Understanding online human emotion
I really enjoyed this talk by Jonathan Harris about his projects to understand human emotion over the internet. He discusses his three projects: We Feel Fine, Yahoo Time Capsule Austin Powers in Goldmember full movie Bee Season move Herbie Rides Again ipod and Universe.
His project, We Feel Fine, scans new blog entries for "I feel" or "I am feeling" statements and records the sentence. It then categorizes its findings by feeling and notes the geographic location, the gender of the writer, the age, etc.
From the We Feel Fine mission statement:
"The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on."
This project is a very interesting idea, but I think it's a bit narrow-minded to say this is how the world is feeling. There are so many people in the world who still don't use the computers and not all of us self-publish. The data for this project is pulled from English
language blogs and it excludes how bloggers are feeling who write in Mandarin, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, or any of the 6,700 living languages in the world.
The idea though is fascinating and I'm excited to see what else Jonathan has up his sleeve.
Date: October 28th, 2008 / Author: Lindsay
Posted in Personal / Tags: human emotion, Jonathan Harris
3 Comments - Add yours!
Dr. Jim Anderson (October 28th, 2008)
Lindsay. I agree – I think that Jonathan just might be on to something here. Yes, yes the whole world is not online just yet, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – you can still get great info from just the English speaking folks who are out there now. I read a great piece in the Wall Street Journal this week that talked about an investment firm (yes, there are still a few of them out there) who is doing the same thing as Jonathan except with a more financial focus. Their point is that if they can harvest how people are feeling about a stock or a market change, then they can buy/sell before everyone else. Not nearly as “warm & fuzzy”, but it does go to show that there just might be something to this approach…
- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental IT Leader Blog
Lindsay (November 1st, 2008)
@Roberto Your English is fine! Keep practicing! Reading and writing blog comments is a great way to keep learning and perfect it.
@Jim You have a good point and I agree too. I think he is on to something very interesting even if it’s only with English speaking folks that publish their thoughts online. It’s just saying how the “world” is feeling that really bothers me.
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This blog is to share my recruiting experiences and discuss thoughts on the job market, PR industry and technology.
Alison Kenney is an independent PR practitioner with more than 15 years of PR consulting experience.
Roberto Carreras (October 28th, 2008)
Excellent opinion! I’m agree with you in terms that there are many people in the world who can’t access to Internet (for example, in Africa, where the feelings of the people maybe are very diferrent than the feelings of rest of the world) … sorry for my English! I’m improving it day by day, but still it isn’t really good.