Mapping emotions

This one is a very interesting, very interactive animated map/art project called "We Feel Fine" by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that "[harvests] 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 [and] using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of [ways]"

Here's some instructions to get you to the map functions:

• Go to http://www.wefeelfine.org/
• Click on the "Open We Feel Fine" button
• A separate browser window will open with the We Feel Fine applet.  You can pause and explore here for a bit before moving on.
• In the lower right-hand corner thee will be an alliterative menu.  Choose the "Mobs" option
• A second menu column will appear.  Choose the "Locations" options from that menu to map the emotion dots on a world map.  
• There is a "Locations" item in the menu bar along the top of the applet that can be used to narrow down the dot-mapping to a specific country, or even a state (though I've had a little trouble with the state function)

 You may also consider experimenting with the "Weather" menu item along that top menu bar.... or any of the others. This is an incredibly fascinating interactive experience that can be loads of fun.