“We Feel Fine” an expansive project that has mined the web since 2005 for the phrase “I Feel” has expanded to include a beautiful book that captures the project.
I’ve been following the “We Feel Fine” project and a number of collaborations between Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that harness data in interesting and artistic ways.
Here’s how Sep Kamvar describes the project on his site.
“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.”