thoughts. Just quality.” (tinyurl.com/hxlp7).
Some more responses are here: www.metafilter.com/mefi/51478
.net: What’s planned next for We Feel Fine? And what’s Lovelines?
JH: We have several ideas in the works for We Feel Fine, but we would prefer to develop them further before stating exactly what they are.
Lovelines was released the same day as We Feel Fine, and uses a very similar data collection engine. However, instead of expressing human emotion, Lovelines expresses human desire. Lovelines has a stark white screen, bounded on the bottom by a slider running from Love to Hate, with a draggable heart that becomes scratched out to the point of illegibility as the heart approaches Hate. As the slider is pulled towards Love through Like, Want, Indifference, Dislike, and Hate, words and pictures appear above to represent the chosen state of desire or despair. The presentation of Lovelines is far simpler than that of We Feel Fine, but also far less expressive.
This interview originally appeared in .net issue 152.
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