We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion
Four years and 12 million feelings later, a book that lives up to its grand expectations.
In 2005, visionary artist-storyteller Jonathan Harris (whom we’ve already established we love) embarked upon an ambitious experimental journey into human emotion. The project, titled We Feel Fine, soon became an icon of interactive storytelling and data visualization. The premise was simple: Every few minutes, an algorithm would scrobble the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling,” and harvest human emotion by recording the full sentence and context in which the phrase occurs, identifying the polarity (happy, sad, depressed, etc. ) of the specific “feeling” expressed. Because the blogosphere is lined with metadata, it was possible to extract rich information about the posts and their authors, from age and gender to geolocation and local weather conditions, adding a new layer of meaning to the feelings.
The result was a database of millions of human feelings, growing by about 20,000 per day.
This week, Harris and co-author Sep Kamvar release We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion, a remarkable book exploring the 12 million human emotions recorded since 2005 through brilliantly curated words and images that make this massive repository of found sentiment incredibly personal yet incredibly relatable. From despair to exhilaration, from the public to the intimate, it captures the passions and dreams of which human existence is woven through candid vignettes, intelligent infographics and scientific observations.
With its unique software-driven model, We Feel Fine is a revelation of emotion through a prism of rational data that only makes the emotional crux deeper and more compelling. It’s the rich symphony to PostSecret’s scattered and sporadic soundbites, transcending mere voyeurism to offer a complex, layered context that spans sociology, psychology and digital anthropology.
From sentiments about cities to approval ratings of celebrities to the effects of gender and age on emotion, We Feel Fine picks at the fabric of feeling and thought from all sides and angles to reveal a complex portrait of human essence.
You can peek inside the book online and even download many of the pages as PDF’s.
For more about the challenges of translating a web narrative onto a print medium, how the idea for the book first came up, and what’s next for Jonathan, check out our exclusive Q&A with him for Wired UK. And grab a copy of We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion — for yourself, or as one of the smartest holiday gifts out there.
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[GReader] We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://bit.ly/8bNI9J
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We Feel Fine: Incredible project about visualising emotions – http://ow.ly/I7Gx
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RT: @retorta: We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://bit.ly/6Porvk
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Algorithm collects instances of “I feel…” from blogs for 4 yrs. The book > We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://bit.ly/4HiDxc
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Sorting the internet heuristically for an anthropology of emotion. http://bit.ly/5eixOU
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Fascinating & beautiful, just pored over it: RT @brainpicker We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion | Brain Pickings http://ow.ly/1mIHXl
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RT @brainpicker We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion | Brain Pickings http://ow.ly/1mIHXl Fascinating & beautiful; just pored over it.
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RT @brainpicker: We Feel Fine: The Book– Jonathan Harris visualizes 12M human emotions recorded on the social web in 4yrs http://ow.ly/Ialp
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We Feel Fine: 12 milhões de emoções humanas registrado nesse lindo livro que acabou de sair http://tinyurl.com/ybxsaoo #euquero
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Another cool visualization technique! We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://bit.ly/4uYC1J
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infographic porn: http://bit.ly/8ZZFNY
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Good looking infographics from ‘We feel fine’, now in book form: http://bit.ly/8ZZFNY
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We Feel Fine Book: 12 million human emotions! Pages online: http://wefeelfine.org/book/ backgroundinfo @brainpicker : http://bit.ly/6Porvk
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Full of interestingness…”We Feel Fine” web experiment turned to book http://bit.ly/8mVlhH via @brainpicker
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Wow, stoked on this Brain Pickings Weekly article. I want this book for Xmas http://bit.ly/6Porvk We Feel Fine: Almanac of Human Emotions
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We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://bit.ly/70LD3B
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[...] We reviewed it fully here. [...]
[We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion] http://u.nu/2pn54
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This is cool: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2009/12/03/we-feel-fine-book/
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Way cool – check out the interactive website RT @keithmcgreggor: This is cool: http://bit.ly/6Porvk
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RT @brainpicker Cool use of visuals to explore emotions: We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://ow.ly/1mIHXl
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RT @dphphd: RT @brainpicker Cool use of visuals to explore emotions: We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion http://ow.ly/1mIHXl
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[...] China to user-centric experiences. Highlights for us include TEDster (and Brain Pickings favorite) Jonathan Harris talking about his most recent work, and hacker-inventors Pablos Holman and 3ric Johnson on the [...]