Harris / Kamvar: We feel fine

We feel fine is a lovely new project by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar. It scrapes blogs, Myspace accounts and similar social networking systems, looking for the sentence fragments “I feel” and “I am feeling”, recording the sentence and the context they appear in, including photographs in the case of Flickr entries. The result is a massive dataset of feelings and moods combined with demographic data.

Written in Processing, We feel fine is a delightful combination of data mining and typographic treatment. Like Golan Levin’s The Dumpster, it is at once poetic and somehow serious. The playful use of color and typography supports the content of the piece, making it both beautiful and wondrous to explore.

While We feel fine goes a little further than The Dumpster in trying to project scientific axis on the data, both projects make a claim at scientific impact which is not really held up by the work. Ultimately, both are arbitrary visualizations of data which is hardly quantifiable. The success of these works (and they are successful) then stems from their ability to project a snapshot of human emotions in multitudes of permutation, as evidenced on blogs and social networking services. While the viewer may get a slight insight from the axis on which the data can be projected, the sheer size of the dataset is much more signficant in its impact on the audience.

Jonathan Harris presented at the OFFF Festival yesterday. See his site for his other visualization projects. Sepandar Kamvar founded a search engine called Kaltix, which was acquired by Google. He is a consulting assistant professor of Computational Mathematics and Engineering at Standford.